Burns Essay Winner 2009 - Robert Burns World Federation Essay Competition 2009

Seraphima Nechaeva

Form 8A

Grammar School 61

St. Petersburg

‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot?’

Since the age of three I have dreamed of becoming a princess.

A Scottish princess. Where did it come from and why did it settle in my mind – a very-very deep, on the level of smell, taste, colour – this chocolate-tasting word – Scotland. Now I can’t remember. There is certainly a sensible explanation: my mother, a teacher of literature, gave private lessons at home, very interesting, and sitting in the next room I listened to unintelligible, beautiful words. Probably, then – in the softest mist of the sentimental elegy from the measured clatter of horses’ hoofs of a ballad, somewhere between a cloud, a loch, a tower and the sunset at the country cemetery – the word Scotland appeared to me. And became an old, sweet acquaintance. Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

In the early childhood I simply liked the sound of it (in Russian – Шотландия) reminded me of chocolate (шоколад) and the woolen warmth of Granny’s plaid, and the royal velvet and satin: in -шот- I felt the velvet depth and rustle, in –ландия- smoothness and radiance and together it turned out to be amazingly delicious. The colour of the word seemed to me purple, pale yellow and also, for some reason, red (the colour of ballads, what else?); the sound – old black ravens, like Cye and Gerda’s, the princess’s harp and a nervous neigh, and also I felt distinctly the smell of clover.

My parents laughed:

Why not a Spanish infanta? A Japanese empress? A little Chinese mandarin?

No, a Scottish princess! – I replied – and turned away. There was only chirp and whiz in my disposal and there were almost no words for my sweet acquaintance.

Time passed. I had already got to know that I wouldn’t become a princess, but I still liked to roll quietly on the tongue the name ‘Scotland’.

And this tender feeling that I cherished in my childhood suddenly began to appear to me in different images, under different names, now like this, now like that calling for a talk.

I learnt to read early. I read avidly children’s classical literature, but I didn’t like poems. That upset my mother very much. Once quite by chance I opened one children’s reader and I came across poems, I wanted to turn the page over, but one line caught my eye and heart:

‘From the bonny bells of heather

They brewed a drink long syne,

Was sweeter far then honey,

Was stronger far then wine…’

(‘Heather Ale. A Galloway Legend.’ By Robert Louise Stevenson)

Immediately flared up the feeling of recognition: here it is, that beloved sensation from my childhood with measured thud and red colour, awfully exciting and stirring something so deep inside me that it made me cry. The heart was beating. It was a verse and not a verse. It was Scotland. With the odour of clover and wild roses there mingled another smell – of pride, honour and glory. My love turned out to have a brave heart.

The words were memorized without any effort (thanks to a brilliant translator S. Marshak).

It is a ballad, - Mother commented. A good ballad, written by a Scot Robert Louis Stevenson. To tell the truth, I like Spanish ballads more.

In the evening Mother gave me two collections of ballads: ‘The Waters Of The Clyde’- a Scottish one and ‘An Oath On The Sword’- a Spanish one. A small brown book and a neat white with gold.

The small brown one was learnt by me almost by heart. I was charmed by the severe, demure rhythm full of hidden emotions, the pulsation of the heart. A brave heart. There was love, simple and clear, like the crystal-clear like waters of the Twid. And I also felt mystery and passion in each ballad. Why did the bride poison her groom? And why could I see the severe baron of Smalgolm and the dead beloved presenting himself at the magic Ivan Kupala night?

That’s how I learnt to read verses. And it was then that I learnt to read Russian poetry too. But should auld acquaintance be forgot? (My acquaintance, my first verses, - it is a burning mystery and surprise and it is also Scotland.) As my most favourite child’s books are.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his divine Sherlock Holmes turned out to be a Scot (O, how frightening it was to sleep in the darkness after his ‘Speckled Band’); and sir Walter Scott with drawling, scrupulous novels, reminding the sound of a bagpipe (my classmates didn’t like them, but I – did!); and absorbing Stevenson, stingy in words, dynamic – and still with a piece of a magic mist, incomprehensibly penetrating into the most down-to-earth story.

And, of course, my earliest book – Kenneth Graham with his magic animals. Long afterwards I invented my own fairy-tales about the magic glade, now my sister Olga invents them…

All of them friendly reached out their hands to me, and in the palm of each of them there was Scotland, like a golden apple on a silver plate. No, - like a lovely wild orchid on a moor. No, - like blinding snow on the top of a green mountain. No, - like the wind in the willows. No, - like a rough but gorgeous ancient stained-glass window in a massive grey stone cathedral.

Sometimes Scotland was cunning: I am reading Anderson – a Dane! And come across ‘The Gardener And The Masters’ – of course! And there, remember? Wild herbs on the strath, and silky thistle, and a beautiful Scottish lady… My favourite thing by Pushkin is ‘Small Tragedies’. And in the ‘Small Tragedies’ – ‘The Feast During The Plague’. And there – lovely gentle Mary with ‘ of those Scottish hair yellowness’, who is giving out ‘ the sounds of her native songs with wild perfection’. And the songs themselves, marvelously translated by our poet…

And here is the melancholy and the mist of Lermontov, whose soul is longing to return to the ancestral castle, to the Scottish rocks, to the scald’s harp…

Deep, mountain, empyrean longing… In what gentlest aspirations, in what deepest sounds the echo is!

Soon appeared the mountains themselves. And the way they appeared! At the English lesson we were given ‘My Heart’s In The Highlands’ as homework. Firstly our teacher Eugenia Vitalievna read us the poem on her own. And I, even before the translation, before the eventual penetration into the meaning, understood: it is about love. And it’s only about love that you can write with such hearty aspirations so fluffy and melting: heart, Highlands, here, high, a-chasing, hills… And it’s only about love that you can fold these dewy lithe combinations: ea – here, deer, farewell – and near like the far away echo – resounding hard -o-; -u-: north, wander, wood, valour…

It turned out to be about love like everything that Burns wrote about. The Russian collection of poems in Marshak’s translations and a small English book settled down on my desk. Russian Burns turned out to be a clear, chaste, almost children’s poet; to work my way through the brushwoods of the original (the hawthorn, wild roses, and also picks on the ivy, and also – do not tread upon the primrose) is very difficult for me.

‘O, luve will venture in,

Where it daur na weel be seen!

O, luve will venture in,

Where wisdom ance hath been!

But I will doun yon river rove

Amang the wood sae green,

And a’ to pu’ a posie

To my ain dear May!’

It is not quite the English language. It is more severe, more enigmatic and somehow more honest. It sometimes reminds me of an exorcism, sometimes of a teasing rhyme and sometimes of a ballad, that one I mentioned before, mysterious, red, with the thud and the heart pulsation.

The mountain echo sounds in the modulations of the diphthongs, crumble and scratch under the foot the pebbles of shortenings; the sky above the head is clear and open, like the vowel sounds of the Scottish speech, resembling the Russian. I am translating. Translating, because I, too, was charmed by the ‘wild perfection’ (A. Pushkin. ‘The Feast During The Plague’) of the Scottish songs. Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

And also, Burns’s poems brought back to me the feelings of the early childhood and of that tasty Scotland which I had rolled on the tongue.

When the difficulties of the translation are overcome and the poem becomes ‘your own’, it can be memorized at once. It creates a melody, becomes part of your hearing and soul. It lies gently on your palm and warms itself in the sun.

‘Now nature hangs her mantle green

On every blooming tree,

And spreads her sheets o daisies white

Out o’er the grassy lea

Now blooms the lily by the bank,

The primrose down the brae,

The hawthorn’s budding in the glen,

And milk-white is the slae…’

In these poems, like in your childhood, there is the kind good and the bad evil, like in your childhood – it’s better to be poor but honest, like in your childhood – love and acquaintance until one dies, and red roses are in blossom, and a transparent river is flowing…

‘John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither,

And monie a cantie day, John,

We’ve had wi ane anither,

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.’

His poems are songs about the love to the world, plain and distinct even for a child. But it is not that simplicity which is worse than a robbery (a Russian proverb: simplicity is worse than robbery – about stupid tactlessness). It is the simplicity of the first deepest feelings – love for mother and father, for brother and sister (I have got a big family, so I understand it very well), to the sun, to the green grass.

‘O happy love! where love like this is found:

O heart-felt raptures! bliss beyond compare!’

Should the first impressions of the childhood be forgot? Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

I turn over a new page and see the earth on the first days after its creation. How beautiful it is! How clear!

‘Now spring has clad the grove in green,

And strew’d the lea wi flowers;

The furrow’d, waving corn is seen

Rejoice in fostering showers

The trout within yon wimpling burn

Glides swift, a silver dart,

And, safe beneath the shady thorn,

Defies the angler’s art…’

Burns’s poems are a detailed, lovingly made up guide of this land. I am enjoying myself, I am making a detailed list of its charming signs: here are mountain daisies, here is the hawthorn and the thistle, the bluebells and the birches (O, they aren’t only in Russia!), the heather, rye, hazel and an oak, and the zephyr wanton’d round the bean and bore its fragrant sweets alang, and claver blooms white o’er the ley, and roses blow in ilka bield.

Should the childish feeling of relationship with everything alive be forgot? Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

It is densely populated, this country, and not only by abstract animals. There live swifts and a linnet, turtle-doves, bramblings and a heron, and woodcocks, and a robin, and a black thrush wishes you a happy birthday, and at night an owl is sharing your sadness with you. There live hares, mice and a merry collie, who can speak – black with a white breast, and in the stream trout is bathing. There are a lot of rivers with beautiful, poetical names. They run, sparkle and play like wonderful, glossy animals, and they also have their say in the matter and can tell us about their fortune (‘The Humble Petition Of The Bruar Water’). On the banks of the rivers and in green valleys there live people. Living people of flesh and blood, with names and surnames, with details of appearance and biography – in a word – neighbours. And it is wonderful, because

it is so difficult, almost impossible to love distant ones. And here…

I feel very sorry for the who was forever abandoned by Jamie and

for John Anderson whose locks, black like the raven’s, turned grey;

and I wish happiness to Jenny, the eldest sister in a big family

(‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’), and I would surely fall in love with

the bonnie Highland laddie, who wears a plaid on the shoulder and a blue bonnet.

Laconic Findlay, a charming nameless lass from the ‘The Lass That Made The Bed For Me’, McPherson playing his fiddle and dancing before the execution, rattling, roaring Willie – all of them come alive

in the tension of the Burns’s verse. Childlike, spontaneous, touching, causing – like old acquaintance – now laugh, then tears.

Tears… No, it is not quite true. Sometimes Burns’s poems are touching to tears, but all the same – somewhere at the bottom, outside the brackets, behind the scenes, behind that pink hawthorn bush – stays a smile.

The sentimentality of his songs never turns into tearfulness, just the opposite – it turns into irony. That’s just for me. I don’t like tragedies. The main tragedy in my reader’s life is the little dog Mumu’s death from the story written by Turgenev. I still cannot make myself read this thing again.

I don’t know how to express my idea, but it seems to me there are no tragedies, but I will think it over afterwards. Afterwards… Now I will only say that Burns has sadness, and compassion, and suffering, but, when put in a song, they dissolve in the air, in the odour of flowers, giving a slightly bitter taste to the wind’s breath, a slight purple shade to the sky’s azure, a diminished seventh to the chords of a thrush. There’s no tragedy in Burns’s poetry because there is no death. Like in your childhood. There is a feast, a brotherly feast, the company of friends sitting at a generous table singing:

‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot?’

and round-sided Haggis is blazing, and the wife is sewing a shirt

at the window…

The jolly beggars are feasting; in the Saturday evening the cotter’s family is dining, trustfully letting good people share their meal.

The three severe kings are raising their bowls, and in the bowls there is golden barley ale splashing – the eternal reminder of John Barleycorn.

In this joyous circle, the sunny ring of the universe, there are included holding each other by the hand, the living and the dead, birds

and animals, the babies’ craddles and the coffins of the deceased ancestors. There is no death because the deserving one reflects the way of the corn, and his heart, his blood, his soul stay in this world changing only their shape. And I will grow up soon and, probably, some other books and songs will attract me. My mysterious country will stay in the world of my childhood together with the prince of my dream. A good-humored brave prince with an open sincere look of his big brown eyes, like in the portrait of Burns painted by Alexander Nasmyth.

But if Deus conservat omnia – will auld acquaintance be forgot?

I am very grateful to my teacher of English Eugenia Vitalievna Dyakova who taught me to love and understand English, to Frieda Naumovna Zaitseva and Vladimir Moiseevich Pavlotsky for the given material.

Literature used in the composition:

Robert Burns. ‘Verses. Poems. Epigrams.’

Publishing house AST, Moscow, 2006.

‘Robert Burns. Poems And Songs’

Dover Publication, Inc. New York

‘Robert Burns. The Complete Poetical Works’

Alloway publishing. Darvel. Ayrshire. Scotland.