This article looks at issues affecting Robert Garioch's translation into Scots of a sonnet from Giuseppe Gioachino Belli's Romaneschi collection. It begins with the discussion of a problem involved in writing in dialects with no settled written standard. This 'standardizing' poetry is then looked at in terms of translation and theories of the "impossibility" of translation. It is argued that the problems facing the translator/poet are much the same as those the dialect writer encounters in writing the original. A brief comparison is made at the level of lexical equivalence between the two texts in order to illustrate some of these issues. It is concluded that claiming there is divergence in meaning between the two texts is dependent on the assumption that there is a determinancy of meaning in both of the languages concerned, an assumption that is ultimately subjective. (Contains 12 references.) (Author/KFT)
