Brian Holton and Kathleen Jamie

Schedule

Wed Jun 28 2023 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm

Location

Scottish Poetry Library | Edinburgh, SC

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Join Makar Kathleen Jamie in conversation with translator Brian Holton, discussing his new book.
About this Event

Irish Pages Press presents Aa Cled Wi Clouds She Cam 60 Lyrics frae the Chinese: Translations in Scots and English by Brian Holton.

Join us for a relaxed conversation and reading as Scots Makar Kathleen Jamie chats to translator Brian Holton about the peaks and pitfalls of translating from Chinese to Scots.

This book introduces Scots (and English) speakers to one of the major genres of Chinese lyric verse. This genre appeared in the ninth century, during the late Tang Dynasty, but is generally considered to have reached its full flowering in the following Song Dynasty (960-1279CE).

Among the most elegant and beautiful texts written in any language, these lyrics are of particular interest in that they demonstrate the multum in parvo (less is mair) principle: like Chinese calligraphy or landscape painting, great and subtle effects result from a high artfulness that looks artless. The authors include masters such as Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), Liu Yong (987-1053), and Yan Jidao (1031-1106), as well as lesser-known writers.

ABOUT

Brian Holton, born in Galashiels in 1949, and educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Durham, has published twenty books of translated poetry, including Yang Lian’s Venice Elegy (Edizioni Damocle, 2019) and Narrative Poem (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). In 2021, he was awarded the inaugural Sarah McGuire Prize for Poetry Translation for Yang Lian’s Anniversary Snow (Shearsman Books, 2019). Holton’s collection of classical poems in Scots, Staunin Ma Lane, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016, and his Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds: Li Bai an Du Fu in Scots by Taproot Press in early 2022. He has won other prizes both for his own poetry in Scots and for his translations into both Scots and English. He is a recovering academic who taught Chinese language and literature at Edinburgh, Durham and Newcastle, and translation at Newcastle and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has given lectures, readings and workshops at universities and major literary festivals in the UK, Spain, Italy, Holland, New Zealand, China, the USA, and Canada. He lives in Melrose in the Scottish Borders, close to where he was born.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and editor. In August 2021, Jamie was appointed the Makar or National Poet for Scotland for a three year term. In this role, Jamie has curated collective poems from lines submitted by the people of Scotland. Raised in Currie, near Edinburgh, she studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, publishing her first poems as an undergraduate. Her writing is rooted in Scottish landscape and culture, and ranges through travel, women’s issues, archaeology and visual art. She writes in English and occasionally in Scots.

Jamie’s collections include Black Spiders (1982) and The Queen of Sheba (1995). Her 2004 collection The Tree House revealed an increasing interest in the natural world, and won the Forward Poetry Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. The Overhaul, won the 2012 Costa poetry award. In 2014, Jamie set herself the task of writing one poem per week. The resulting poems were collected in The Bonniest Companie, winning 2016 Saltire Society Book of the Year award. Her Selected Poems were published in 2018.

For the last decade Jamie has also written non-fiction. Her collections of essays Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing are widely regarded as influential works of nature and landscape writing. The latter was a co-winner of the Highland Book Prize in 2020. On publication in the United States, Sightlines won the John Burroughs Medal and the Orion Book Award. Jamie writes occasional essays and reviews for the London Review of Books and The Guardian.


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Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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Scottish Poetry Library

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