---

By Josephine Murray

I first came across the names Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman in 2022 while writing my dissertation on experimental translation into Scots at the University of East Anglia.

My research focused on the idea of twentieth and twenty-first century Scots writers and translators ‘stretching Scots’, a term used by Chinese to Scots translator Brian Holton in a volume edited by Findlay; Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots, to suggest that translators into Scots could “stretch the tongue beyond what we think it can do, make the tongue new by including things we’d never before have dreamt of saying in Scots, to build the language we lack out of the otherness of a different tongue”.¹

Describing, in Volume One of the Michel Tremblay plays, how their first co-translation came about, Martin Bowman quotes Findlay, writing in 1980, who uses the same term. He argues that theatre translators into Scots “should further explore, through attempting translations of contemporary foreign material, the dramatic potentialities inherent in the language which has characterised the major success in Scottish drama in the last decade [. . .] Such a challenge should not only allow us to ‘stretch’ the language but should suggest new ways in which we could use Scots for more experimental dramatic purposes”.²

As shown in these volumes, Bowman (who recently received an Honorary Fellowship from the Association for Scottish Literature) and the late Findlay took up this challenge themselves in spectacularly successful fashion with their translations of eight of Tremblay’s plays, staged between 1989 and 2003. They extended the landscape of Scottish drama in translation, from its focus on 17^th and 18^th century European plays to contemporary settings – namely experimental drama in working-class Montreal, written in that city’s vernacular French; Québecois.

Ian Brown explains, in his foreword to Volume Two, how the Tremblay translations have made a “remarkable” contribution³ to the shift in Scottish theatre – away from male-centric plays employing an “older modes of Scots”,⁴ to plays which foregrounded women’s experiences, written in what Findlay described as “contemporary Scots idiom”.⁵

The Guid Sisters, The Real Wurld?, Hosanna and Forever Yours, Marie-Lou in Volume One, and The House Among the Stars, Albertine, Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer and If Only… in Volume Two were translated from Tremblay’s plays written in Québecois, in itself a departure from a prevailing Canadian theatrical norm of standard French. The decade gap between the writing and staging of Bowman and Findlay’s first translation, The Guid Sisters, is indicative of the initial resistance by senior Scottish theatre figures to the vernacular language, perceived vulgarity and brutality, and the dominance of female characters.

There are two ways of approaching these two volumes (the first publication, by the Association for Scottish Literature, of all eight translations – three have been published previously). One can either read all the additional material brought together by Bowman, prior to the play scripts, or jump right in and read the plays themselves – and then go back to the other sections, which are unmissable.

Detailed introductions by Bowman to the translation project as a whole and to each play, plus forewords by Michael Boyd and Ian Brown, provide the reader with an understanding of the Scottish political, social and theatrical context into which these trailblazing translations appeared.

We gain insights into Bowman and Findlay’s collaborative translation process, and there are fascinating examples of how some of the scripts were adapted during the production process to better fit different actors and directors. Each play script is preceded by lists of the venue and date of the original Tremblay play staged in Montreal, and the venues and dates of each production of the Bowman/Findlay translations, plus the cast lists – which include now famous names such as Peter Capaldi, Ashley Jensen and Peter Mullan.

The plays’ subject matter ranges from aging drag queen artists (Hosanna), to a woman who (almost) wins enough material goods to transform her lean existence (The Guid Sisters) and a portrayal of a woman’s life in each of the decades she lives, from 30 to 70 (Albertine, in Five Times). But these are poor descriptions of plays which extend from the raw, visceral, comic and downright vulgar, to the lyrical and musical, via the structure of the Catholic mass and multiple timelines enacted simultaneously on stage.

Some form part of a Tremblay ‘family saga’ of linked plays – so many characters appear in more than one work. Although written by Tremblay between the 1960s and 1990s, and translated into and performed in Scots between 1989 and 2003, the plays lose none of their power when read in 2024 – and are in some ways more relevant than ever.

Their themes are weighty – greed, sex, betrayal, power, truth, poverty, violence and despair, yet the liberal humour, spanking pace and compelling dialogue prevent any descent into misery. Reading all eight plays in quick succession for the purposes of this review, the phrase that came into my mind was the old News of the World strapline – All human life is here.

It’s the dazzling use of Scots that makes these texts so compelling. Bowman and Findlay’s dialogue complements the plots and characters so well that it’s difficult to imagine these people speaking anything else. Yet, the retention of characters’ names (Germaine Lauzon in The Guid Sisters, Claude and Mariette in The Real Wurld?), French titles (Monsieur, Madame and Mademoiselle) and the innumerable geographical and cultural references to Montreal and to the Catholic religion of Quebec remind us that what we’re reading, or watching, is not a representation of working-class life in Scotland, but in Montreal.

This retention was a deliberate choice by Bowman and Findlay to mark their versions of Tremblay’s plays out as translations, not adaptations to a Scottish setting and context – which was the prevailing norm in Scottish theatre translation of the 1980s.

In Volume One, Bowman says that their goal was to demonstrate that the Scots language was capable both of supporting a translation of a contemporary playwright, and of accommodating a foreign setting. They wanted the audience to be fully aware that the scenes unfolding on stage were taking place in Montreal – and to recognise how similar it was to working-class life in urban Scotland. And it worked. As the late theatre director Michael Boyd states in his foreword to Volume One – “Audiences were recognising themselves in this Franco-Scottish mirror.”⁶

The similarities between the Scots/Scotland and Québecois/Quebec context are outlined within these volumes – for instance, Ian Brown quotes Joyce McMillan’s comments about the “continuing struggle to raise Scots language and ordinary Scottish speech from its perceived status as a despised ‘incorrect’ form of English, but also in the way that the struggle to reclaim a sense of dignity, maturity and completeness in the national culture has, for many Scots, been part of a wider interest in the politics of freedom and identity [. . .]”⁷ As I have learned from my dissertation research into Acadian French, this is a struggle known to so-called minority languages across French-speaking Canada, and around the world.

The story of how Michel Tremblay of Montreal became “The best playwright Scotland never had” (as theatre critic Mark Fisher put it in his oft-quoted remark in The Guardian⁸) goes like this – in 1978 Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, who were in touch through their separate PhD research into the nineteenth century novelist John Galt, met for the first time in Edinburgh.

Findlay, from Fife, asked Bowman from Quebec, who grew up hearing Scots spoken by his Angus-born parents and their Scottish expatriate friends, if there was a Quebec playwright that they could translate into Scots. Bowman suggested Michel Tremblay and his ground-breaking French vernacular play Les Belles-Soeurs. Although it would be 1989 before The Guid Sisters was professionally staged, this meeting started a translation partnership that lasted until Findlay’s death in 2005.

Their collaborative methodology began with Bowman making a literal translation of a Tremblay play into English, which was then put into Scots by Findlay – who had become (as Ian Brown says in his foreword to Volume Two) “expert in varieties of Scots dialect both across regions and through the twentieth century”.⁹

Bowman’s drafts included explanations of Montreal cultural references and of the register and tone of each character’s language in the original Québecois. There are examples of how this process worked in Bowman’s introduction to Forever Yours, Marie-Lou in Volume One. In his literal translation of Marie-Louise’s diatribe about her husband’s drinking to the point of vomiting over himself, which she then cleans up, Bowman comments; “All this is vernacular, strong, serious and meant to shock the audience by its utter lack of sentiment. The line should produce some nervous laughter in the audience but also shock.”¹⁰

Such passages are of great interest to literary translators, particularly those working in Scots and/or French, as are Bowman’s explanations of how the duo represented in Scots the multiple linguistic registers present in the original Québecois versions of The Real Wurld?, The  House Among the Stars and Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer.

For example, The Real Wurld? contains three separate registers; the slightly elevated language of aspiring writer Claude, the vernacular language of his parents and sister, and the exaggerated vernacular of Claude’s ‘bad play’, a drama set within the larger drama. But these two volumes will appeal to anyone who enjoys twentieth century drama, especially in Scots, whether for research or pleasure.

THE BIG BABEL: Ross Perlin on Listening to the World Speak Through New York City

Reading a play is of course a very different experience to watching a performance on stage, but the advantage of these printed versions is that we get the full texts as written by Bowman and Findlay (some of the plays were subject to directorial cuts during production). The reader also gets to see the alternative ending to The House Among the Stars, and three and a half pages of alternate lines from Hosanna (Findlay rewrote references to Hosanna’s boyfriend Cuirette being overweight, replacing fatness with baldness to match the physical appearance of the actor Peter Mullan).

As readers rather than audience members, we don’t get to hear the lines spoken, but the orthography, punctuation, stage directions, and a bit of imagination enable an approximate re-creation of what theatre-goers in Scotland, Montreal, London and the U.S experienced. According to my non-Scottish friends, these elements, plus a little working out of unknown words using the context in which they appear, make the text accessible to readers/audience members who have no knowledge of Scots. This was borne out with the positive critical and audience reception of the plays in the United States, Toronto and London.

The House Among the Stars, which premiered in in Edinburgh in 1992, encapsulates many of their translation joys and challenges, and much of what critics and audiences feel about the Bowman and Findlay translations of Tremblay. This play (which inspired Fisher’s ‘the best playwright Scotland never had’ comment) is set in 1910, 1950 and 1990 – which, as Bowman explains in his introduction, not only necessitated translation into multiple registers but “provided the opportunity to weave a fabric of Scots language like nothing else in the other Tremblay plays we translated.”¹¹

It possesses a lyrical beauty and imaginative power, illustrated when in 1910 Josaphat-le-Violon tells his grandson stories about the house; “Weel, the gairdian angels . . . they jist went outside . . . tellt us tae shut oor een . . . then we hears it . . . a muckle whoosh ae wings . . . ‘s if the forty’d become forty thoosan . . . forty thoosan beatin wings liftin intae the sky abune Montreal . . . ”¹²

The way in which the characters communicate with one another across the timelines due to the simultaneous interweaving of the three stories from three different eras adds to this feeling of magic. Bowman and Findlay felt a particular affinity with The House Among the Stars due to their own experience of linguistic and sociological displacement.¹³ As Bowman explains, in this play Tremblay not only tells his own family story, but the story of Quebec – in many ways, so similar to Scotland’s own.

---

About our contributor

---

---

1. Holton, Brian. 2004. “Wale a Leid and Wale a Warld: Shihu Zhuan into Scots.” In Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots, edited by Bill Findlay, p. 15-37. Clevedon [England]; Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters Ltd. ↩︎
2. Michel Tremblay: Plays in Scots, Volumes One and Two, Translated by Martin Bowman and Bill Findlay, edited by Martin Bowman: Volume One, p. 5 ↩︎
3. Ibid: Volume Two, p. xiv ↩︎
4. Ibid Volume Two, p. xii ↩︎
5. Ibid: Volume Two, p. xii ↩︎
6. Ibid: Volume Two, p. xii ↩︎
7. Ibid: Volume Two, p. xiv ↩︎
8. Fisher, Mark. The House Among the Stars: The Guardian, 29 October 1992. ↩︎
9. Ibid: Volume Two, p. xv ↩︎
10. Ibid: Volume One, p. 241 ↩︎
11. Ibid: Volume Two, p. 10 ↩︎
12. Ibid: Volume Two, p. 41 ↩︎
13. Ibid: Volume Two, p. 16 ↩︎