Aonghas MacNeacail, who has died aged 80, was a significant literary presence in Scotland over five decades, best known for writing in his native Gaelic – although he was resistant to being labelled exclusively a “Gaelic poet”.
He wrote with equal power in English, and his Gaelic identification stemmed not only from his poetic output but also from a public commitment to the language, signalled by the legal adoption in the late 1970s of the Gaelic form of his name at birth, Angus Nicolson. “Scotland has a curious relationship with its Gaelic poets,” he said. “It likes the fact that we’re there, so long as it doesn’t have to read us … The rest of the world is more open to what we have to offer.”
His popularity at poetry readings, which took him to North America, Russia, Japan, Israel and throughout Europe, was enhanced by a bardic appearance and an engaging, humane manner through which he could relate his poetry to circumstances that shaped the universal themes he wrote about. Many of these stemmed from the history of his own people, in which the cruelty of eviction was within living memory.
In his 1996 collection, Oideachadh Ceart agus Dàin Eile/A Proper Schooling and Other Poems (in Gaelic with parallel English translation), he wrote: “when i was young / it wasn’t history but memory // when the factor, on horseback, came / on the woman’s descent from / the moorland grazings laden with bracken / he cut the ropes from their shoulders / spreading their loads to the ground, / alleging they took without permit / a weed he’d eliminate / were it not that women cut it and carried it home / for bedding to ease their cows’ hard rest; and there was rent in that weed”.
For that collection, he won the 1997 Stakis prize for Scottish Writer of the Year which he dedicated to “every bard, known and anonymous, who ever made the Gaelic language sing”. He was also a recipient, in 2015, of the Saltire Society’s premier award, for his contribution to the arts and humanities.
Alan Riach, professor of Scottish literature at Glasgow University, described one of MacNeacail’s bardic works, Thug Thu Dhomh Samhradh (You Gave Me Summer), as “one of the world’s great love poems, to a partner, a beloved person, but also to a language, and perhaps to language itself, to all forms of language in the world”.
Nicolson was born in the Skye village of Uig. When he was eight his father Alasdair, a merchant seaman, died from cancer, and his mother, Catriona (nee Stewart), raised him and his sister Peigi in a crofting community. His early educational journey was typical of the era, going to school without a word of English and speaking not a word of Gaelic within its walls.
He progressed to Portree high school, where the headmaster “liked to work himself into a foul mood before administering beltings … Later he shot himself.” He left to enrol at nautical college but soon lost his yearning for the sea, instead finding employment as a British Rail clerk in Fife for seven years.
A railway colleague lent him Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett, which he later said sparked the ambition to pursue a literary career. By 1968, he had gained entry to Glasgow University, through a scheme for mature students without formal qualifications, and started writing in earnest.
For Glasgow, it was a golden age for poetry abetted by the presence of the critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum who had become a reader in English literature there in 1965. Wherever he went, Hobsbaum nurtured the talents of writers through private “groups” which, in Glasgow, included such future luminaries as Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard. It was an intellectually rigorous environment in which Nicolson (as he still was) found a natural home.
Hobsbaum was impressed by one of his poems, The Divide, about two old brothers in Skye. “That’s a poem,” he said. “Write about what you know. Go back to your roots.” While always open to wider influences, the emerging poet never departed far from that advice.
After graduating, Nicolson worked in London as a housing officer while engaging with the Poetry Society. In 1976 his work was first published by Gollancz in the anthology A Poetry Quintet. The following year, he was appointed writer in residence at the Gaelic college on Skye, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. This prompted his name change by deed poll and an invigorated commitment to writing in Gaelic and promoting its use.
Gerda Stevenson, the writer and actress whom he married in 1980, recalled his view of Gaelic speakers: “He went from saying ‘there are only 65,000 of us left’, to ‘there are still 65,000 of us left’.” Despite all that had been thrown at it by history and prejudice, there was enough remaining of Gaelic language, culture and communities to be worth fighting for.
MacNeacail did his own translations in the belief he was better qualified than anyone else to retain the nuances of language and said he “valued the opportunity to reach the non-Gaelic audience, among whom most of my life is spent, in translations that aspire to be as close in creative quality as the originals”.
In 1993, he recalled, “a fellowship at Glasgow University, 25 years after I’d first matriculated there, turned me into a bilingual poet again” (having resumed writing in English as well as Gaelic), and he still found energy to tour poetry festivals, and contribute in other areas of Gaelic culture, including scriptwriting for television and providing lyrics for leading Scottish composers – including the libretto for William Sweeney’s chamber opera An Turus (The Journey), performed by Paragon Ensemble for the Celtic Connections festival in 1998. He continued to agitate whenever the opportunity arose for the language he loved.
He is survived by Gerda, their son, Rob, and daughter, Galina.
• Aonghas MacNeacail (Angus Nicolson), poet, writer and Gaelic language activist, born 7 June 1942; 19 December 2022
