Dares Paradise

Two long poems by eighteenth-century Scottish Gaelic poet, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, revived and reintroduced for twenty-first century Anglophone readers

Little of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s biography can be confirmed other than his work as a teacher in Scotland’s Ardnamurchan Peninsula and his role as a captain in the 1745 Jacobite Uprising. What we do have is his poetry—one volume self-published in 1751, the first nonreligious work to be published in any of the Celtic languages. Dares Paradise presents two long poems by mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, newly translated by Taylor Strickland. In his translation, Strickland—himself a poet—takes a subversive approach, writing in a transatlantic English idiom with Scots and Gaelic inflections. This is mac Mhaighstir Alasdair for the twenty-first century reader.

The poems offer a rare pre- and post-battle perspective on a world, and a language, at risk of disappearing. The first, “Allt an t-Siùcair,” is a lyrical celebration of place, a vivid evocation of the landscape of the peninsula at Britain’s westernmost edge. The second, “Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill,” considered mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s masterpiece, conjures instead a placelessness, recounting an epic sea journey from the Hebridean island of South Uist to Ireland that can be read as an allegory for persistence. For both poems, the English translation and Gaelic original appear on facing pages.