Nation and Translation: Margaret Turner Re(-)covers Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd
By Leith Davis
Critical Essay
Margaret Turner's translation of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd: A Scotch Pastoral into English in 1790 was just one of a number of republications of the text in different forms throughout the eighteenth century. The play had its origin in two love eclogues, "Patie and Roger" and "Jenny and Meggy" which Ramsay wrote in 1720 and 1723 respectively. Ramsay then transformed the two pieces into a full-length pastoral drama which he published in 1725. This 1725 version included four songs, but in 1728, encouraged by the success of John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, Ramsay added more songs to the piece. By 1752, the play had already gone through eleven editions and innumerable performances. As well as being taken up by other printers in Scotland, it was published in England, Ireland and the United States, sometimes with accompanying music, illustrations and what is frequently referred to as a "complete glossary."
The author, Allan Ramsay, came to Edinburgh from Lanarkshire in 1700, before the highly contested Act of Union which joined Scotland and England politically. A wigmaker turned bookseller and printer, Ramsay conveys the dynamic and uneasy alliance between the two nations in his writing. Most often, his literary works combine a celebration of Scottish national culture, including the Scots language, with English literary forms and language.[1] In the case of The Gentle Shepherd, the play is set in rural Scotland and presents a mixture of "braid" Scots and English literary idioms, all delivered in iambic pentameter.
The Gentle Shepherd's simple plot line has often resulted in its dismissal as trite and conventional. Set at the time of the Restoration, the play concerns three sets of lovers. Patie and Peggy enjoy requited love and are able to express their regard for one another. Roger, however, is being teased by his beloved Jenny into thinking that she really prefers Bauldy, who has been previously engaged to Neps. Bauldy attempts to gain the affection of Peggy by engaging the help of Mause, a woman whom he believes is a witch. Mause and her friend Madge scheme to punish Bauldy for his boorish behaviour by disguising themselves as ghosts and frightening him. Patie, it turns out, is actually the son of Sir William Worthy, who was exiled during the Cromwellian wars but is now returning to acknowledge his son. Patie, while happy to meet his real father, is devastated by the change in his fortune because it threatens his relationship with Peggy, until it is revealed that Peggy, too, was a foundling and is gently born. Sir William Worthy has his lands and position restored to him, Patie and Peggy are able to marry, Jenny accepts Roger, and Bauldy and Neps are reconciled. Despite the simplicity of the plot, however, Thomas Crawford argues for The Gentle Shepherd's importance to Scottish and, more generally, to British drama: "Behind [the] text there lies not only the contemporary crisis of Scottish culture and the lowland nation, but also the great debate about pastoral in England of the previous twenty-five years" (71). The great popularity of the play as indicated by its frequent publication throughout the eighteenth century suggests that both issues continued to be of interest to British theatre-goers and readers during this time.
Margaret Turner was not the first writer who
undertook to translate The Gentle Shepherd into English rather than refer
readers unfamiliar with Scottish expressions to a
Her six-page list of subscribers belies her professed diffidence, however, as it includes the Duke of Queensberry, the Duchesses of Beaufort, Devonshire and Gloucester, several countesses and earls and other minor aristocrats and literary luminaries. The bookseller William Creech took twelve copies, while David Hume is listed for five copies. Such a list works to convince her readers of her suitability for the task at hand, as it suggests that she had in fact enlisted the support of an impressive number of respectable persons, including, most importantly, the Prince of Wales, to whom the work is dedicated.[2]
In order to explain why she undertook what she
indicates in the title of her work as her "attempt" at translation,
Turner concludes her "Address" with a quotation from a male authority:
Hugh Blair. Blair was himself a Scot who was anxious to promote the work of his
countrymen, just as long as they adhered to what he considered
"proper" English. He devotes a passage in his Lectures on Rhetoric
and Belles Lettres (1783) to Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd.[3] Although he
praises Ramsay's work, he identifies two
Blair's concern is to advocate for Scottish
writers while promoting the superiority of standard English as the language of belles
lettres. Earlier critics like David Daiches, following in the steps of
Gregory Smith and Edwin Muir, have analyzed this kind of dual impulse as
indicative of an almost pathological split in the Scottish psyche. In The
Paradox of Scottish Culture, Daiches refers to the "dissociation of
sensibility" among Scottish writers which he maintains was caused by
thinking in one language and writing in another (21). Recent critics have
different perspectives on the issue, however. Robert Crawford interprets what he
refers to as "The growing wish for a 'pure' English in eighteenth-century
Scotland" in a positive vein, suggesting that such an impulse was not
"an anti-Scottish gesture, but a pro-British one. If Britain were to work
as a political unit, then Scots should rid themselves of any elements likely to
impede their progress within it" (18).[4] Turner's example suggests that it
is worth examining texts which apparently advocate for "pure" English
more closely, however. The fact that Turner concludes her "Address"
with a quotation from Blair suggests on the surface the similarity between their
projects. Her translation into English of the Gentle Shepherd appears as
a remedy to Blair's lament regarding the play's potential disappearance. But as
becomes apparent, aspects of Turner's text actually work to undermine the
hegemony of the English
Turner translates The Gentle Shepherd into standard English, a task that consists for the most part in changing vowels sounds, replacing dropped letters and finding less specifically Scottish idioms. Accordingly, "sae," "ane" and "mony" become "so," "one" and "many'; "a'" and "fa'" become "all" and "fall"; expressions like "ablins" and "fair-fa" become "perhaps" and "Heav'n bless." Only occasionally does Turner alter an end rhyme. For the lines "Ere scornfu' queans, or loss of warldly gear,/Shall spill my rest, or ever force a tear" (3), for example, Turner makes a new rhyme on the translated word "store" by reversing two thoughts in the second line: "Ere scornful maids, or loss of worldly store,/Shall make me drop a tear, or wake an hour" (3). Similarly, for "Seem to forsake her, soon she'll change her mood:/Gae woo anither, and she'll gang clean wood" (7), she substitutes: "Indiff'rent seem, she'll change her mood, my lad;/Go woo another, and she'll run half mad" (7).
Ramsay's rendition of his characters' speech
was an approximation of oral dialogue which at the same time emphasized the
distance between the spoken and written word. Turner's translation of Ramsay's
play adds a further distancing; the written dialect is no longer visible even as
a sign of orality. This produces some odd effects. In Ramsay's play, the
gentility of the characters is indicated by their use of standard English. The
more rustic and ignorant the character, the more scotticisms appear in his or
her speech. Sir William Worthy speaks the best standard English, while,
conversely, Bauldy's speech is littered with scotticisms Turner's translation,
however, by standardizing the characters' language, actually works to undo what
is presented in Ramsay's text as an
Turner's version of The Gentle Shepherd
suggests a desire to translate the Scottish language and Scottish rural customs
seamlessly into a form more easily understood by readers of standard English —
to explain Scotland to England, in other words. However, the materiality of the
text implicitly emphasizes the difference — and the distance — between the
two nations. Even though the majority of the words in Ramsay's original play are
understandable to a standard English reader, Turner provides two completely
separate plays. Her English translation prevents the standard English reader
from ever having to confront unfamiliar words and attempting to understand them
in context or through the use of a glossary. But Turner does not eliminate the
Scottish text altogether; rather, the Scottish text occupies the opposite page
to that of the English translation. Although the standard English reader need
not engage with the Scottish words at all, he or she is forced to confront the
fact of Scottish difference by the textual landscape of the book in which
margins become the border. Positioned in such a context, Scottishness appears
both more in need of translation but, paradoxically, more untranslatable. Turner
implies the Scottish language's recalcitrance in her "Address to the
Public" when she notes "the impossibility of doing [the play] justice
in any other dialect than that in which it was originally written" (v). Her
wording itself disputes the hegemony of English as she implicitly places that
language on par with Scots as just another "dialect." In The
Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, Janet Sorensen
suggests that "the relationships between Scotland and England did not
challenge so much as produce the idea that languages conform to national
borders" (2).
If the text of the play suggests a face-off between the English and Scottish languages and, implicitly, between the two nations, the final section entitled "NOTES, Explanatory of Local Customs and Words," complicates the binary opposition between them, allowing for the possibility of multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of belonging. In the "Notes," Turner herself occupies, and forces the reader to occupy, positions which are not easily divisible into two camps. The "Notes" follow a trajectory of different ways of viewing the relationship between Scotland and England. They begin with Turner acting as straight interpreter of Scottish culture for an English readership. In regard to the word "gentle," for example, she comments: "in Scotland they use the word gentle in the same sense as it is used in England" (Notes 1). Similarly, she finds an English cultural equivalent to explain the "West Port" of Edinburgh: "The marketplace for live cattle at Edinburgh, as Smithfield is in London" (Notes 2). Such comments suggest an observer who is equally at home in both worlds. Moreover, they imply a fundamental equivalence between Scottish and English culture. Both sides of the equation are in balance. "Milk and meal in Scotland imply plenty, as beef and pudding do in England" (Notes 5), the notes inform us later on. This neutral position becomes increasingly disrupted as the "Notes" progress, however.
Turner presents a pastiche of two previous English views of Scotland: Scotland as commodity and Scotland as romantic wilderness. In early eighteenth-century works such as Daniel Defoe's A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), Scotland is of interest only for its economic potential (or lack thereof). In his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), published just fifteen years before Turner's own work, Samuel Johnson turns his attention not to Scotland as economic object, but to Scotland as an object of knowledge, as he blends observations on the country's history, agriculture and culture into his circumnavigation of Scotland. (Unlike Defoe, Johnson actually traveled to all the places he describes.) Turner adopts an objective perspective similar to those of Defoe and Johnson for many of her comments. She provides information, for example, on farming practices in southern Scotland, and like Johnson, she particularly targets the superstitions of the Scottish people. Explaining "elf-shot," she observes: "If cattle die suddenly, the ignorant people think that they are killed by the invisible darts of Elves, Fairies, or some malignant Spirit, at the instigation of witches" (Notes 1). Unlike either Defoe or Johnson, however, Turner is an "insider," a native of Scotland. But although she acknowledges her Scottish origins, at times she also distances herself from those origins. She comments, for example, "I remember when I was a child to have seen, in a cow-house, a stone suspended by a string over every cow's stand, and the same in a stable over every horse's stall. — As the thing was new to me, I inquired for what purpose they hung there, and was told that they were fairy-stones to preserve the cattle from the power of Witches and Fairies" (Notes 2). Here Scotland is presented as at once familiar to her as the place of her childhood and foreign as the site of customs she does not share.
But such objective comments appear less and less frequently as the "Notes" progress, or if they do appear, they are qualified by comments of quite a different tone. In the note regarding the expression "Watching of the fold," the objective explanation of the southern Scottish practice of sending lambs away to the hills for the summer gives way to a description of the emotive effects of the procedure: "the sweet melancholy bleatings of the innocent lambs, the deeper toned complainings of the distressed dams, answering each other from hill to hill — the mild soothing twilight which makes the summer nights of a northern climate enchanting" (Notes 1). This is the other extreme of English projections onto Scotland, as that nation became a site of exotic interest for tourists south of the border in the eighteenth century.[5] Here, Turner again recalls Johnson, who, despite his avowed objectivity in his Journey, confessed that his original idea for writing the narrative came not from a desire to present an objective description, but from the inspiration of the Scottish wilderness:
I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me, on either side, were high hills, which by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not; for here I first conceived the thought of this narration. (9: 40)
Turner's comment regarding the salutary effect
of the southern Scottish landscape's stone walls on abstract thought contrasts
with Johnson's observation early on in his journey that "The roads of
Scotland afford little diversion to the traveller, who . . . has nothing to
Turner's projections onto Scotland differ from those of her English predecessors like Defoe and Johnson, however, insofar that she interrupts these with perspectives which refuse the idea of Scotland as the object of inquiry and/or fantasy by a more "civilized" English readership. She achieves this at times by placing the readers in the same position as that of the Scottish peasants about whom she writes. In the course of describing the "implicit faith" of the "Scottish lasses" in "the virtues of May-dew" (Notes 2), for example, Turner turns her readers into potential practitioners of superstition, crossing over national and also class boundaries as she addresses literate ladies: "If any lady should be tempted to try the experiment, let her rise with the sun, and with her own fair hand gather the dew which she means to use, as it has no virtue if procured by another" (Notes 2). Turner's "Notes" here shift from ethnographic description to "how-to" manual. At other times, she suggests that the superstitions of the Scottish rural class are not unique to Scotland, but can be attributed to individuals of other nations and social classes. Regarding the belief in witches, she writes: "These absurd ideas were not peculiar to Scotland, but to superstition and ignorance in general" (Notes 4), and she gives as an example the case of the Duchess of Beaufort "who is said to have made a pact with the devil to procure her Henry IV. of France for a lover" (Notes 4).[6]
Turner's most drastic challenge to English culture involves the same person whom she in many respects imitates: Samuel Johnson himself. Turner invokes Johnson's Dictionary, that national icon of the English language and nation, on two occasions. In the first citation, she gives Johnson's definition of the rural Scottish sport of "putting the stone": "A large round stone which was thrown with one hand, and the skill and strength of the putter was shewn in the distance he was able to throw it. See Johnson's Folio Dictionary" (Notes 4). The fact that Johnson is cited as the authority on Scottish shot-putting is double-edged. On the one hand, it suggests that he has indeed achieved his purpose as suggested in the Journey of understanding Scotland better than the Scots themselves do because he has an outsider's perspective. On the other hand, it points out Scotland's occupation of space within what Johnson intended as the quintessential archive of English culture. The second quotation Turner offers from the Dictionary pertains to "Second sighted," a characteristic which Johnson associates in particular with the Scots: "'The power of seeing things future, or distant, is supposed inherent in some of the Scottish islanders.' Johnson's Fol. Dict." (Notes 5). Turner, however, in her extended comment on the topic, situates Johnson among the believers: "one would be apt to think, from his manner of expressing himself in his Journey to the Hebrides, that he had believed in some people's possessing this supernatural power" (Notes 5).[7] The object of inquiry here becomes not Scottish but English credulity, as represented in the person of Samuel Johnson.[8] By the end of the "Notes," the superstitions of the "ignorant [Scottish] people" (Notes 1) have become indistinct from those of an established representative of English culture.
The text of Turner's translation of the Gentle Shepherd presents an image of two languages and two nations; the English side of the page represents a standard, literary culture, the Scottish side represents otherness, orality, the local (it speaks volumes that the latter appears on the "odd" pages). Turner's "Notes," however, lead the reader away from this binary formulation, away from a concern with a Blairian translation of "Local Customs and Words" of Scotland to a re-evaluation of what "local" means when peasant and dictionary editor share a common belief and when a Scottish woman writer occupies positions both out- and inside both nations, refusing the restraints of closed borders.
Notes
1. Daiches suggests that "There is often an exhibitionist quality about Ramsay's use of Scots, as though he was presenting a provincial vernacular for the amusement of the educated" (25). Zenzinger, however, argues that this distancing was an effect of Ramsay's social position.
2. See Schellenberg for a complementary discussion of how women novelists' participation in the literary marketplace troubles the image of the "domestic woman" within the public/private and male/female opposition.
3. See R. Crawford (Ch. 1) for a discussion of the subject area of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres as a forebear of modern English studies.
4. Smith coined the phrase "Caledonian Antisyzygy" to describe the condition.
5. See Glendenning.
6. Turner refers here to Gabrielle d'Estrées (1592-99), mistress of Henry IV, but it is interesting that the English Duchess of Beaufort was one of her supporters.
7. In his Journey, Johnson writes: "Our desire of information [about "second sight"] was keen, and our inquiry frequent"(9: 108). He suggests that there are "strong reasons for incredulity" (9: 109), but he also describes himself as "willing to believe" (9: 110).
8. Boswell laid the groundwork for the parallel between Johnson and Englishness, referring to him in his Tour as: "much of a John Bull; much of a true-born Englishman" (5: 20).
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