The New Testament In Scots (Canongate Classics)

The endeavour to produce the entire New Testament in Scots, which William L. Lorimer fulfilled so magnificently in 1966, was not a new one. Indeed, the task had been fully accomplished twice before, though not with such skill and scholarship, by Murdoch Nisbet, around 1520, and by William Wye Smith, whose work was published in 1901 and achieved its final revised edition in 1924. Nisbet, a shadowy figure, who was probably associated with 'the Lollards of Kyle' mentioned by John Knox in his Historie of the Reformatioun, merely transcribed John Purvey's version of John Wycliffe's English text into a Scots orthography, which was eventually published by the Scottish Text Society.
Smith's New Testament in Braid Scots is a more impressive text, but cannot compare with that of Lorimer, a Professor of Greek at St. Andrews University, insofar as it was translated from the Revised Version of 1881 and also shows the influence of the Authorised King James Version. So, as David Ogston has observed, 'Now, at last, in the dying decades of the Twentieth Century, we Scots can hear in our own tongue the wonderful works of God; the northern peasant from Galilee has travelled further still into our understanding and our affection'. Indeed, we meet in Lorimer, for the first time, The New Testament story translated into a resilient, poetic and sinewy modern Scots prose, taken from the original Greek. Yet it is now almost 20 years since Lorimer's New Testament in Scots was published by Southside in a splendid hardback edition, and, since then, it has reached an even wider audience through the good offices of Penguin Books (1985) and Canongate (2001).
When Lorimer's work was published, it was the immediate subject of laudatory, if not ecstatic, reviews. Paul H. Scott was wisely to the fore in recognising its significance and the magnitude of the author's ambition: 'His purpose then was even more ambitious than MacDiarmid's, who widened the dimensions of poetry in Scots'. This sounds almost casual, but it recognises a very major achievement. Writing in The Glasgow Herald, John Fowler approached the subject from another angle, setting Lorimer's work aside other translations: 'Compared to the weak kneed neither one thing nor the other of the New English Bible and like translations ... the Lorimer version is forthright, pungent and expressive. It is intoxicatingly quotable'. Peter Levi's review in The Spectator testifies to the fact that 'even robustly philistine and foreign readers will find it marvellously alive'.
Most readers of course will be immediately attracted to Lorimer's rendering of the gospels, and of particular merit here are his renderings of the Parable of the 'Prodigal Son' (Lk. 15:11-35), and the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well (Jn. 4:1-42). In Luke's text for example, the generous father addresses the furious elder brother as an importunate but much loved child: 'Laudie, laudie ... ye ar ey by me, an aathing I hae is yours. But we buid be mirkie and haud it hairtie: your brither wes deid and is in life aince mair ...'. The poetry and spiritual wisdom of the Johannine passages are splendidly realised in lines like these: 'Hae ye no a say, 'Ither fowr month or hairst? Na, na, I tell ye: cast your een outowre the fíelds an see hou yallow they ar an reddie for shearin!' The double negative captures a Scots idiom which still survives, with perfect precision.
That Scots is a fit vehicle for narrative prose is ably shown, moreover, in Lorimer's 'Acks'; for example in the dialogues when St. Paul argues eloquently before King Agrippa. The King, reluctantly impressed and a littl mischievous, says: 'Ye will be makkin me a Christian wi the skíllie tung o ye'. Paul answers powerfully and even proverbially: 'Be it suin, or be it syne ...' (Ac. 26:28-29). Until Lorimer, however, Scots had not been much used as a successful medium of expository writing of an abstract nature, and it is in this context that his versions of the epistles, 'Hebrews' and 'Revelation' come into their own; one need only look at the famous Paulinian reflections on charity from 'I Corinthians' 13:1: 'Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin bress nor a rínging cymbal', or his meditations on childhood and maturity: 'In my bairn days, I hed the speech o a bairn, the mind o a bairn, the thochts o a bairn, but nou I am grown manmuckle, I am throu wi aathing bairnlie' (1 Cor 13:11).
As most readers will know, the 'New Testament' was written over a long period of time by different authors in a variety of styles - a comparison between the Greek of Mark and Luke makes this perfectly clear. It is to Lorimer's credit that he therefore sought a variety of Scots styles to represent the disparate nature of his original. For example, his 'Hebrews' is the only book in the text to use the phrase 'Sith, than' (e.g. Heb. 4:14). 'Revelation' is, perhaps, the most poetic book in his rendering, much more so than the gospels. Chapter 19:7, for example, reads: ' ... his Bride is there, aa buskit an boun, buskit an boun, bi the favour o heiven'. The collocation of 'buskit' and 'boun' has a long pedigree in Scots and is reminiscent of the old ballads (cf. 'busk and boun my merry men all'). Lorimer's repetition of the phrase elevates his prose into lyric poetry.
At all times, however, Lorimer's translation exemplifies the dictum of his introductory epigramm: 'Your speech makes you come out into the open'. We can rejoice that William L. Lorimer chose to reveal himself in the way that he did, by bequeathing to his nation and his people, a truly magisterial 'New Testament in Scots'.

Dr. Kenneth D. Farrow