Brian Holton, Aa Cled wi Clouds she Cam: 60 lyrics frae the Chinese: Translations in Scots and English

This volume is the third in Brian Holton's continuing mission to render into Scots selections of classical Chinese poetry.It follows Staunin ma Lane (2016) and Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds: Li Bai an Du Fu in Scots (2022).Holton's 'Owresetter's Eftirword' ('Translator's Afterword') informs us that Aa Cled wi Clouds she Cam presents the first sixty lyrics from Song Ci Sanbaishou, a standard anthology of 300 lyrics from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), edited by Zhu Zumou.The edition was published in 1924, principally for use in Chinese schools.Aa Cled wi Clouds she Cam offers the reader a textual apparatus in English, that is, a brief introduction to each featured poet and explanatory footnotes, and the poems are presented trilingually, in Scots and Chinese, with an English paraphrase.It is important to emphasize that the Scots version is the poetic translation and the English version is a paraphrase; Holton is much more concerned with finding formal equivalences to the poetic effects of the Chinese source texts in his Scots target texts than in his English versions, though the latter are also presented as poems, and are not without their merits.However, the function of the English versions is primarily to support the readers as they travel through the dense thickets of the Scots vocabulary.Holton, then, can be seen as following a tradition, now over 500 years old, of testing the linguistic and aesthetic resources of Scots by translating canonical texts, and in so doing refining his literary medium of choice.For much of that tradition, Scots language translators have drawn upon highly renowned literature in the major European languages.1 Although there have been sporadic instances of Scottish writers indirectly translating Chinese literature in the past century and a half, usually drawing on English versions as bridging texts, Brian Holton is the first translator since the great nineteenth-century missionary and scholar James Legge to have the linguistic competence to be able to