2012-04-24

If it's not Scottish Esperanto poetry . . .

. . . . it's crrrrrrrrap! -- Borrowing a joke from Saturday Night Live.

Actually, the late William Auld (a Scot who was Esperanto's leading living poet until recently,) told me, in 1975, long before Mike Myers' Scottish comedy routines, a phrase he coined:

"Oni vivas aŭ skote, aŭ kote." It rhymes in the original. Translation: "One lives either like a Scot or like mud."  Auld was a great guy, though, and not a chauvinist.

The individual pages of The Capital Scot have disappeared from the live Internet. You can find them via the Wayback Machine of archive.org, but I have rescued the two articles concerning Scottish Esperanto writers:

The Scottish School (Skota Skolo) of Esperanto Writers by Geoffrey Sutton

The Scottish School (Skota Skolo) of Esperanto Writers - John Sharp Dinwoodie by Geoffrey Sutton

Individual articles for the other three poets were never published along with these two articles. Dinwoodie was a pastor and a religious poet and thus the least interesting to me, but you can learn about him in the second article, and get an overview of the Scottish School in the first.

The Scottish School debuted in 1952 with the volume Kvaropo (Quartet).  The four poets were William Auld (1924-2006), John Dinwoodie (1904-1980), John Francis (1924-2012) and Reto Rossetti (1909-1994). Francis died just last month.

From my web pages above you can link to other sources on my web site and elsewhere (including this blog) on the Scottish School and Auld and Francis in particular. See also Reto Rossetti's translation on this blog: La Iamo Longe For (Auld Lang Syne in Esperanto).




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