Introduction
THE POET-TRANSLATOR
This volume collects all the translations of Seamus Heaney: 101 texts from fourteen languages that demonstrate how prominent, powerful and personal a role translation played in the poet’s imagination and work. It testifies also to the form’s enduring importance to the author across time: he began the first of them before the publication of his 1966 debut, Death of a Naturalist; he was working on the last of them in the months before his death in 2013.
Most of the texts in this edition were published during SH’s lifetime, some posthumously; several appeared multiple times, a few once; one is published here for the first time. It is a body of writing carefully and confidently accomplished – even if, ‘in the case of translation,’ as he observed, ‘it is even truer than usual that a poem is never completed, merely abandoned’ (SF, viii).
From school to Stockholm, from scriptorium to stage, a striking and humbling cohesion underscores this volume. Translation after translation, and decade after decade, the poet-translator weaves his own word-hoard and story-board. This was Heaney’s characteristic way of building confidence in his personal and poetic stance through the continuity of thoughts and words, commitment and testimony, visibility and accessibility, inspiration and education. It is the hope of the editor of this volume that its readers will confirm for themselves that each of his translations have what Heaney, quoting Anna Swir, referred to as a poem’s ‘biological right to life’ (SS, 159).
Titled ‘Prayer’, the unpublished translation in this edition has come to us as a clean, unmarked typescript discovered in the archives of the National Library of Ireland. Whether it was intended to be revised by the author, or perhaps be submitted for publication, we cannot be sure, but we do have a guide as a precedent. ‘To a Wine Jar’, the text that opens this book, found its way from typescript to publication thirty years after it was finished and did so without revision.
SH was exacting about disseminating his work. When a text was published, it was invariably in a state of advanced completion. Still, the ‘double-take of feeling’ influencing the poet-translator – being simultaneously accountable to ‘the inner literalist’ and to ‘the writer of verse’ – is a force that is always operating upon the author to an extent that can be considered ‘self-revealing’ (CTb, 77; TSH, 251, l. 1606). The line between completion and abandonment is not always a clear one. After all, as SH himself asks in a poem stemming from translation, and titled ‘The Fragment’, ‘“Since when . . . / Are first line and last line of any poem /Where the poem begins and ends?”’ (EL, 57).
For translation in particular, finding an answer to that question poses a special challenge, but for SH the response lay in the composition process itself. He gave equal care to translation as to his original work and held the forms in a level of literary equivalence. But he also understood an instinctive difference between the two: that a translation was already a variant of an original, and therefore bore a differing relationship to composition than did a poem that he might have originated himself.
Capturing every stage of that distinction – registering every alteration in draft, each forward or sideways step – did not hold the same intrinsic value for SH as might accompany the creation of an original work, because variance was an essential component in the transformation of a poem from one language to another. It was a flux built into the process, and was the element that he was seeking to excise in achieving a version of sufficient fixity that might mark it as ready for publication – like ‘The unpredictable fantail of sparks / Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water’ (DD, 9). The toughest challenge for any translator, and especially for the literary translator, is to arrive at a stage of completion where the ‘tense diaphragm’ (DN, 44) between translator and poet, and between translation and original, can finally be relaxed so that the text can breathe naturally.
In the opening remarks of his Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture (Heaney 2008b) SH quotes a line from one of his own poems as the translator’s motto: ‘I had your measure and you had mine’ (DC, 61). Achieving that measure – that completion – required in SH a process of constant sounding and refining in order to stabilise the movement of the text in place and time. Even so, some published variants do stand out as illuminating of his creative process, as signals of his pathway to completion through ‘the ongoing vigour of the “translated” knowledge’ and ‘the aspiration of all translation to live a free and independent life’ (Heaney 1999b, 331).
Sweeney Astray (1983–4), Heaney’s first major translation, is in progress for over a decade, for example, with more than a dozen excerpts published (1976–82) before the appearance of the complete translation; a further decade elapses before the publication of the revised translation in Sweeney’s Flight (1992). ‘For one thing,’ as SH explains in his Preface to that revised edition, ‘there is a slightly different rhythmic imperative in operation when a piece stands on its own than when it is a constituent element in some longer structure’ (SF, viii). In the 1992 text, ‘grievously’ becomes ‘sacrilegiously’, a revision that charges Ronan’s private grief with religious defilement, making him curse Sweeney (SF, 91; TSH, 136, §6, l. 2).
Beowulf (1999; Beowulf BE, 2007), SH’s most domineering translation, is the result of an even longer gestation that spanned nearly two decades and spawned many published excerpts (1980s–1990s). After that book was published, SH made further revisions: ‘clearly’ to ‘brightly’ for example, in the text of a 1999 Gallery Press Christmas card (Beowulf, 51; BE, 109; TSH, 326, l. 1572), and, invited to contribute to an anthology titled Irish Writers Against War (2003), adapting some lines into an independent poem titled ‘News of the Raven’ (Beowulf, 91–5; BE, 195–203; TSH, 359–62, ll. 2897–3027).
SH’s version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes comes out in the USA on 4 December 1991, more than a year after the play premiered at the Guildhall in Derry on 1 October 1990 and was published in Ireland and Britain. SH takes this opportunity to weave his title of the play, The Cure at Troy, into the text, where it appears (TSH, 252, ll. 1654–5) spoken by Philoctetes in his last speech: ‘I can see / The cure at Troy’ (CTb, 80). This supplementary line strengthens the connection already established by translator and translation between Ancient Greece and Ireland, ‘north and south’, he told Dennis O’Driscoll in conversation, where ‘the idea of a miraculous cure is deeply lodged in the religious subculture, whether it involves faith healing or the Lourdes pilgrimage’ (SS, 422). The title would also serve as a model for SH’s second Sophocles translation, The Burial at Thebes (2004), where an original poem SH had published in the New Yorker under the title ‘Sophoclean’ provides the basis for a key chorus(BTa, 16–17; TSH, 389–90, ll. 356–89). The 2008 Peacock production of the play enables SH to refine his version: the text in this edition is what SH regarded as ‘the final correct version’.
The words, lines and punctuation of ‘The Yellow Bittern’ and ‘The Glamoured’ – SH’s translations of two canonical and rhythmical texts in the Irish tradition, ‘An Bonnán Buí’ and ‘Gile na gile’ – jigged their way into print multiple times across two decades (1997–2016). The inclusion of Canto II from Dante’s Inferno in a new anthology in 1998 provides SH with the opportunity to re-read the translation he had published in 1993. So Virgil’s desire to honour Beatrice’s plea and aid Dante – ‘I yearned the more to come’ – becomes more explicit – ‘I yearned the more to help’ (Havely 1998, 264; TSH, 36, l. 117). When Billy Connolly was recording Henryson’s fable ‘The Fox, the Wolf and the Carter’, SH readily adjusted his 2009 translation of ‘Lent-feed’ to ‘Lent-food’ (TCSF, 141; TSH, 470, l. 172) to improve clarity and flow. In 2009 SH also committed to print his first Pascoli translation, ‘The Kite’, which he had encountered in Italian in 2001 and which would form the basis for ‘A Kite for Aibhín’, the last poem in his last book, Human Chain, published in 2010.
SH was exacting about titles too. As bibliographer Rand Brandes notes, for SH effective titles would be ‘successfully embodying the spirit of the poem or book in a way that resonates with the reader’ and ‘serve as emblems capable of calling forth the essence of the book or poem from memory’ (Brandes 2008b, 19). That said, an excerpt from the translation in progress of Aeneid Book VI (ll. 638–78 of the standard Latin edition by R. A. B. Mynors; ABVIa, 35–7; TSH, 512–13, ll. 867–914) appears in print with two different titles: ‘The Fields of Light’ (2008) and ‘The Elysian Fields’ (2012).
Each of these occasions demonstrates that SH never downplayed his debt to the source text as he strove to achieve with his translations the same independence as in his original works. Even when the process involved languages he did not know or required working with scholars and co-translators, the translations become unmistakably his. In a panel on translating poetry and poetic prose (1999), SH described the translator as ‘a creative stealer’, arguing that the writer and the translator share the same ‘artistic task’: ‘to make something of the given, to move it through a certain imaginative and linguistic distance’ (Heaney 1999b, 331). ‘All language,’ he maintained, ‘is an entry to further language’ (Delanty 2012, xii).
SH did not have an overarching theory of translation, and he could be cautious about pronouncing upon it; what insights he did share, however, are illuminating. Reflecting on The Burial at Thebes (2004), his version of Sophocles’ Antigone, he affirms that ‘verse translation is not all that different from original composition’ and that ‘in order to get a project under way, there has to be a note to which the lines, and especially the first lines, can be tuned’ (Heaney 2005, 169).
It is an analogy that illustrates exactly how he went about his translation and poetry alike. ‘Until this register is established,’ he explains, ‘your words [. . .] cannot induce that blessed sensation of being on the right track, musically and rhythmically’ (Heaney 2005, 169). A description of translation, this account nonetheless seems also to evoke a line in ‘Song’ in which SH describes ‘that moment when the bird sings very close / To the music of what happens’ (FW, 53). In another poem, ‘The Given Note’, he describes the moment of inspiration as a process of translation: ‘spirit music’ that is surprisingly and mysteriously received and that ‘Rephrases itself into the air’ (DD, 36). This image returns in conversation with George O’Brien at Georgetown University (1988) when SH mentions Osip Mandelstam’s definition of great poets as ‘air stealers’ (Heaney 1998b, 20:42–20:52), akin to the musician of ‘The Given Note’.
Another metaphor of translation as creative transfer can be found in ‘The Settle Bed’, in which SH writes ‘whatever is given // Can always be reimagined’ (ST, 29). It is not surprising that, when translating, SH embraced the ‘liberating idea’ that ‘an original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations’ (Heaney 1999b, 331). An event ‘out of the marvellous’ reported in Lebor Laignech (‘Book of Leinster’), in Lebor Bretnach (Irish Nennius) and also in Konungs skuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’) reaches SH’s imagination through Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s English translation, ‘The Air Ship’ (Jackson 1971, 165). This transmission – ‘hung out on the limb of a translated phrase’ (SI, 57), ‘Needy and ever needier for translation’ (HC, 58) – exemplifies the evolutionary impact of translation as SH practised it. ‘1 Lightenings viii’ (ST, 62), which is known also as ‘The annals say . . .’ – one of the poems singled out by the Swedish Academy to illustrate how the ‘lyrical beauty and ethical depth’ of SH’s poetry ‘exalt everyday miracles and the living past’ (Nobel 1995) – could arguably have found space in this edition. This original text, like all the translated texts here, exemplifies the poet-translator’s ‘light-headed credo’ in ‘Discovering what survives translation true’, as he says in ‘Remembered Columns’ (SL, 45).
SH’s translations – to be listened to as given notes that give back ‘the clear song of a skilled poet’ (Beowulf, 5; BE, 9; TSH, 287, l. 90) – are arranged here in two sections: texts that can be classified as short or long poems, and those of book length that have been previously published under their own title; in each, obvious printers’ errors have been silently corrected.
An editor’s Commentary, arranged by decade, provides information on the original source text, a publication history of the translation, and an account of its background and significance drawn from SH’s discussions of his own translations: his prefaces, introductions, essays and interviews in which he discusses materials and motivations. Secondary sources helped to further document that SH turned to translation as an ideal space to connect his experiences in Ireland, north and south of the border, with experiences outside Ireland, and to comment on societal issues near and far with personal and artistic integrity.
The universal dimension of SH’s local preoccupations and the redressing power of literature across confines and cultures are made evident in an interview with Jon Snow for Britain’s Channel 4 News (1999) in which SH draws a parallel between the situation in Northern Ireland and events in Beowulf, which he had recently completed. Because of their ‘extreme ordeal, a little exhaustion, and tremor’, the people of Ulster, like those in the Old English epic poem, he said, ‘know a lot’ about danger, dread, hurt and suffering. This is ‘the general condition of species at the end of the century’, observes SH, ‘and the particular condition of people in Northern Ireland’ (Heaney 1999e, 4:34–5:49).
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 – ‘Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between’, he writes in ‘Terminus’ (HL, 5) – is the natural habitat of the translator. Seamus Heaney was a born translator.
Marco Sonzogni
Autumn 2022
Copyright © 2022 by The Estate of Seamus Heaney
Introduction and editorial material copyright © 2022 by Marco Sonzogni
