Hammering the Scots
Sir: It would be churlish indeed for me to take any sort of general issue with Brian Masters's benignly witty review (Books, 3 November) of The Faber Book of Blue Verse which I edited, but I was struck by his confession that he could understand scarcely a word of the poems by Burns.
Is this really a general difficulty among the southern English? I ask because I see that a book has recently been published in Lewes (and you can't get much more southern than that) 'translating the best of Burns's oeuvre into modern English'. Then there were all those letters to the BBC about the newsreader Susan Rae's im- penetrable accent. Och, awa' wi' ye!
I hope all this is just in Samuel Johnson's tradition of hammering the Scots — God knows they often need it. If it is in truth a serious problem then perhaps anything more than about 150 years old ought to be homogenised into last week's journalese. It is a dismal prospect and I won't believe it. Here is something much older than Burns. Can Spectator readers really understand only the last line?
I that in heill wes and gladness Am trublit now with gret seikness, And feblit with infermitie: Timor mortis conturbat me.
John Whitworth
20 Lovell Road, Rough Common, Canterbury, Kent
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