Russian Poetry and the Rewilding of Scottish Literature

This chapter borrows the metaphor of ‘rewilding’ from contemporary ecology to describe the effect of Russian poetry translated into Scots on the literature of Scotland in the past century. In that time, it is argued, poets writing in Scots have treated Russia as a source of unorthodox, revolutionary energy that might help them push back against anglophone monoculture and revitalize Scottish letters. I divide this history into three periods: the first is the modernist ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the 1920s, in which the iconoclastic Hugh MacDiarmid made versions of Aleksandr Blok, Zinaida Gippius and others part of his interrogations of and prescriptions for Scottish national identity and language; the second is the 1960s and 1970s, when modernism slipped into postmodernism and when the presiding figure was the prolific and playful Edwin Morgan, who maintained a lifelong interest in the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii; I close with the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the present, in which no single figure or explicit ideology has dominated, except perhaps for a growing concern with the promotion of minority identities as an end in itself. In all three periods, we see translators using Russian poetry, and especially experimental modernist verse, to help them interrogate Scotland’s ambivalent position as both perpetrator and victim of colonialism and to explore the productive tension between locally and globally dominant English and its minoritized sister-language Scots.