NPPF: C.12: Angus MacDiarmid

[Jasper Fidget]

"_Finnigan's [sic] Wake_ as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's
'incoherent transactions'" (p 76) suggests James MacPherson (1736-1796), a
Scottish poet and historian, who published fake verse translations of Ossian
(_Fingal and Temora_ or _The Poems of Ossian_ or just _Ossian_), whom he
claimed was a third century Gaelic bard.

"[...] he perhaps saw himself as reconstituting epics from fragmentary
remains. Yet much of the poetry is his own, and his 'learned' commentaries
are disingenuous."

http://www.slainte.org.uk/Scotauth/macphdsw.htm

While his counterfeit was finally determined by David Hume and Edward
Gibbon, MacPherson's early detractors included Samuel Johnson, who wrote
(according to Boswell):

"Mr. James Macpherson, ---

I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall
do my best to repel and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for
me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by
the menaces of a ruffian.

What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it
an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the public,
which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since
your Homer, are not so formidable: and what I hear of your morals inclines
me to pay regard, not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove.
You may print this if you will.

SAM. JOHNSON"

Nonetheless, MacPherson had a great influence on Goethe and the German
Romantics, as well as on Russian literature and theater:

"Russian readers of the poems of 'Bard Ossian', published in 'Moskovsky
zhurnal' (Pt. 2. M., 1791) in the 1790s, were thrilled to discover a
wonderful and distant northern land, so like their own country and yet so
full of secret charm and mystery."

http://ideashistory.org.ru/almanacs/alm15/scherbak.htm

Macpherson is thus another literary bridge across Europe: Scotland and
Russia linked (as with Boswell and Botkin). 

http://www.bartleby.com/220/1010.html
http://www.exclassics.com/ossian/ossconts.htm
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/Scotlit/ASLS/NoFrames/THubbard2.html

>From MacPherson's_Fragments of Ancient Poetry_:

"Son of the noble Fingal, Oscian, Prince of men! what tears run down the
cheeks of age? what shades thy mighty soul?

Memory, son of Alpin, memory wounds the aged. Of former times are my
thoughts; my thoughts are of the noble Fingal. The race of the king return
into my mind, and wound me with remembrance."

http://www.ed.ac.uk/englit/studying/undergrd/english_lit_2/Handouts/ri_ossia
n.htm


>From MacPherson's "On the Death of a Young Lady":

Lamented shade! thy fate demands a tear,
An offering due to thy untimely bier;
Accept then, early tenant of the skies,
The genuine drops that flow from friendship's eyes!
Those eyes which raptured hung on thee before,
Those eyes which never shall behold thee more:
So early hast thou to the tomb retired,
And left us mourning what we once admired.

[...]

Peace, gentle shade, attend thy balmy rest,
And earth sit lightly on thy snowy breast;
Let guardian angels gently hover round,
And downy silence haunt the hallowed ground:
There let the Spring its sweetest offspring rear,
And sad Aurora shed her earliest tear.

http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/death_young_lady.html

***

See also Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus":

I went out to the hazel wood 
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I turned to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

***

See also Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), pseudonym for Christopher Murray
Grieve, a Scottish poet and political radical who often used a fake Scots
dialect in his work.  His poem "First hymn to Lenin" (1931) caused some
English poets to sympathize with Communism, and his book-length poem _A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle_ (1926), about Scotland from the point of
view of a man drunk on whiskey, is usually considered his great work.

http://www.slainte.org.uk/Scotauth/macdidsw.htm
http://www.yfinnie.demon.co.uk/contents4/thistle1.html


ptrJasperFidget