Malcolm Maclean: Everything is illuminated

Uniting Scottish and Irish art, 'The Great Book of Gaelic' proves the Northern Ireland peace process can bear beautiful fruit. Boyd Tonkin talks to its co-editor, Malcolm Maclean

The most haunting Christmas story in the English language owes nothing at all to Mr Dickens. In his precocious mid-twenties, the self-exiled James Joyce wrote "The Dead", with its urbane, cosmopolitan hero chilled amid the festive cheer by the snowy winds of loss and grief that blow out of the Irish west, and out of the past.

In 1987, 80 years after its composition, John Huston fulfilled his dream of adapting "The Dead". It's the great director's last film, and one of his finest. At one point, Huston makes a perfectly judged addition to the text. A guest of the musical Misses Morkan silences their merry Dublin party by reciting a traditional Irish poem of desire and betrayal, which he calls "Broken Vows". This is a fragment of the Gaelic love-song "Dónal Og", dating at least to 1700 but possibly older, and translated into the flowery English of the Irish literary revival by Yeats's patron, Lady Gregory. With its eerie cadences, the poem's presence in the film links the ideas of lost language and lost passion. The story's briskly modern hero Gabriel, who – like Joyce himself – distrusts narrow nationalism and treats the Irish tongue as "not my language", will later find old songs and old loves joined again when his wife reveals her hidden longing for the dead lad, Michael Furey. Very deftly, Huston amends Joyce.

The written poetry of Gaelic, in Ireland and Scotland, begins around 600AD – an unbroken 1,400-year span. Yet, since it came to élite attention in the drawing-room fug of the "Celtic Twilight", it has often carried those overtones of decline and decay. It can only, so many readers think, speak of love and loss in the same sad breath. Even the emergence in 20th-century Scotland of world-ranking Gaelic poets – such as Ian Crichton Smith and, above all, Sorley MacLean – still coincided with the dying-off of native speakers and Gaelic's near-extinction in places where it once flourished. The Independent recently carried a report from Cape Breton Island about Gaelic's plight in its Canadian outpost.

In Ireland, the insistence of a post-independence ruling class on qualifications in Irish as a precondition for routine state jobs managed to turn the ancient tongue into a dreary schoolroom successor to the Latin of imperial Britain. Meanwhile, designated "Gaeltacht" regions of the Irish west did help preserve the culture – but only under museum conditions. In fact, the faint but genuine connection of Scottish and Irish rock'n'roll (via traditional music) to the literary tradition has probably done more for Gaelic culture over the past two decades than any official gesture. When conquest and flight scattered the Gaelic dynasties of Ireland – in the 17th century – and Scotland – in the 18th – it was in popular song that the learnt lines of the poets endured.

Now an ambitious publishing venture aims to disperse those mournful mists and shine plenty of bright, modern light through the living stream of Gaelic verse. Edited by Malcolm Maclean and Theo Dorgan, The Great Book of Gaelic/An Leabhar Mòr (Canongate, £35) pairs 100 Scottish and Irish Gaelic poems – from 600 to 2000AD – with specially commissioned works from 100 visual artists. The poems appear in both Gaelic and English while, on each facing page, 10 calligraphers have ornamented the visual works (from 50 Scottish and 50 Irish artists) with parts of the text – gorgeously reviving the Celtic monastic art of illumination.

The result – the harvest of five years' complex collaboration – stands as a brilliant bridge between tradition and modernity, in words and images. You will find "Dónal Og" here: now in the translation of the poet Louis de Paor, but still with its forsaken lover lamenting that "You took the east from me and you took the west from me,/ you took before me and you took behind me, / you took the moon and the sun from me,/ and I'm greatly afraid, you took God from me." You will also find famous lyrics such as the medieval scholar's address to his cat, "Pangur Bán"; the bawdy satire of Brian Merriman's 18th-century "The Midnight Court"; and modern landmarks that include Sorley MacLean's "Hallaig". For me, the book's startling revelations stretch from a bitter elegy for the victims of the Sharpeville Massacre by the South African migrant Duncan Livingstone (84 at the time) to a lyric from c.1500 in praise of the "powerful penis" of her priest ("that thick drill of his") by one Iseabail ní mheic Cailéin. Isobel, Countess of Argyll, seems to have married into the Campbells. She probably needed some cheering up.

Malcolm Maclean – director of the Gaelic Arts Agency, Proiseact Nan Ealan, on the Hebridean isle of Lewis – dates the conception of The Great Book of Gaelic to a visit he paid to Irish poet (and director of Poetry Ireland), Theo Dorgan. They marvelled at the ninth-century Book of Kells in Dublin: always treated as an icon of Irish art, that great book was in fact illuminated by monks on the Scottish island of Iona.

After that flash of inspiration, Maclean "spent the best part of a year letting it percolate". Four years of hard fund-raising and commissioning followed for what is now a million-pound project (the art alone has an insurance value of £670,000). The enterprise, Maclean affirms, serves to renew the kinship of Irish and Scottish Gaelic culture. "The centre of gravity has always been cultural," he says, "but we were aware of the political implications from the outset."

The venture came under the aegis of the Columba Initiative, set up in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. But, bureaucracy aside, The Great Book of Gaelic can be described – without much exaggeration – as the loveliest fruit so far of the peace process in Northern Ireland.

During the grim years of the Seventies and Eighties, Maclean recalls, an annual tour of Scottish and Irish Gaelic poets "retained a cultural connection that was essential, and ran at a deeper level than the problems of the Troubles". In Ireland, of course, Gaelic-language culture had acted as a community linchpin of Catholic Republicanism. "The Scottish Gaelic connection didn't fit neatly into that equation, and as a consequence wasn't widely understood," he says. In Scotland, the spread of the Reformation had left most Gaelic speakers and writers in the Protestant camp.

"When the first ceasefire was called in 1994," he remembers, his agency was "really struck by the number of contacts that came from Ireland within a week. They ranged from the Falls Road arts centre to Loyalist Prisoners' Aid." That once-forgotten Gaelic bond proved its power "to cut through so many of the stereotyped, fixed positions".

The latest census figures will show that Gaelic speakers on the British side of the Irish Sea number around 60,000 (down from a quarter of a million a century ago). To halt this slide, Maclean puts his faith in culture, not compulsion. "The extent to which the state made Gaelic a compulsory part of the education system created a lot of resentment in Ireland," he argues. For Scottish Gaels, exposure to the language must be "an issue of parental and individual choice".

New radio programmes and adult education classes allow Scottish and Irish speakers to hear one another's versions of the language. But Maclean stresses that "there are only 650 different words, and not all of those 650 are by any means in common usage. It's a distinctly manageable scale of difference." Even within Scotland, Gaelic radio transmissions at first brought a flurry of objections from Skye about incomprehensible Lewis accents, from Argyll about Barra ... "but within 18 months those complaints had virtually disappeared. People's ears had got attuned".

Now The Great Book will attune the ears of English speakers to the historic wealth of Gaelic poetry – as well as delighting their eyes. The artworks can be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow until March 2003. Then they will move to the US before returning to shuttle between Scotland and Ireland. This high profile may hasten the goal of steering Gaelic beyond the danger zone where – with most of the world's 6,000-plus tongues – it struggles. Colourful, stylish, even starry (a naked Tilda Swinton shows up on a motorbike, in a drawing by her husband John Byrne), the project "takes an issue people tend to look at in a relatively narrow perspective and places it in a global context," reports Maclean. Together, literature and art can help ensure that "Gaelic is in the saveable half of the world's languages."

The Great Book Of Gaelic An Leabhar Mor

Scél Lem Dúib

Scél lem dúib

dordaid dam;

snigid gaim;

ro-fáith sam;

Gáeth ard úar;

ísel grían;

gair a rrith;

ruirthech rían;

Rorúad rath;

ro cleth cruth;

ro gnab gnáth

giugrann gurth.

Ro gab úacht

etti én;

aigre ré –

é mo scél.

Brief Account

Brief account:

Stag's complaint.

Cold front.

Summer's spent.

High cold blow.

Sun holds low.

Short the day.

Sea just spray.

Bracken brown,

Broken down.

Geese all mouth,

Heading south.

Chilled each quill.

Feathers' flurry.

Weather's hoary.

End of story!