The Puddocks

There's some are jou o' love divine;

There's some are fou o' brandy.

--Robert Burns, The Holy Fair

Full of a brandied kind of Scots nationalism, a bearded, kilted, 6-ft. 5 1/2-in. classical scholar named Douglas Cuthbert Colquhoun Young has for years fought an amiable but unremitting war to drive out the Sassenach. In 1942 he was jailed for not submitting to the English draft--not because it was a draft, but because it was English. After he was led to the lockup, a band of bagpipers skirled round the building playing a composition in his honor, The Unjust Incarceration. In 1944 he ran gallantly, although unsuccessfully, for Parliament on a platform of. roughly, "Remember Bannockburn." More or less in the spirit of things, he published, while lecturing at Aberdeen University, something called The Aidd Aberdeen Courant and Neo-Caledonian Spasmodical. But his most bravely brandished weapon is Lallans, a braw dialect of lowland Scots, little known today to Scots who are not classicists, or at least poets.

Bluidie Bleckguaird. Until recently, the Lallans dialect was used chiefly by Young and his co-secessionists for pastoral poetry, "flytin," i.e., jousting in libelous verse. Then a classics student at St. Andrews University, where Young has taught for ten years, asked him to do a translation for a dramatics group. The play: Aristophanes' The Frogs, which, because it is less scabrous than most other Greek comedies, is the one most often served up in freshman courses. But even mild Aristophanes is as ripe as Roquefort, and scholars' English translations tend toward the tepid. Young's translation of The Puddocks (frogs) does not.

In the famed, spirited, but excessively proper translation of British Classicist Gilbert Murray, Aeacus. judge of the dead, mistakes the wine god Dionysus for Heracles, who has stolen Cerberus, the watchdog of Hades:

Thou rash, impure and most abandoned

man,

Foul, inly foul, yea foulest upon earth,

Who harried our dog, Cerberus, choked

him dumb . . .

Young's version:

Ye scunnersome, ootrageous skellum,

you,

mischievous villain, bluidie bleckguaird,

you

you rave awa oor collie Cerberus,

gruppit his thrapple and ran aff wi

him . . .

the hunner-heidit boa-constrictor snake

sail ryve your guts; the Loch Ness

monsteress

sail tear the lichts frae oot ye; your twa

kidneys, wi aa your vital harigals, reeman we

bluid,

Gorgorts frae Crail sail sune

jurmummle."

Murray's "cutpurses, burglars, father-beaters" become, in Young's thistly translation, "houssbrakars, sporranslitters, daddie-dadders." Young is not above throwing foreign phrases into his Lallans: "He's a richt pukka sahib, your maister."

Brekekekex, Koax. Impenetrable at first, Lallans becomes readable after a little practice, and the reader stumbles through even such sheep-pasture poetry as: "Meantime the doitit gomerils sat,/ the hinnie-darlin mamma's pets/and gowpt like gowks." (Murray's equivalent verse: "Each sat at home, a simple, cool,/ Religious, unsuspecting fool/ And happy in his sheeplike way!")

Now and again the barnyard Lallans breaks into a lilt: "I'm the darlin o the Muses wi their clarsachs soondan sweet, and o Pan, the skeely piper wi the dansan horny feet ..."

Put on by a St. Andrews dramatics group, The Puddocks was a rousing success, and in the printed version Young got out, it won an accolade from T.S. Eliot: "A most delightful piece of work. I enjoyed it immensely." A bit of the original Greek retained in Young's Puddocks as well as Murray's Frogs--the croak of the frog chorus that mocks Dionysus as Charon ferries him across the Styx:

Brekekekex, koax, koax,

Brekekekex, koax.

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