My attempt at translating no. 45 from his 1943 collection, Dain do Eimhir, Poems to Eimhir. Below is a scan of the Gaelic poem from my personal copy of the 1943 first edition.
A knife made a cut in my brain on the stone of my love, darling, and the edge probed each single ridge and my eye took its hue.
I turned each gemmed particle under the sharp, cold glass that is my understanding flame, which valued them hundreds of hours.
After the knife, glass, fire and the beam of the sharp edge, gashing, cutting, burning, probing, there was not a change in the hue.
The amulet-stone cut into a thousand particles as whole as ever it was, crushed into powder, but dense, crystalline, sharp-edged.
As it went go into the number of crushed, cut shards, so it would take on the unity of the hard compact oneness.
It swelled to the extent of a thousand oceans and each shard went into a drop, but it was the water that went hard with the swollen crushing of love.
The stone that got the cut was from my own narrow mind, sliced into the majesty which the deep land would deserve.
Pickaxed out of my chest, its expanse was above my alien dimension and like a splinter its mother-rock contracted into Betelgeuse of the stars.
The stone of love came from my brain and it took the brave imagination so that it was the mother-imagination to the mother-brain itself.
It is the love born of the heart that is the love that is fettered free when it is taken in the mind, the loving brain on its love.
And it is the stone that is broken that is the bright, whole jewel when it is crushed by a brain to the topmost hardness of love.
Darling, if the love of my heart on you were not like the hardness of the diamond, I know that it would take cutting by a sharp, hard brain.
This poem is steeped in the world of the Metaphysical poets, with its incongruous likening of love and the brain to a hard gemstone that could be cut up in some Baconian early scientific experiment. Compare John Donne’s opening to “The Damp”,
When I am dead, and doctors know not why,
And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart”.
You can also see the influence of the Metaphysicals in Maclean’s deliberate employment of paradox, as in “fettered free” or the contrast between multiple, pulverised fragments and their unity. Images of violence, burning, slashing, pickaxing, and radical physical changes of state applied to a personal mental world are also Donnean.
Like Donne’s flipping between the body and the world or the cosomos, Maclean switches easily between different proportions, with the growth of the stone from the brain to a scale measureless beside his body, and the abrupt shift in perspective from a splinter to the star, Betelgeuse. Likewise, the stone grows to the size of an ocean, and then the rocky splinters transform themselves to watery drops.
Not least, the line of thought of the poem, occasionally convoluted, dwells on difficult obscurities, and unsettling analogies, the brain as knife probing the author’s own emotions.
Like T.S. Eliot, Maclean was intrigued by the Metaphysicals, presumably because their thought-world was congenial to the Modernist emphasis on fragments, rapd shifts in vision, and alienation.
For a lateral look at how another modernist writer transfigures passion into an internal geological landscape, here is an interesting comparison from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah (trans John Sturrock):
It is hard to credit the extent to which his anxiety had disturbed, and by the same token had even momentarily enriched, M. de Charlus’s mind. Love causes these veritable geological upheavals in our thoughts. In those of M. de Charlus, which a few days before, had resembled a plain so smooth that, away into the distance, he would not have been able to spot an idea lying on the surface, there had abruptly arisen, hard as stone, a mountain massif, but of mountains so sculpted it was as if some statuary, instead of carrying the marble away, had carved it where it lay, and where there writhed, in giant, titanic groups, Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.
ealasaidbooks 