Today, 25 January, Scots around the world mark the birthday of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns. And not just Scots. Robert Burns is a poet with universal appeal. Like Romania’s national poet Mihai Eminescu, Burns was a Romantic whose poems describe experiences that we all share, and which have been translated into many different languages.
I celebrated Burns night a few days early this year, at a dinner on Saturday evening held by the charity Light Into Europe which has been working for the last six years to help blind and deaf children in Romania. We observed all the traditions of this event, serving haggis and whisky, and ending with some Scottish Country dancing. I gave the toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns, and used a beautiful translation by Mihnea Gheorghiu of one of my favourite Burns’ poems, “A Man’s a Man for a’that”. Burns criticised the nobility for putting themselves above everyone else. In his view it was a man’s qualities that counted more than his rank – his honesty, and his sense of his own worth. And these same qualities unite all men, whatever their rank or nationality. So here – in Romanian and then English, is Burns concluding stanza:
Să ne rugăm, deci poate-o fi
Să vină vremea, pe pământ
Când omul şi al său cuvânt
Rodi-vor într-o zi.
For a’that and a’ that
It’s coming yet, for a’ that
That man to man the world o’er
Shall brothers be, for a’ that.
