Scottish Authors > Robert Garioch Poet 1909-1981

Robert Garioch Sutherland (who wrote under the name of Robert Garioch) was born in Edinburgh on 9th May 1909 and was educated at the Royal High School and Edinburgh University. During the Second World War he served in the army in North Africa and was a prisoner-of-war in Italy and Germany from 1942 to 1945. He taught in schools in Edinburgh, London and Kent until he retired in 1964 and returned to Edinburgh. He was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University, a "lexicographer's orraman" at the Dictionary of the older Scottish tongue and much in demand as a reader of his own poetry. He died in 1981. Sydney Goodsir Smith said of Garioch that he sat easily in the company of his predecessors, Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. This is true particularly of Fergusson with whom Garioch felt a special affinity. They were both devoted to Edinburgh and were sharp-eyed observers of its life. Both wrote in Scots as a conscious effort to preserve the language and resist creeping Anglicisation and the reduction of Scotland to a province as a result of the Union of 1707. Garioch says in a poem addressed to Fergusson:

But truth it is, our couthie city

has cruddit in twa parts a bittie

and speaks twa tongues, ane coorse and grittie,

heard in the Cougait

the tither copied, mair's the pitie,

frae Wast of Newgate

Most of Garioch's work is in this "coorse and grittie" Scots which, as he said, he "used in the streets as a boy, but not in the R.H.S.". He wrote in a letter to J.K. Annand:

You and I belong to about the last age-group to have spoken Scots as laddies in the ordinary way of life... Perhaps not. But the great thing is that they keep on trying.

It is a pungent language for the deflation of pomposity and pretension, but he also used the aureate style of the 15th century makars. He ranged from the comic to the philosophical, as in his long poem, The Muir.

Garioch wrote many verse translations, from the French of Apollinaire, the Greek of Pindar and Hesiod, the Latin of Arthur Johnstone and George Buchanan, including the latter's dramas, Jephthah and The Baptist. Above all he translated 120 sonnets of Guiseppe Belli, a Roman poet of the nineteenth century who was another kindred spirit.

His one book in prose, Two Men and a blanket (1975) is a vivid and typically down to earth account of his experiences as a prisoner-of-war. Garioch's first publication, jointly with Sorley Maclean, was 17 poems for 6d. (1940). Several volumes of poetry followed, most of which were included in Complete poetical works (1983). Jephthah and The Baptist were published in 1959. Some of his letters and another play, The Masque o' Edinburgh (1954) appear in A Garioch miscellany, edited by Robin Fulton (1986).

Paul H Scott

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