Landscape in Translation: Anne Grant and the Highlands

Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which the poet and essayist Anne Grant understood her role as a translator from Gaelic. While Grant did not learn Gaelic until she was an adult—and the extent of her command of the language has been questioned by readers and scholars both in her own time and since—Grant herself argued strongly that a knowledge of Gaelic was requisite to a full appreciation of Highland landscape. In part, as this paper argues, she saw her own poetic work as an attempt to 'translate' that landscape for English readers.