In my introductory remarks to Robert Falconer, my first MacDonald translation, I claimed that the hero’s search for a father was the novel’s central theme. The reason I have chosen Castle Warlock as its successor is that there is, if not a similitude, at least a kind of parallel between the two stories. Fatherhood remains at the very heart of the tale; but Robert’s youth was defined by its absence, and Cosmo’s by its life-giving presence. MacDonald said of his own father that he was his “refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp pain itself” and he advised those who took no pleasure in the name father to “interpret the word by all that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, that was a time when a father might have been a father indeed.” In at least one sense, Warlock can be seen as a reimagining of Falconer, as if MacDonald had set himself to write a tale wherein the great lack in Robert’s life was pre-eminently supplied for another of his fictional heroes. At any rate, the contrast is there: through all his adventures, challenges and wanderings, Cosmo’s abiding strength and solace is indeed that “great rock,” as firm as the castle they both call home, the love of his father.
Great good also came of Robert’s hardships in the end, but, to quote C S Lewis, it was “not the good that [God] had prepared” and “what was lost [we] have not seen.” Well, here, in Castle Warlock, we spend a whole novel seeing it: the good that God intends for a child who grows up in the sunshine of a strong and loving paternal presence. The old laird’s devotion is no cold philanthropy or detached benignity (one thinks of the efforts of Grannie falconer to help Robert, or of the minister in Alec Forbes to assuage the sufferings of Annie.) Here is loving fatherhood indeed: potent, venerable, and real-and only growing as the story unfolds. It is noteworthy too, that while the desolate Robert was raised in relative material comfort (as a rule, all of MacDonald’s heroes are what we would call poor) and was well clothed and fed by the unstinting hand of his grandmother, Cosmo and his father sometimes look literal starvation in the face together. But the “together’ is all. Reading the two stories, I wonder if there is anyone who would consider the ample meals and cosy parlour of Grannie Falconer worth exchanging for the shared privations of the grim old castle.
I have given my attention first to what I think most important, but before turning to translation matters, it is only fitting to briefly touch on the story itself and the other characters belonging to it. Many people know MacDonald chiefly (if they know him at all) as a writer of fantasies; and within the story of Castle Warlock are elements of the supernatural worthily handled by the master. The ghostly tale of the old captain, with his riddling-rhyme “catch your horse and pull his tail…” is admirable in itself, and is deftly woven into the other themes of romance and what the author aptly calls “castle-building” (Cosmo’s dreams of restoring the fallen fortunes of his house.) This eerie tale, however, while the most significant, is not the only fantastic or mythic allusion; there are several “stories within the story” which leave their mark on us, not unlike The Gray Wolf in Robert Falconer, or the many fairy tales in Adela Cathcart. As for characters, even the minor ones are memorable, such as the exasperatingly loquacious watchmaker James Merson, or the displaced Scottish gardener at Cairncarque, whose saturnine disposition is something of a throwback to Scott’s Andrew Fairservice. When it comes to Grizzie and Aggie, however, MacDonald is simply lyrical (in the former case, literally so.) One in their tireless loving devotion to the lairds, they are otherwise almost opposites-the irascible old servant who speaks in involuntary rhyming couplets, and the peasant-protectress who proudly stands in the stead of both mother and sister to Cosmo. These two are a delight in themselves, and they serve as ample testament to the inexhaustible invention of the author.
Turning our attention now to the translation, the reader will notice that one of the defining features of Warlock is the frequent appearance of verse, from the old captain’s scrap of equestrian poetry to the aforementioned rhyming couplets affected by Grizzie. This of course presented a potential challenge from a language perspective: a rhyme in Scots having no guarantee of surviving after translation into English. By a happy chance, the captain’s riddle “Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail” did, in fact, transpose with rhyme intact, and the short poem beginning “When the coo loops over the mune” I considered to be sufficiently free of jar, even without its rhyme, that I was happy to leave it in blank verse. With Grizzie’s “rimes” I have had to be creative, but have endeavoured on all occasions to retain the sense of what’s being said even when having to diverge from the original wording. The following verse may serve as an example:
Whaur’s neither sun nor mune Where’s neither sun nor moon
Laich things come abune Low things turn up soon
“Soon” is superfluous in that it doesn’t appear in the Scots, but “Low things come above” (a word-for-word translation) would of course have dispensed with the rhyme. Here again though, a happy chance came to my aid: having chosen the phrase “turn up”, I realised that it has connotations of ploughed fields, and the turning up of the soil, thus I have been able to convey not only the “coming to light” of the “low things”, but equally their elevation.
A brief mention might also be made here about character names. I cannot now remember if I had any set approach in mind during Robert Falconer, but here, where a name has been written in Scots in preference to its English equivalent (such as James rather than James) I have seen no occasion to meddle. The nickname (Lord) Lick-my-loof I have opted to translate only the first time it appears, and have again let the Scots stand thereafter, since Lick-my-palm simply lacks the pith which the original conveys. I have, however, placed that single translation in brackets in the main body of the text, rather than in a footnote, in hopes that it will the more easily lodge itself in the reader’s memory.
On a more general note, certain questions arising from the translation project as a whole, some of which have been put to me in the interval between Falconer and Warlock, also deserve attention. They are of purely technical interest, and the answers to them can be found in the two books themselves, as I shall explain. Firstly, for those new to Scots, it must be understood that it is a quite separate language from Gaelic. The latter is spoken predominantly in the highlands and islands of Scotland, and even in MacDonald’s native Huntly it would be a rare thing to find a fluent speaker. Grannie Falconer, who speaks exclusively in Scots, illustrates the point when she admits that she “never could understand Erse (Gaelic.)” The second general point to be made is that Scots is a language like Gaelic or English, not a dialect of the latter tongue. There are numerous dialects within Scots-the Aberdeenshire Doric used by MacDonald being one-just as English has its own multiplicity of regional tongues-but the equivalency therefore is between Scots and English, not between Scots and Cockney, for example. My intentional omission of a second column when Cosmo is in Yorkshire is an acknowledgement of this fact: his conversations with the locals there no more merit translation than do the comparable passages in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or The Secret Garden.