George Campbell Hay - in brief
George Campbell Hay (Deorsa Caimbeal Hay / Deòrsa Mac Iain Dheòrsa) died in 1984. His surprisingly brief obituary in the Glasgow Herald referred to him as the distinguished Gaelic poet. In 1967, the Gaelic poet Derick S. Thomson (Ruaraidh MacThómais) included the poem Do Dheòrsa Caimbeal Hay ("For George Campbell Hay") in his collection Eadar Samhradh Is Foghar, referring to Hay as my Ulysses, and mentioning silence having come to Hay. Yet Hay was still alive.
Quelques informations en français sur George Campbell Hay (article académique)
Hay was born in Renfrewshire to parents from Argyll. Hay's father MacDougall Hay, known for his novel Gillespie, died when George Campbell Hay was only four. The family returned to Tarbert. Growing up there among his extended family, Hay developed a love of the place, the culture and the language. Then he was sent to school in Edinburgh (Fettes College). Both he and his best friend Robert Rankin won university scholarships, Hay to Oxford and Rankin (later to be Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow) to Cambridge. At Oxford, Hay studied many things, some of which were part of his course. He graduated and returned to Scotland. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Hay received call-up papers; he absconded to the wilds of Argyll. Hay was firm and large in his political beliefs, which included disdain for the British Empire entwined with a Scottish nationalist sentiment against conscription of Scots into the British army, arguing that the Westminster government, having often breached the Act(/Treaty) of Union, had lost its authority in Scotland. Found, prosecuted and imprisoned, Hay then submitted to enlisting, and was sent to North Africa with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. His experiences there led to perhaps his most famous poem, Bisearta (Bizerta), named after the town in Tunisia, which had been bombed and shelled; Bisearta stands as a monument to all civilian casualties of war. In 1946, the war over, Hay, now a sergeant, was sent to Greece. Modern Greek was one of Hay's many languages, and his left-wing views and his associating with local people were noted by right-wingers, who tried and narrowly failed to murder him. This traumatic event may have triggered the mental illness that would plague him continually ever after. For long spells, he would be in hospital. For long spells, he would write no poems. That would be the silence. For a while he moved from place to place, sleeping rough. But in most of the period from 1975 until his death he did produce a stream of much-admired writing.
Collected Poems and Songs of George Campbell Hay, Edited by Michel Byrne, Edinburgh University Press 2000, has more information about George Campbell Hay, including:
"A Stey Brae an' Bonnie": A Short Biography (57 pages);
The Poetic Craft: Aspects of Form and Language (19 pages);
"Out of the Midst of Life": Recurrent Themes in Hay's Poetry (20 pages).