I’ve been reading my way through The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022), edited by Marco Sonzogni, over the last few months. Containing over a hundred texts from fourteen languages, from Ancient Greek plays to twentieth-century Romanian poetry, the tome is a fascinating chart of Heaney’s literary preoccupations, revealing how foundational translating was to his creative life.
One of the most famous quotations from Heaney, included in a speech by US President Clinton in Derry in 1995 as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland, is in fact derived from translation: The Cure at Troy (1990), a version of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes:
History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
Concluding his introduction to Translations, Sonzogni writes: ‘Seamus Heaney was a born translator’:
In Northern Ireland, SH’s life, education and work developed to ‘the tick of two clocks’ (North, x): Catholic and Protestant mindsets; Nationalist and Unionist agendas; Irish and British cultures. This inherited homeplace, an inescapable middle ground […] is the natural habitat of the translator.
Heaney’s poetry and essays show the stresses and strains of language and speech during the Troubles, a period that he terms ‘our more or less civil war’. ‘Whatever you say, you say nothing’ reads one poem from 1975, contrasting the glib phrases of professional commentators (“‘One side’s as bad as the other’, never worse.”) with the realities of living in fear of state violence and sectarianism, the ‘tight gag of place’ that mandates reticence, ‘Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks’. As participants from the documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland related, the era-defining aphorism went: ‘loose talk costs lives.’
The same poem reveals Heaney’s anxiety about his role as a poet within this trauma: ‘Yet for all this art and sedentary trade/ I am incapable.’ In a lecture from 1974 ‘Feeling into words’1, Heaney states that after 1969:
the problems of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.
‘Open Letter’, a response to his inclusion in an anthology of British poets during the Thatcher years (‘Be advised,/ my passport’s green’), used this epigraph from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard:
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
One of these incidents of ‘accumulated silent things’ for Heaney occurred in a fish and chip shop in a loyalist area of 70s Belfast, as recounted in his lecture ‘Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain’ (2001). ‘Aren’t you the Irish poet?’ asked the English assistant, recognising him from television. The shop owner corrected her: ‘He’s like the rest of us, a British subject living in Ulster’ and added ‘wouldn’t it sicken you, having to listen to that! Irish poet!’ ‘And Irish and all as I was,’ Heaney says, ‘I’m afraid I hesitated to contradict her.’
‘It is hard to grow up in Northern Ireland and not be forced into second thoughts sooner or later’, Heaney says in ‘Something to Write Home About’ (1998), reflecting on his poem ‘Terminus’. ‘If one person says that too many cooks spoil the broth, another maintains that many hands make light work […] Ulster is British, says one; Ulster is Uladh, an ancient province of Ireland, says the other.’ ‘Place and Displacement’ (1984), a lecture considering the work of other Northern Irish poets, discusses ‘the strain of being in two places at once’, belonging to a place ‘riven by notions of belonging to other places.’
‘Terminus’ evokes Heaney’s childhood growing up along boundary lines, between the ‘predominantly Protestant and loyalist village of Castledawson and the generally Catholic and nationalist district of Bellaghy,’ separated by the Moyola River:
If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain. If I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse. Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts?
Perhaps then, within Heaney’s wider literary output, translation was one opportunity to communicate more freely and allusively. Whilst being highly personal, the act of translation is the ability to handle another’s words, connecting across time and space in a loosening of the aforementioned gag. Translation almost makes a virtue of the harried condition, these ‘second thoughts’; a translation might even be defined as a second thought, the second impression of a thought into language. The translator becomes the mediator between two languages. Looking backwards to reckon with the the original text and forwards to its new form.
Heaney consistently expresses awareness of this mediating potential. Through his translation of the Middle Irish text Buile Suibhne (‘Sweeney Astray’) in the 70s, Heaney hoped to
offer an indigenous text that would not threaten a Unionist (after all, this was just a translation of an old tale, situated for much of the time in what is now Co. Antrim and Co. Down) but that would fortify a Nationalist (after all, this old tale tells us we belonged here always and that we’ll remain).
In ‘Burns’ Art Speech’ (1997), Heaney analyses two classic poems from either side of the Gaelic-Ulster Scots cultural divide, whose sympathies with the plight of an animal prompt existential reflection: ‘To a Mouse’ by Robert Burns and ‘An Bunnán Buí’ by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna.
Burns destroys a mouse’s nest while ploughing and Mac Giolla Ghunna ruminates on the corpse of a parched yellow bittern. Heaney finds common ground between the two in the sound and sentiment of ‘och’, ‘the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination’ that he believes ‘lies every bit as deep in the Irish larynx as in the Ulster Scots’. Burns deploys it in his last verse (The present only toucheth thee:/But Och! I backward cast my e'e/ On prospects drear!/ An' forward, tho' I cannot see/I guess an' fear!) while, in ‘An Bunnán Buí’, ‘och appears at the phonetic centre of this poem in the word loch and the word deoch [drink]’.
Heaney is also sensitive to the ambiguities of what he drily describes as ‘the medium which England, for better or worse, impressed upon us all, the English language itself.’ He treats with this legacy through his celebrated translation of the Old English epic Beowulf (1999), a foundational work of English literature and a set text when Heaney was a student in Belfast. Much was made of a ‘Gael’ translating the ‘Saxon’. Terry Eagleton’s essay in the London Review of Books, for example, is republished on the Guardian’s website with ‘Heaney conquers Beowulf’ added to the headline.
Beowulf is claimed as a kind of inheritance, a collective ‘word-hoard’ (a distinctive Old English compound used in the poem). There is an edge to the concept; after all, as Beowulf has it, a hoard nursed by a dragon brings bad luck, an association renewed in popular culture by The Hobbit (and Wagner, I guess). Yet Conor McCarthy argues that Heaney’s Beowulf is not a ‘continuation of cultural animosities’ but a ‘gesture towards breaking down the barriers that are perceived to exist between Irish and English’. In ‘Through-Other Places’, Heaney again brings up the demoralisations of silence:
I take Beowulf to be a poem which is about facing up to silent things accumulated within a consciousness. What gives it imaginative potency […] is a brooding sense of what the Anglo-Saxon language calls wyrd. This wyrd or fate is a silent thing that is ominously present, lying in wait in every life, a challenge that should be faced and that probably can’t be shirked.
Heaney also translated many Irish texts into English. He contributed two translations from Irish to Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing (1998), edited by John Kinsella. Sonzogni notes Heaney’s description of the medieval ‘Saint Brigid’s Wish’ and ‘Colmcille the Scribe’ as ‘pre-colonial’, adding that they are also ‘post-colonial in the act of translation’, related to two hugely important saints and cultural icons in Ireland and beyond. ‘Through-other’ means ‘confusion’, used as an alternative to the binary of ‘us’ and ‘other’ that reinforces colonialist hierarchies. ‘We have heard much about “the other”’, Heaney says, ‘but perhaps the moment of the through-other should now be proclaimed, if only because it seems to have arrived. Translation, among other things, has seen to that.’
The stepping stone is another of Heaney’s repeated images relevant to his translations as well as his wider poetic vocation. ‘Each point of arrival,’ he said in his Nobel Prize speech in 1995, ‘whether in one’s poetry or one’s life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.’
Evoking the stepping stones Heaney used to cross the Moyola as a boy, ‘Terminus’ concludes with:
Baronies, parishes met where I was born. When I stood on the central stepping stone I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his kernes
The ‘last earl’, Heaney explains in ‘Something to Write Home About’, was Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who fought the armies of Elizabeth I of England. Heaney is fascinated by an instance in 1599, when O’Neill met and agreed a truce with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, an ‘old friend’ whose father had been his patron in England, on the banks of the River Glyde. Talking, he stepped out into the water. In this moment of suspension and negotiation, with the violence and injustice of centuries looming, Heaney sees the earls ‘at the terminus in an extreme sense of the word’ and wishes for their release from the ‘entrapment of history’ (Tyrone would be defeated and ultimately go into exile, not before Essex was executed for treason):
And even if we know that such a release is impossible, we still desire conditions where the longed-for and the actual might be allowed to coincide. A condition where borders are there to be crossed rather than to be contested:
Running water never disappointed. Crossing water always furthered something. Stepping stones were stations of the soul.
Works of translation can be stepping stones between languages, casting back and forth across the borders of understanding and the imagination. Translation is provisional, imperfect; it entails both the loss and creation of subtleties of meaning, old and new resonances in altered contexts. It requires trust in the translator. It invites other attempts. Appropriately for a poet now inextricably linked with hopes of peacemaking, Heaney commits to communication without underplaying the psychological strain of ambivalence and the legacies of colonialism. He is ‘still parleying’, out on his stepping stones.
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If you’d like to listen to more
BBC Radio 4 released a series ‘Four Sides of Seamus Heaney’ last year, including interviews with family, friends and academics, with an episode on translation. You can find it here.
All quotations from Heaney’s essays and lectures are in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (2003) or the notes from Translations.