The trouble with Burns' poetry is that it's written in a dialect of English that few speak, can read, or understand.

It's to some degree a foreign language to most English speakers.

So with any foreign-language poetry, what to do?

-Having a person familiar with the language read the poetry aloud in its original form conveys the intended sound to the listeners. But little of the meaning of the poetry is conveyed.

-Translate the poetry into English (or in Burns' case, Standard English) and you get the meaning but the entire sound-sense is lost.

What we often get here in the USA at Burns' Dinners is neither of the above. Instead we get people who cannot read or pronounce or understand Burns' poetry struggle along in a halting reading which conveys none of the sound that Burns intended. The audience gets neither sound nor meaning.

When poetry is stripped of both sound and meaning, what purpose is being served?

It would be like honouring Van Gogh in a room hung with horridly crudely distorted copies of his paintings done by untalented hacks. How thus is Van Gogh honoured?

I would say, in the absence of someone who actually speaks the Lowland Scots dialect to do the Burns' readings, simply raise a glass in his honour and sing Burns' songs etc.