When people think of Scotland, most probably they are apt to think of engineers, inventors, philosophers and thinkers, but rarely of translators and the Scots as a nation of translators. Yet I would argue the Scots have one of the most formidable translation traditions of any country on earth.

If we think, for example, on the great modernist literature of the Twentieth Century, and that trio of great writers who are Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, it surely can be no insignificant detail that the latter was an Irishman in exile, and the two former were first translated by Scots who wandered Europe: Proust, carried over by the indefatigable and fearless Scott Moncrieff; and Kafka rendered by the team of Orkney poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa Muir.

I read Edwin Muir’s autobiography recently (An Autobiography) in the vain hope of finding out something about how he came to translate Kafka, who had a great comic talent, and what such an experience might have been like. But Muir says little or nothing about the matter, other than to remark that Kafka “was a very tall man”. He seems not have given much importance to his translation which introduced Kafka to the English speaking world, at least not in his autobiography.

How can it be that the relatively small nation of Ireland gave the flower of Twentieth Century English literature in poetry (Yeats), in prose (Joyce) and in theatre (Beckett) and that it was Scots translators – forthgangin Scots, wanderers and adventurers – who unearthed Proust and Kafka for the English speaking world? Could it have something to do with being on the periphery of the English speaking world? About not being in the centre, about being culturally centrifuged?

The Scottish tradition in translation goes back much further back, not least to the singular and most remarkable figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611-1660), who was the first to translate the first three books (there would be five in all) of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel into English.

Sir Thomas, a royalist loyal to the Stuart crown during the War of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1660), fought at the ill-fated battle of Worcester where the royalist side was defeated, and was then detained in the Tower of London, a stay brilliantly and hilariously fictionalized by Alasdair Gray in Tales Unlikely, Mostly.

Before that, Sir Thomas had wandered the continent, travelling through France, Spain and Italy where, according to one biographer, “he spoke the languages to such perfection that he might easily have passed himself off as a native of any one of these countries… but his patriotic feelings were too strong to allow him such a course” and where he had drawn the sword three times to defend the honour of his native land.

As Hugh MacDiarmid points out in his essay on Sir Thomas in his brilliant Scottish Eccentrics, the Scots sense of honour and high spirits back at the time were proverbial, in both  Latin – “He is a Scot, he has pepper in his nose” (Scotus est, pipier in naso) – and in French, (Fier comme un Ecossais).

Inveterate bibliophile, Sir Thomas had built up a library in his years abroad which he subsequently took back with him to Cromarty where, once on the bookshelf, he would describe as “like a complete nosegay of flowers which in my travels of I had gathered out of the gardens of above sixteen several kingdoms” – a library which he subsequently lost, heartbroken, to his rapacious creditors.

His translation of Rabelais’s first three books, spinning 200,000 words from Rabelais 130,000, was described by some, despite some inaccuracies, as “the best rendering in any language of the work of the Reverent Rabelais”.

Sir Thomas also wrote The Jewel – “a vindication of the honour of Scotland” – and Logopandecteision, a prospectus on his plan for devising a universal language.

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty died in exile back on the continent – from a fit of laughter. Legend has it that when he heard the news of the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne, under Charles II in 1660 after so many years of civil war, he laughed so hard he dropped dead on the spot.

Could there be a more fitting end to that great Scottish adventurer, wanderer, writer and translator of the singular comic genius of Rabelais? And wouldn’t have Kafka himself approved?

* All quotes are taken from Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Eccentrics (Carcanet Press, 1993. Edited by Alan Riach.)