A Roman poet and the Scottish connection

He has also created a Papal-Scots tartan which was worn by Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to Scotland in 2010.

This celebration got me thinking of a Roman dialect poet, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), who recorded an occasion in 1834 when a tartan kilt was seen in Rome, to the poet’s astonishment and dismay. Two clan chiefs were to be presented to the Pope of the day, Gregory XVI, resplendent in their kilts.

History does not record the clans they represented, but the sight of them and the idea of them turning up in the Papal palace dressed in that style pleased Belli’s imagination but displeased his sense of decorum. The poem he penned on this occasion was translated very freely into English by Mike Stocks, who admitted Scots was a better vehicle for the earthy dialect, Romanesco, of the original. Stocks wrote:

Scotsmen or coachmen, pal, or anyone –

No matter what they are it makes no odds,

They’re nothing but a pair of sods

To swan around without their trousers on …

Belli assumed that the place the Scotsmen came from must have

been calm and wind-free, since otherwise:

Just one puff of wind and any minute

They’d end up showing off their Mr Bigs.

The final words are a coy euphemism for Belli’s more teasing term for the Scotsmen’s sexual tackle.

There were a few other translators of Belli but the one Stocks refers to with admiration was Robert Garioch, who wrote punchy, vivid verse to reproduce what Edwin Morgan called “the pungent lines” of Belli.

The encounter between the two poets was mediated by Antonia Stott, whom I remember as an inspiring, insightful Italian lecturer in the University of Glasgow. She provided the basic translations on which Garioch worked. He translated some 120 sonnets out of the 2279 Belli produced, mainly in the 1830s.

It was an ideal union of imagination, vision, mindset and poetic sensibilities across two cultures and two centuries, bringing together two men dedicated to writing in a language which was not the speech of the upper classes but which they refused to view as inferior or unsuitable for literature.

Other translators of Belli were hampered by not having such an idiolect to hand. The most interesting was Anthony Burgess who in his novel Abba Abba imagined a meeting between John Keats and Belli who were in Rome at the same time but did not actually know of each other’s existence.

READ MORE: Darien scheme failure in Panama led to Scotland joining the Union

The novel is followed by an English version of some sonnets probably done by Burgess’s Italian wife, Liana. Although in standard English, they do not shy away from the bawdy irreverence of Belli’s tone when talking, for example, of Popes or biblical figures.

The chaste Susannah – what was she chased for?

Her beauty, yes, but was there something more

The sort of reputation that she bore?

You said the word, not I: the word is w---e.

Those old men said it too. (Ach, nothing’s lower

Than watching at a lady’s bathroom door.)

The “Ach” might be a bow towards Scots, but more importantly in the novel Burgess ponders the relation between dialect and language in words applicable to Scottish debates. His Belli bursts out in exasperation at someone who dismisses dialect as merely uncouth and proposes his own view: “A language waves flags and is blown up by politicians. A dialect keeps to things, things, things, street smells and street noises, life.”

Elsewhere a friend of his exclaims Romanesco “does not have that sense of high responsibility thrust upon it. The Roman tongue is coarse and rough and full of the Rabelaisian.” Garioch did not shy away from that element.

Belli himself was an oddly contradictory man, a conventional bourgeois in his lifestyle who wrote sniggering verse by night, an observant Catholic who mocked Biblical figures and Papal practice, a jeering satirist who took employment as Vatican censor, forbidding the staging of Shakespeare’s plays and Verdi’s operas.

He left orders that his work, which was known only to a select few in his lifetime, be burned at his death, although his wish was disregarded – by a Cardinal.

The Rome of his poetry has none of the historical grandeur of the Eternal City. It was not the capital of the Roman Empire or of the Renaissance but the hidden Rome of the people. He endows these people with their own colourful speech, with no more hesitation than was shown by Burns or JM Synge.

READ MORE: Festival celebrates influential role Gaelic travellers had in preserving Highland traditions

THERE is a monument to him, lounging in an effete pose, on the road into Trastevere, the working-class area of Rome, but he himself wrote that he chose to “leave a monument to the ordinary people of Rome” by paying homage to “a type of originality in their language, concepts, character and beliefs” which distinguished them from other peoples.

Garioch had a different view of Scots as a national language, but he found it an ideal vehicle for rendering Belli’s work.

He delighted in Belli’s irreverence, his disdain for government and established ways, his mockery and unpolished satire.

This could extend to incidents in the Old or New Testaments, like his wry defence of Cain. Public executions were not uncommon in nineteenth-century Rome, as Dickens recorded during his visit to the city.

One sonnet, entitled “The Reminder”, is an account of an execution. In Garioch’s version, it reads:

I mind the day when they hingit Anthony

Gammerdella – ma confirmatioun

jist feenished, and ma gossip said: “Here, loun,

a doughnut-ring and a jumping-jeck for Johnnie.”

Perhaps that kind of experience led him to side, at least ironically, with Cain, the first fratricide. Garioch renders the closing strophe of that poem:

But, seeing Gode wes aye crabbit and dour

whan he brocht neeps, honey and sunflure-seed,

tho Abel’s milk and yowes were Gode’s plesure,

til a man like hiz-yins, made of flesh and bleed.

It wes eneuch to make his bile turn sour:

and sae, my freend, slash, slash, whan he saw reid.

Translation can come in various guises and through Garioch, Belli was kidnapped for Scottish literature. Some individual works are parallel versions rather than what would be acceptable by pedants as translations. At times he keeps the Roman setting:

This swinish Rome, Christ, whit a reivers’ den

it’s turnt tae, may Gode forgie the curse!

Hemp raips and hingan-shaws, wull ye no hearse

this haill wansome nest of wicked men?

At others, he brings the action back to some or other spot in Edinburgh:

Hou accidents will happen! Here’s my story:

yon aafisest hellish nicht I iver saw,

coming hame frae Split Heir Street, in the smaa

hours of the morn, frae visiting Victoria,

jist as I mak my wey up frae the Doria

to sclimm St Mary Street, I skyte and faa,

Christ! Whit a dunt! Back of ma heid anaa,

it gies me harns a phantàsmagoria.

Garioch was persuaded to provide a glossary for a language which was far removed from the vocabulary of the cultured elites of Edinburgh as had been Belli’s from the Italian equivalent. But both men produced poetry which had the power of a punch on the jaw, and whose impact lingered as long.