The Revolutionary Poet

József Szili on Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernist Poetics

Abstract

Hugh MacDiarmid, a leading figure in Scottish modernism, published his major work A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in 1926. In his attempts to revive Scottish literature, MacDiarmid combined ideas of political nationalism with communism in his own way. The latter opened doors for him during his visit to Hungary in 1959, when he met József Szili in person. Szili later published a two-part study on MacDiarmid in Filológiai Közlöny (Philological Notes), Hungary’s foremost journal of literary criticism, and translated several of his poems. I will show how Szili’s study outlines a Marxist interpretive framework for understanding MacDiarmid’s modernist poetics, which sought to reclaim political self-determination and linguistic self-consciousness in Scottish poetry. I will present Szili’s translations of MacDiarmid’s poems and answer the question of how Szili’s interpretation influenced MacDiarmid’s reception in Hungary and how it fits into the critical field of contemporary Scottish MacDiarmid scholarship.