From Wood to Ridge

"He was entirely a Gaelic poet. The book’s entitled Collected Works in Gaelic and English, but he never wrote a poem in English: he wrote all his poetry in Gaelic and then translated it. He grew up in Raasay, a little island just off the coast of Skye, and I’d say he’s seen as the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century. One person who has written most perceptively about “Hallaig” is Seamus Heaney, who made his own translation. As Heaney indicated, in some ways the poem is quite straightforward and simple. The township of Hallaig was completely cleared in the early 1850s and most of the inhabitants were shipped to Australia . The poem is an evocation of the people who were there – particularly the young girls, as they are walking into the township, who begin as birch trees and are transformed: “The men lying on the green/At the end of every house that was,/The girls a wood of birches/Straight their backs, bent their heads.” It’s not just a lamentation for the desolate nature of the place, although it is partly that – it’s also an evocation of what the Highlands might have been without what, in the English translation, is described as “the heartache of the tale”."