Sorley MacLean(1911–1996)

Somhairle MacGill-Eain, in English Sorley MacLean, was born on 26 October 1911 at Osgaig on the small island of Raasay, off the east coast of Skye, the second of seven children of Calum MacLean, a crofter and tailor, and Christina Nicolson, a domestic servant turned crofter's wife. The household was Gaelic-speaking and Free Presbyterian, with English as a school language and the King James Bible as the daily English text. His mother's people were Skye, and her grandfather had been cleared from Hallaig on Raasay in the 1850s, the village whose absence would shape MacLean's greatest poem. He was schooled at Raasay primary, at Portree High School on Skye from twelve, and at the University of Edinburgh from 1929, where he read English Literature on a Carnegie scholarship and graduated with a First in 1933.

He taught English at Portree High School, on Mull, at Hawick High School in the Borders, and at Boroughmuir Senior Secondary in Edinburgh through the 1930s, while reading the European modernists with whom he wanted Gaelic to be in conversation: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, MacDiarmid, Lorca, Blok. He published seventeen songs for Eimhir in the journal Modern Scot through 1935; and in 1943 brought out Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile, the sequence of love and political poems written between 1939 and 1942 that recast what Gaelic poetry could do. The Eimhir of the title was the Irish-mythological beloved of Cú Chulainn, but the woman behind the poems was an Edinburgh student MacLean had met in 1937 and lost. The book reads as a single argument with itself about whether the poet's first duty is to love or to the Spanish front.

He joined the Royal Corps of Signals in 1940 and served through the North African desert campaign, wounded three times at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942. He returned to teaching, married Renee Cameron of Inverness in 1946, and from 1956 was headmaster of Plockton Senior Secondary School in Wester Ross until he retired in 1972, turning the Highland school into a Gaelic centre by the simple measure of teaching the language as if it had a future.

Hallaig was published in the journal Gairm in 1954. It is the poem of the cleared village of MacLean's mother's people, in which the dead of the eighteenth-century clearances walk back through the birch wood between the headland and the burn in the present tense and are seen by the poet from the high ground above the bay. The poem moves between Gaelic and the time-out-of-time of Highland memory in a way that no Gaelic poem had moved before. Seamus Heaney, who translated it into English in 2002, called it the touchstone of modern Gaelic poetry. Heaney's translation hangs framed on the wall of every Highland secondary-school English department.

MacLean was awarded honorary degrees by every Scottish university and one Irish, an honorary fellowship at Edinburgh, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1990, and the Saltire Society Award. He retired to Braes on the Trotternish peninsula of Skye in 1972, looking across the Sound of Raasay to the island of his birth. He died at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness on 24 November 1996, and is buried at Stronuirinish on Skye. The MacLean name today carries his memory as the writer who proved, when the Gaelic language was widely thought to be in its terminal generation, that the language could still produce poetry that read on the same shelf as the best of European modernism. Hallaig is the most quoted poem in modern Scottish Gaelic, and the wood the poem walks through is now a national nature reserve.