I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy, Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her; Love but her, and love for ever.

One of the main aims of Alloway Burns Club is "To encourage the study of the Life and Works of Robert Burns and of Scottish Literature". With this in mind we wanted to make Burns more accessible to people who speak other languages. Some of the official translations below are excellent interpretations of Burns originals and others are maybe not so accurate. A famous quote from Dante Alighieri says;

“No work bound together by the muse can be
transferred from its own language to another
without losing its sweetness and euphony.”
... Dante

If we bear this in mind, we can be forgiving and maybe even applaud the fact that the works of ‘Scotland’s Favourite Son’ are forever spreading around the world.

The majority of the reproductions below are taken from the book ‘Robert Burns In Other Tongues’ written by William Jacks and published by James MacLehose and Sons of Glasgow in 1896. Other reproductions were freely available via the Internet.

Special thanks to the Confucius Institute for Scotland for allowing us to reproduce their Chinese translations taken from their book ‘Selected Poems by Robert Burns’, edited by Prof Natascha Gentz. You can visit them by using the link below.

We are always looking to add to the available languages so keep checking back to see the latest additions.