Divers tongues
Peter Levi
The New Testament in Scots W. L. Lorimer (Canongate £17.50) Acts and Letters of the Apostles Richmond Lattimore (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux £10.95) . L. Lorimer was once Professor of Greek at St Andrews, but his passion was the Scots language. He was a son of the manse, and learnt his first Scots from aged cottage ladies. He was a brother of that noble old dragon, Miss Lorimer of Lady Margaret Hall, who presided for years over the antiquarian scrap-heap which used to be called Homeric archaeology, and he shared something of her spirit, and indeed of the spirit of the most admirable Scottish scholar of all, Murray of the Dictionary. When summoned to Oxford for a viva in 1908 'he walked from Spean Bridge, climb- ed Ben Alder, and reached Dalwhinnie in time to catch the night train'.
He died at well over 80, without com- pleting the revision of his life work, his Scots New Testament. It is not a monument of religious piety, the old cottage ladies who might best have relished it being now many Years dead, but a monumental companion to the Scottish National Dictionary, with which he was closely associated. So is his son, who has edited this magnificent book, including scholarly notes in Scots, Greek and Latin, with the odd bit of Spanish Jesuit quotation, and at least one bit of English: `St Luke exhibits here, as on every other occasion, the most perfect command of nautical terms', cf James Smith of Jor-
danhill. In his private notes, W. L. Lorimer recorded the observation that 'Jesus spakna Standard Aramaic — for ordnar oniegate — but guid braid Galilee'. He has a point.
He early abandoned the religion of his terrifying clerical ancestors, learnt Italian from a servant girl on an Italian holiday, learnt German and, having been soon in- valided out of the Gordon Highlanders, spent the 1914 war reading the neutral press for the War Office. He learnt Swedish, Dutch, Frisian, Romansch, and Romanian, and became increasingly interested in ethnic minorities and other minority languages. He was already extremely keen on Scots, and was clearly a natural born lex- icographer. His work as a classicist included contributions to the new Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon. Among the versions of the New Testament he used there were Frisian, Flemish, Afrikaans, Catalan and Occita- nian translations, as well as the usual ones. But his enthusiasm for Scots went beyond pedantry; he loved it, and if a modern scholarly intellectual can do so, he lived it.
At first, when translating Corinthians chapter 14, verse 11, 'I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian', he considered writing, 'My speech will be like the cheepin o' a spug tae him an his will be like the claikin o' a craw tae me.' Alas, more sober thoughts prevailed, but his son R. L. C. Lorimer, also of the Scottish National Dic- tionary, has preserved the note. It will sur- prise no one that two of W. L. Lorimer's brothers are mentioned in a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid. This translation, which well deserves to be studied, has been published by subscription and by the W. L. Lorimer Trust. Roy Jenkins subscribed, 1 am pleas- ed to see. But I do not suppose Scots will ever be revived as a living language, and even as a language of literature it seems at the moment to pay diminishing returns.
Welsh is a wonderful dying language, Irish might be a fine language again if it were not for the unhappy Irish; one doubts whether the prospects of Scottish Gaelic are as bright as they should be. Scots in its first recorded form was one of the most beautiful and creative languages of Renaissance Europe. It was an equal sister of Shakespeare's English. Is this book any more than a late, lonely monument to the mania of a single eccentric scholar? It may be more. Religion enters profoundly into national culture and national con- sciousness, for better and worse. Some seed, some spark, some sense of what is be- ing lost may well be preserved just through this book. It is probably the most con- siderable accomplishment in Scots prose literature to have been written in hundreds of years. Its movingness goes deeper than language. Even robustly philistine and foreign readers will find it marvellously alive when they have stopped laughing at it.
Richmond Lattimore's offering could hardly be more different. It is a perfectly sober, clear, slightly elderly, very slightly antiquated version of the Acts and the Epistles, by one of the most distinguished living American scholars. He is fine, tact-
ful, gently resonant and perfectly intelligi- ble. The tone a little resembles that of the 19th-century Revised Version. It is solemn, appropriate and, at the same time, easy. This is what we needed before the villainous series of debauched modern versions began to tumble around our heads some 20 years ago. Or did the rot start with Knox? Lat- timore is far better than any other modern version.
Of course, this is only Paul and the Acts. The problem here is to comb out the in- tricacies and to make sense. He has already published part one in New York, and that was praised by Reynolds Price, whom one can trust. Yet I can hardly imagine that this luminous gravity would quite catch all the tones of the Gospels, still less of Revela- tions, which he included in his first part. In the second part, the crucial test is the Romans, chapters five to eight. No transla- tion has ever made such passionate and convincing sense of that, such continuously driving sense as the Geneva Bible of 1560. Even the Authorised Version is inferior. Lattimore makes it sound serious but unex- citing. All the same, I will never again recommend any older modern version of the scriptures to anyone. The churches ought to get together and adopt him; it is high time they had something respectable again. But someone ought to promulgate W. L. Lorimer's New Testament in Scots as the only permitted New Testament in Scotland.
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