“Not only did he invent a sentence structure that works like breath through the body of the reader, and a kind of Scottish English that’s simultaneously rich and spare, but [A SCOTS QUAIR is] a formally stunning and cunning work of art”

—Ali Smith in 2019, on James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon

3/9

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/29/ali-smith-books-that-made-me

#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage

SUNSET SONG: a Scottish Gift to German Readers

Regina Erich compares the original German translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A SCOTS QUAIR trilogy published in the GDR between 1970 & 1986, with its more recent republication in a unified Germany

4/9

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2019/12/sunset-song-a-scottish-gift-to-german-readers/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #modernism #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #translation #German #EastGermany #GDR

“When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus & unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of THE REPUBLIC of Plato hidden in his breast.”

Ian Campbell discusses the vivid realisation of a slave revolt in Mitchell’s SPARTACUS (1933)

5/9

https://asls.org.uk/james-leslie-mitchells-spartacus/

#Scottish #HistoricalFiction

Why Everybody Needs Smeddum

“The heroine, Meg Menzies, is Gibbon’s answer to Austen’s Mrs Bennet. In fact, she works as a kind of anti-Mrs Bennet.”

—Graeme Trousdale on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic short story “Smeddum”

6/9

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2007/05/why-everybody-needs-smeddum/

#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage #shortstory #shortfiction

SUNSET SONG

Currently on the iPlayer: the digitally restored 1971 BBC adaptation of the first part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s SCOTS QUAIR trilogy about a young girl’s intellectual & sexual development in rural north-east Scotland just before WW1

7/9

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001bm9l/sunset-song

#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage #adaptation #TV

The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon
ed. Scott Lyall

The best contemporary guide to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s/James Leslie Mitchell’s literature, politics, life, & work – available in print or online via Project MUSE

9/9

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/companions/ic1/

#Scottish #literature #modernism #20thcentury #HistoricalFiction #ScienceFiction #LewisGrassicGibbon #SunsetSong #Scots #Scotslanguage