Archive
awendan
OE vb. (tr.) to turn away or redirect; to translate or transfer from one to another
Plagiarism is certainly criminal in a cultural context in which writing is a commodity to be bought and sold. It such a context, the writer certainly has moral and legal rights over the disposal of his or her writing and is perfectly entitled to feel aggrieved when someone ‘carries it away to another place’. And that is the context we have had since the inception of publishing and the subsequent control that publishers have exerted over the dissemination of writing. Prior to that, plagiarism was unknown among storytellers and bards, who merrily lifted portions of other people’s work to incorporate into their own oratura and literatura. And there are strong signs that the liberation of writing from the publishing industry through its free exchange on the internet has returned us to a similar context, in which the ideas of ownership and plagiarism become meaningless. Creative net-surfing reveals plagiarists who plagiarise the plagiarisms of others, to such an extent that the ‘true’ author is lost and the very idea of an author quickly becomes absurd.
—Ne Aiw: Ekki segja mér að ég hef sagt ekkert nýtt. Fyrirkomulag málið er nýtt (Tórshavn, 2021)
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ljóð mín eru að mestu stolið frá þér; Ég hef stolið úr ljóðum þínum, of, Mig langar þig líka að stela frá mér; Jafnvel orð verða ekki einkavædd; |
My poems are mostly stolen from you; I have stolen from your poems, too, I would like you too to steal from me; Even words cannot be privatised; |
Suðuroy saga
10th century Íslendingasögur
author unknown
tr. Anders Andersson
Andrew McCallum is a Scottish poet and scallywag with a distant background in European philosophy.
wuirds/words
efter louis-ferdinand céline, via the Scots
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at the stert o it aa there wis feelin the wuird wis-na there wi aa when ye kittle an amoeba a bairn greits oorsels juist the wuird is uggsome ti ventur sic is ill-faurt |
in the beginning there was sensation the word was not there at all when you tickle an amoeba a baby cries only us the word is disgusting to attempt it is ill-advised |
Author’s note: “wuirds/words” is a more or less straightforward found poem, taken from an interview given before his death (1961) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the whole of which appeared in another translation several years after the event (1964) in The Paris Review. The poem was originally rendered from the French into Scots, which I’ve subsequently translated into English. The poem itself speaks of the difficulty (impossibility?) of translating the subjective immediacy of phenomena into the social institution of language.
Andrew McCallum is a Scottish poet and scallywag with a distant background in European philosophy.
piobaireachd
i ùrlar
boy meets girl
girl bites boy
boy sees doctor
this is fact
we can verify this
ii siubhal
boy is intrigued
girl moves away
his curiosity unsatisfied
with its motives and suggestions
this is narrative
iii lemluath
boy works days
moonlights as a gumshoe to
earn enough money to
follow his girl to
oz
girl works too
without declaring whether she
is saving to move back
or move on
this is plot
notoriously wordy
seductive
a trap for the unwary
iv taorluath
boy is coming down with something
from a dark car
across the street from the house of a man
— his client —
whose fortune comes from vending machines
boy watches for indiscretion
the wife is home
her lover steers into the driveway
like the night before
light from the streetlamp
glints across his hatchet face
lover enters the house
boy is right behind him
i don’t need much he tells them
five hundred notes and I’m on my way
husband need never know
girl meets boy at the airport
i’m sick – he tells her – over you
she bites him like a flu jab
high on his arm
that’s — he bites her back — better
his bite drives a stake into the ground
her bite turns the boy into a man
the man into a meal
a meal she sends back to the kitchen
v crunluath
this is poetry
friendless
not a good listener
not to be trusted when there are
facts to be established
a story to tell
boy meets girl
they cannot kiss
except by locking teeth
they eat
but they do not eat from hunger
with or without her he cannot be well
she is a girl who likes to bite
Note: Piobaireachd is a classical music genre native to the Scottish Highlands and performed on the Great Highland Bagpipe. This poem came about when, at a ceilidh at the late Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank Cottage during the Biggar Little Festival in 2008, Ann Matheson challenged the writer to make a poem that imitates the musical structure of piobaireachd.
Andrew McCallum is a fat, middle-aged, married man with a dicky ticker and Nietzschean aspirations. When not striking classical poses on hilltops in the Scottish Southern Uplands, he writes deep into the night sustained by outrageous amounts of caffeine and tobacco.
Excerpts from Seven Anglian Spells
aairvhous
the house appointed for judgement
marked by an arrow bearing certain signs
to assemble the multitude
a decisive place
where we lieutenants add our arrows to
that of the headsman
pushing them into the soft belly of the earth
to signal our kinship
planting a henge that shall
over time
grow into chapels and parliaments
the house appointed for judgement
two or three men clad in the pelts of beasts
heads close
conferring on a skyline
aaron’s beard
a charm against enchantment
a cure for bad milk
a sprig placed in the milk pail
before milking afresh
a sprig hid with cunning
from the priests
about one’s person
against their malignancy
adderstane
earth baked hard
almost glass
a bead
a lentil
an unnatural device
disguised by name and
allegory
to protect against
the uncanniness of nature
afterwald
land taken in from the forest
stolen
domesticated
like the dogs that scavenge our touns
accepting sometimes
a kind hand
a docile word
that warn the approach of our enemies
yet slink back to the wilderness
when the spirit takes them
Andrew McCallum is a widely published and award-winning poet from southern Scotland. The countryside around his home is littered with relics of his forebears, who speak through them from as far back as mesolithic times, and with whom Andrew strongly identifies in his poetry. Heideggerian in temperament, Andrew is convinced that language is constructive of the world inhabited by the language user; hence the incantatory or ‘spell-like’ character of the old Anglian words he casts in this poem.
qarrtsiluni 