12-1-2001

Seamus Heaney

(1939 -           )

Biography

Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm, Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast in County Derry. He attended the local school at Anahorish until 1957, when he enrolled at Queen's College, Belfast and took a first in English there in 1961. The next school year he took a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. In 1963 he took a position as a lecturer in English at the same school.

While at St. Joseph's he began to write, publishing work in the university magazines under the pseudonym Incertus. During that time, along with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others, he joined a poetry workshop under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965, in connection with the Belfast Festival, he published Eleven Poems. In August of 1965 he married Marie Devlin. The following year he became a lecturer in modern English literature at Queen's College, Belfast, his first son Michael was born, and Faber and Faber published Death of a Naturalist. This volume earned him the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award in 1967, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, also in 1968. Christopher, his second son, was born in 1968.

His second volume, Door into the Dark, was published in 1969 and became the Poetry Book Society Choice for the year. In 1970-71 he was a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1971, and in 1972 he resigned his lecturship at Queens College, moved his family to Glanmore, in County Wicklow, and published Wintering Out. In 1973 his daughter, Catherine Ann, was born. During this year he also received the Denis Devlin Award and the Writer in Residence Award from the American Irish Foundation. In 1975 North was published, winning the E.M. Forster Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. During these years at Glanmore, Heaney also gave many readings in the United States and England and edited two poetry anthologies.

In 1975 Heaney began teaching at Carysfort College in Dublin. In 1976 the family moved to Sandymount, in Dublin, and Heaney became Department Head at Carysfort. In 1979 he published Field Work, and in 1980, Selected Poems and Preoccupations: Selected Prose. In 1981 he gave up his post at Carysfort to become a visiting professor at Harvard. In 1982 he won the Bennett Award, and Queen's University in Belfast conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He cofounded Field Day Publishing with Brian Friel and others in 1983. Station Island, his first collection in five years, was published in 1984. During that year he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and Open University awarded him an honorary degree. Also in 1984 his mother, Margaret Kathleen, died. The Haw Lantern, published in 1987, contains a brilliant sonnet sequence memorializing her. Heaney's father, Patrick, died after this, and Heaney's latest collection, Seeing Things, published in 1991, contains many poems for his father.

Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaneyboppers" attend his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be seen throughout his work, but most especially in his first two volumes, where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and even Dante have played important roles in his development.

The first poem in this archive, "Personal Helicon," introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor.

"Bogland," the final poem in his second volume, presents once again his fascination with things buried. He acknowledges an attachment to the soil that is the source and subject of his poetry. The catalog of objects, buried in bogs for years, sometimes centuries, and dug up in remarkable condition, encompasses the vegetable world ("waterlogged trunks / of great firs"), the animal world ("the skeleton / of the Great Irish Elk"), and the human world ("Butter sunk under / More than a hundred years"). Perhaps with hindsight we see a progression toward the bog's most important preservation, a human being.

Hard on the publication of P.V. Glob's The Bog People, detailing the discovery of a series of bodies over 2000 years old in the bogs of Denmark, Heaney's metaphor, begun in "Bogland," reaches its ultimate fruition. In Glob's book, Heaney found the consummation of his descent into the earth. His series of "Bog Poems" (including "The Tollund Man") address, through a study of these victims of tribal sacrifice and punishment, the political and social situation in his native Northern Ireland. Heaney's fascination with the past allows him to comment on the present in an oblique yet forceful way. Perhaps the most striking of these poems is "Punishment," where he sees in the corpse of a ritually sacrificed woman an echo of the Catholic women in Northern Ireland who are tarred and chained to their front porches for dating British soldiers. He acknowledges his guilt for implicit participation in such terrible deeds, because he "would have cast, I know / the stones of silence." He recognizes his own conflicting feelings, this man

who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or taken to task for remaining aloof from it. Nevertheless, some of his most convincing elegies deal with friends and family he has lost to the Troubles. "Casualty," a poem about a Catholic friend murdered by a bomb set by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in a Protestant pub, gives us another look at the tribal warfare in Northern Ireland. His questioning of his friend's responsibility for his own death realizes the ambiguous nature, the muddling of right and wrong, that grips Northern Ireland today. And yet, what is important is not placing blame, but the recognition of what remains to those who live, memories and sadness.

It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. That conclusion, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. "Song" demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and "Personal Helicon," this short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and the details of language make this poem a small success.

"Harvest Bow," a touching look at his father's creative impulse, also addresses Heaney's own art. The poem rests on the recognition that there are more important creations than the ordering of words. Rather than being merely a recollection of childhood, this poem takes on universal weight in the intertwining of the artistic forces in father and son. Heaney presents the mature relationship of a child with his or her parents, the unspoken joy of a shared experience. His recognition of his father's different talents leads to a consideration of his own work, like his father's a "frail device." Be it a harvest bow or a formal elegy, "The end of art is peace." Further explorations of Heaney's thoughts on his own poetry can be found in his two collections of essays, the previously mentioned Preoccupations and The Government of the Tongue. He is an insightful critic of both the Romantic tradition and the poetry of the twentieth century.

Perhaps his most moving works are the series of sonnets called "Clearances," written as a memorial to his mother. The two poems we have here, the third and fifth of the sequence, show him taking firm hold of the sonnet form and bending it to his own interpretation of the elegaic tradition. These poems possess a soft power that bathes all in the golden haze of memory while presenting stark images of the spaces that death leaves between us. In "When all the others were away at Mass" Heaney moves from the distant past of the first two quatrains, through a telling break in lines, the into a place nearer the present in the final quatrain. But this present reality is too much to bear, and he retreats again to the past in the final couplet. In this way memory serves as a shield to protect him from his mother's death. "The cool that came off sheets just off the line" takes place entirely in the past, as he recalls the intricate dance he and his mother performed in folding bed linens. His comment on their relationship, "Coming close while again holding back," speaks to a lifetime of memories, and the space that her absence leaves in his life.

His final poems here, from "Lightenings," take up again thoughts of death, the afterlife, and other planes of existence. The structure of these poems, with their three-line stanzas, recalls Dante's Divine Comedy, where the poet as pilgrim is guided through the afterlife. Heaney has remarked that, since the death of his parents, he feels as if "the roof has blown off" his life. We are all inevitably relased from both the weight and the shield of our ancestors. This lightening, when we are finally exposed to the elements, to the cosmos, is both freeing and frightening. The first poem acknowledges the transience of life, framing death in the religious terms of the particular and universal judgements that come at the end of an individual life and the end of the world. Recognition of the fact that "there is no next-time-round" carries with it a mixture of fear and freedom.

Heaney discusses that mixture again in the Hardy lyrics, and explores the questions that the nearness of death brings. Hardy pretends to be dead in "vi," and, being dead, "He experimented with infinity." He claims that the recognition of death is a necessary act for a poet, for it alone opens the poet up to what the universe has to say. In "vii" Heaney admits to the frailty of memory, a fragility that makes what is remembered all the more dear. Hardy's communion with the frightened sheep holds the anticipated sorrow that would later fill his poetry at bay for a moment. Again, the nearness of death, or, for Hardy, the pretending to be dead, is an essential component, if not the ultimate font, of poetry. The final poem here ends on a life-affirming note, for Heaney recognizes the beauty of earthly existence, placing that beauty in a religious context that not only enhances it, but holds out hope for more wonders to come after death.

Heaney's work is filled with images of death and dying, and yet it is also firmly rooted in the life of this world. His tender elegies about friends and family members who have died serve many purposes: they mourn great losses, celebrate those who have gone before us, and recall the solace that remains to us, our memories. When asked recently about his abiding interest in memorializing the people of his life, he replied, "The elegaic Heaney? There's nothing else."

Joe Pellegrino

Select Bibliography

* A Boy Driving His Father to Confession / Farnham, Surrey: The Sceptre Press, c1970.

* A Lough Neagh Sequence / Didsbury, Manchester [Lancashire]: Phoenix Pamphlet Poets Press, 1969.

* A Personal Selection: August 20-October 24, 1982 / Belfast: Ulster Museum, 1982.

* After Summer / illustrations by Timothy Engelland. Old Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Press, c1978.

* Among Schoolchildren: A Lecture Dedicated to the Memory of John Malone / [Belfast]: John Malone Memorial Committee, c1983.

* An Open Letter / Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1983.

* Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition: 1980 Anthology / edited and introduced by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Todmorden (Lancashire): Kilnhurst Pub. Co., [1982].

* Bog Poems / illustrated by Barrie Cooke. London: Rainbow Press, 1975.

* Death of a Naturalist / London: Faber and Faber, [c1966].

* Door Into the Dark / London, Faber and Faber, 1969

* Eleven Poems / Belfast: Queen's University of Belfast, 1965.

* Field Work / London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979.

* Gravities: A Collection of Poems and Drawings / Seamus Heaney, Noel Connor. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Charlotte Press Publications, 1979.

* Hailstones / Dublin, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1984.

* Hedge School: Sonnets from Glanmore / with colour woodcuts by Claire Van Vliet. Salem, Ore. (Postbox 12367, Salem, Ore. 97301): C. Seluzicki, 1979.

* In Their Element: A Selection of Poems / by Seamus Heaney & Derek Mahon. [Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1977].

* Iron Spike / Concord, N.H.: William B. Ewert, 1992.

* Land / [London]: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

* Mint / Concord, N.H.: William B. Ewert, 1991.

* New Selected Poems, 1966-1987 / London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

* Night Drive / Crediton, Devon: Richard Gilbertson, [1970].

* North / Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

* Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland / Seamus Heaney

* Poems and a Memoir / Seamus Heaney; selected and illustrated by Henry Pearson with an introduction by Thomas Flanagan and a preface by Seamus Heaney. New York: Limited Editions Club, c1982 ([Hadley, Mass.]: Wild Carrot Letterpress).

* Poems, 1965-1975 / New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, c1980.

* Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 / New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, c1980.

* Remembering Malibu / Claremont, Calif.: Scripps College Press, c1983.

* Responses / London: National Book League; Poetry Society, 1971

* Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and an Elegy / London ; Boston: Privately printed by Faber and Faber, c1978.

* Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin / introductions by Craig Raine. London: Faber and Faber, c1983. (Audio tape)

* Seamus Heaney at Harvard : Heaney Reads His Own Poems / [Cambridge, MA]: Poetry Room, Harvard College Library, p1990. (Audio tape)

* Seeing Things / New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

* Selected Poems, 1965-1975 / London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980.

* Servant Boy / Detroit: The Red Hanrahan Press, 1971.

* Station Island / London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984.

* Stations / [Belfast]: Ulsterman

* Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish / Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1983.

* Sweeney Praises the Trees / illustrated by Henry Pearson. New York: [s.n.], 1981

* Sweeney's Flight: Based on the Revised Text of "Sweeney Astray": with the Complete Revised Text of "Sweeney Astray" / with photographs by Rachel Giese. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

* The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes / London: Faber and Faber in association with Field Day, 1990.

* The Essential Wordsworth / selected and with an introduction by Seamus Heaney. 1st ed. New York: Ecco Press, 1988.

* The Fire i' the Flint: Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. / London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

* The Government of the Tongue: the 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings / London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

* The Gravel Walks / Hickory, N.C.: Lenoir Rhyne College,1992. ([s.l.]: Shadowy Waters Press).

* The Haw Lantern / New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987.

* The Makings of a Music: Reflections on the Poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats / delivered on 9 February, 1978 [Liverpool, Eng.]: University of Liverpool, 1978.

* The Place of Writing / with an introduction by Ronald Schuchard. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, [c1989].

* The Rattle Bag / edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1982 (1984 printing).

* The Redress of Poetry: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 24 October, 1989 / Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

* The Sounds of Rain / [Atlanta]: Emory University, c1988 ([s.l.]: Shadowy Waters Press).

* The Tree Clock / Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1990.

* Ugolino / with 2 lithographs by Louis Le Brocquy. Dublin: A. Carpenter, 1979.

* Verses for a Fordham Commencement / New York (2651/2 West 94 St., New York, 10025): Nadja, c1984.

* Wintering Out / London: Faber and Faber, 1972.

Published: 24 April 2012

Small Fantasia for W. B.

by Seamus Heaney; introduced by James Crews

Seamus Heaney’s later poems have turned more and more towards an exploration of mortality and spiritual matters. In the volumes The Spirit Level (1996), District and Circle (2006) and his most recent, The Human Chain (2010), he questions the role of the mind in creating or undoing a sense of self, using language that is earthy, palpable and evocative of his native County Derry. As Brad Leithauser wrote in his review of District and Circle in the New York Times, “his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might say”.

Heaney’s poems build slowly, drawing readers into meditations on existence, loss and memory. “A Small Fantasia for W. B.” is composed of a series of questions – a sort of litany – expressing the speaker’s doubt in the powers of human creation (“Things remembered, made things”) to reassure us. As uncertainty grows, we wonder whether anything manmade can contain “spirit”; does it live in nature alone – in “the seabird’s cry” and the “jackdaw’s nest”? Heaney pits what we assume will be our most enduring works – the “stone tower” and “marble bust” – against the intangible and uncontrollable “windy light”. What the speaker means by “spirit” is perhaps a belief in God or the “soul”, which he implies, with a stanza break, is only “imagined”. But this interrogation of faith offers, perhaps, a kind of “reassurance”, too: humans continue to find comfort and pleasure in the “held note or held line”; we return to songs and poems again and again in spite of our doubts.

Small Fantasia for W. B.

Where does spirit live? Inside or outside

Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul

Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks

In a jackdaw’s nest up in some old stone tower

Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

What was learned from the midwife and the hangman?

What’s the use of a held note or held line

That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

SEAMUS HEANEY (1989)

Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, January 25, 2009; BW12

This winter I heard Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney recite to a packed crowd an early poem that's among his most celebrated. "Digging" starts off tracing the poet's break from his sod-cutting father in Northern Ireland. The pen he holds as a gun in the opening lines suggests Heaney is a kind of stickup man at first, taking aim at his father for doing undignified work, which Heaney must "look down" on. And though digging makes "a clean rasping sound," the old man is a comic, almost feminized figure, "his straining rump among the flowerbeds."

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,

Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

While city folk have the privilege of romanticizing field work from afar, anybody who's done it understands Heaney's flight into writing. The penultimate stanza reeks of labor's decay (mould and squelch), but work is inescapable. As "living roots awaken in my head," the memory of that work sends green shoots into the pen he holds. For this reader (bred herself to plod behind a plow), seeing the two jobs conflate is poetic alchemy.

"Digging" is from Seamus Heaney's "Poems: 1966-1996" (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998). Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

PÚBLICO ,28 de Maio de 2001

"A poesia pára o tempo por um segundo"

Entrevista com Seamus Heaney

Nobel da Literatura em 1995, Seamus Heaney, nascido irlandês do norte, nacionalista e católico, acredita que o objectivo da arte, da poesia é, de alguma forma, reparar o que está danificado. Sem fronteiras de identidade. Recorda a vitalidade de Ted Hughes - "era como estar na mesma sala com um jovem cavalo" -, destaca a sabedoria do polaco Czeslaw Milosz, e anuncia como falará de Alberto Caeiro (esse "pastor louco") numa próxima conferência em Cambridge. Alexandra Lucas Coelho (texto), Mário Marques (fotos).

Dizem deste homem grande e risonho (os olhos, muito vivos, riem, quando ele ri), que é o mais importante poeta irlandês desde Yeats. É seguramente o mais popular poeta vivo de língua inglesa. A Academia sueca deu-lhe o Nobel da Literatura em 1995. Ele agradeceu, com um texto límpido, magnífico, onde coube a Irlanda rural, raiz da sua infância - uma quinta nos arredores de Belfast, uma calorosa família de nove irmãos muito unidos em torno do pai e da mãe, figuras presentes em toda a sua poesia -, e uma crença inquebrável na força da poesia como tradução do mundo.

Nasceu, há 62 anos, irlandês do norte, nacionalista, católico. Esse é o seu centro, de onde partiu para a descoberta que havia uma Inglaterra escondida dentro dele, como havia uma Grécia ou um Mediterrâneo, porque "cada criatura tem uma estação receptora que pode receber quase tudo, desde que não lhe imponham barreiras". Também por isso lhe deu muito prazer concluir, há três anos, o desafio de traduzir "Beowulf", narrativa heróica da tradição anglo-saxónica, composta algures entre o século VII e X. O que levou a que o prestigiado prémio britânico Whitbread para Livro do Ano de 1999 fosse atribuído a este irlandês do norte, que tanto lutou - escrevendo - contra a intransigência de Londres nos piores anos do conflito irlandês.

"Electric Lights", o seu décimo livro de poemas originais desde a obra de estreia, "A Morte de um Naturalista" (1966), saiu recentemente na Faber, e estava esta semana disponível em algumas livrarias portuguesas, atentas à passagem do poeta pelo Porto, onde participou, quarta-feira, no Encontro Europeu de Poetas. Uma viagem possível pela sua obra, em português, é a "Antologia Poética", com selecção e tradução de Vasco Graça Moura, que está editada na Campo das Letras.

PÚBLICO - No seu discurso de aceitação do Prémio Nobel, honra a poesia por ser uma ajuda, ao tornar possível uma relação redentora entre o espírito e o que está à sua volta. Como pode a poesia realmente ajudar, não só o poeta, mas quem o lê?

SEAMUS HEANEY - A poesia ajuda, ao representar verdadeiramente o que está errado, a perturbação que está a ser sofrida, a forma que a tristeza tem. Esse sentido de apaziguamento, pela representação do que está mal, ajuda cada um de nós, e se vários indivíduos são ajudados, o colectivo é ajudado. Não que os artistas sejam profetas, mas frequentemente encontram maneiras de ver e dizer, de novo, chegam a imagens que avançam. Uma nova metáfora que seja verdadeira em relação à realidade faz avançar as coisas.

Há um verso de John Keats que diz: "Heard melodies are sweet [São doces as melodias escutadas]. Em inglês, "heard" pode soar como "herd" [rebanho, carneirada]. Frequentemente, o que as pessoas querem dos escritores são "herd melodies", os ditadores esperam dos escritores que falem por slogans, ou apelem à solidariedade do colectivo. Mas não é para isso que a criação deve apelar, mas sim ao que na consciência de cada um se reconhece como verdade.

Tomou como mote, no poema "Harvest Bow": "O fim da arte é a paz". O que significa que a arte nunca terminará.

O objectivo da arte, da poesia, é, de alguma forma, reparar o que está danificado. Se tudo fosse reparado, a arte estaria acabada - mas isso é impossível. Esse mote é uma citação de Yeats... a pequena "harvest bow" [laçada da colheita] pertence ao centro de todas as coisas, um pequeno pedaço de palha que remonta às origens, apanha o significado humano. Esse poema foi escrito nos anos 70, quando havia uma forte pressão da realidade exterior [na Irlanda do Norte]. Wallace Stevens disse que a poesia representa a imaginação lutando contra a pressão da realidade. A pequena laçada está a lutar contra o que a cerca, tentando fazer a paz.

O título da sua última antologia de poemas, "Opened Ground" [Chão aberto] tem a ver com toda a sua poesia, com a busca de raízes. Ao longo destes 35 anos representados no livro (1966-96) como evoluiu a sua relação com o seu chão, a Irlanda do Norte? Ou, de outra forma, o que é que o tempo lhe ensinou?

Que tudo é mais simples e singular, que tudo se relaciona. Comecei com uma forte consciência de mim enquanto resistente no que era então a Irlanda do Norte: pertencendo a uma minoria católica, com uma fidelidade à cultura gaélica, irlandesa. Sentia uma grande solidariedade política com essa minoria, pelas discriminações que existiam. A minha identidade era baseada nessa resistência política e num cordão com o passado irlandês. O inglês é a minha língua materna, mas estudei gaélico e tinha essa noção de ter sido desapossado da língua irlandesa devido a séculos de língua inglesa.

Na universidade aprendo a história da língua inglesa. E gradualmente compreendo que a nossa existência como criaturas, com impulsos, instinto, está baseada no inglês. Ou seja, havia uma Irlanda escondida em mim, mas descubro através da educação, do vocabulário que também havia uma Inglaterra escondida em mim - talvez não tão escondida... -, como há uma Grécia, como, através do catolicismo há um certo Mediterrâneo... Não traímos o que está lá, expandimos, renovamos, reapossamo-nos, de outra forma, do que está lá. Robert Frost disse que o objectivo da educação era mudar o plano do olhar. O nosso plano do olhar, se temos sorte, continua a mudar, a re-situar-se. No discurso de aceitação do Nobel usei essa ideia da ondulação que vem de um centro... atiramos uma pedrinha numa piscina e algo começa, as ondas vão avançando, avançando... à medida que envelhecemos, a nossa experiência alarga-se, mas ainda estamos ligados a essa coisa no centro.

Politicamente, como é que avalia agora a situação na Irlanda do Norte?

Há uma mudança enorme. Se pegarmos nos anos 40/50, quando eu cresci, tínhamos um governo apenas unionista, havia discriminação, uma força policial armada. Nos anos 60 houve algumas mudanças, o acesso da minoria à educação, movimentos de direitos civis. Depois, os levantamentos dos anos 60/70 quando a estrutura de governo foi desmantelada e começou a violência, o IRA, a velha luta pela independência. E os anos 80 começam com greves de fome e a senhora Thatcher dizendo: "Isto não é uma situação política, são criminosos." Acabamos os anos 90 com um acordo alargado, concedendo que a minoria tem uma identidade, tem o direito de ser representada politicamente.

Nada está completamente consolidado, mas ultrapassou-se a intransigência dos britânicos e dos unionistas. O que era necessário era o respeito pela identidade, pela legitimidade da cultura irlandesa. Ainda virá a ser confuso, complicado mas as alterações são enormes.

E continua a existir a "cumplicidade das tribos", de que fala num dos seus poemas mais célebres, "Casualty", sobre um amigo católico morto pelo IRA num bar de unionistas?

Persiste, não seria humano se não persistisse. Mas as instituições estão lá para alargar, abrir essas fronteiras.

Está optimista?

Sim. Pensemos na segregação nos estados do sul dos EUA nos anos 50. Mudaram-se as coisas através de legislação. Não significa que os brancos supremacionistas já gostem dos negros, mas são obrigados a deixar que se sentem na parte da frente do autocarro. E isso é uma diferença enorme: quando as instituições, as leis garantem paridade, levará um século, mas as consciências mudarão. O seu sentido de justiça é ressuscitado.

Na introdução de "Beowulf" fala dessa estranheza que se pode ter por um irlandês nacionalista, católico traduzir o poema da tradição anglo-saxónica, e conclui dizendo que é como se essa antítese, essa barreira tivesse colapsado. O que é que lhe interessou nesse trabalho, além do imenso desafio literário?

O primeiro dos motivos foi linguístico, artístico. Não o poderia ter feito se não sentisse que a melodia do meu discurso poético tinha alguma coisa a ver com "Beowulf": com o meu diapasão, eu podia apanhar a "nota" de "Beowulf". Mas, no fim, não pude impedir-me de pensar no que significava ter traduzido esta obra. Como nacionalista católico, etc. era esperado de mim que traduzisse da língua irlandesa, que afirmasse a profunda tradição irlandesa - e fi-lo em 1983, publicando um livro, "Sweeney Astray" [tradução de uma obra medieval irlandesa], que queria dizer: 'Ei, há uma longa tradição aqui!' Era uma declaração política, também.

Ao concluir "Beowulf", pensei que era pelo menos malicioso, irónico, ir às fundações da tradição anglo-saxónica e apropriá-la [risos]. Ou, noutro sentido, alienar a distinção, tentar dizer que as políticas de identidade são um pouco disparatadas... Porque, segundo a lógica dessas políticas, nós, os católicos da Irlanda do Norte traduzimos a tradição irlandesa, vocês, protestantes, unionistas traduzem os anglo-saxões... Isto reduz as possibilidades humanas, não é a forma como somos, não é verdadeiro em relação à vida, à nossa capacidade de absorver tudo. Cada criatura tem uma estação receptora que pode receber quase tudo, desde que não lhe imponham barreiras. A minha, enquanto criatura da fonética, está muito alerta a essa rocha anglo-saxã, que me deu, dá muito prazer.

Levei três anos a completar essa tradução, comecei nos anos 80, interrompi, recomecei em Março de 1995 e acabei-a no fim de 1998. Pelo meio, o Nobel afastou-me durante um ano. Mas ter "Beowulf" como um objectivo, um trabalho ajudou-me muito depois do Nobel, recentrou-me. Foi um lastro.

Friday, September 12, 2003 Elul 15, 5763

`Let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes'

By Galia Benziman

Guilt is at the center of the rich, wonderful long poem `Station Island,' by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He feels guilty about being alive, about his request for absolution and above all, about his lack of political commitment.

 "Station Island" (bilingual edition) by Seamus Heaney, translated from English with an introduction, notes and epilogue by Yehuda Litani, Carmel Publishing House, 141 pages, NIS 69

“Station Island," a long poem by Seamus Heaney, is a work that describes a double journey. This is both a geographical journey and a pilgrimage to Lough Derg in Ireland, and Station Island, a holy site for Catholics, and a dive inward to the depths of memory and forgetting in the Irish poet's personal and literary biography. Very salient here, both as a subject that is treated directly and at the implied, figurative level, is the motif of absent presence. The present tense in the poem, apart from transitional sentences that have to do with movement from one spot on the island to another, is in fact the past tense. And the aggregate of the speakers in the poem, of whom there seem to be very many, all derive from a single speaker, the image of the poet himself, who imagines or draws out interlocutors from his inner world. That is, the journey outward is primarily a journey inward, and the religious framework of the act of pilgrimage is mainly a shell that encloses a fragile and autonomous personal-emotional process.

Seamus Heaney, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995), is in the eyes of many, the greatest poet writing in English today. He was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland, which is under British control. There he grew up as a member of the Catholic minority, but as an adult he moved to Dublin, capital of the independent Republic of Ireland. He made the pilgrimage to Station Island in the 1970s, and the long poem was first published in 1984.

  As the translator, Yehuda Litani, explains in his introduction to the book, among Catholics there is a belief that a person who visits the island, deprives himself, fasts, confesses and desires to repent is given absolution, but only for his personal sins (between him and his fellow man). The stations after which the island is named are crosses, next to which there are "beds" (niches), which served in the Middle Ages as isolation cells. The pilgrims go from station to station, and they must spend six hours at each one. Litani writes of a folk belief that people who have lost their loved ones can meet them on Station Island, and apparently Heaney drew from this the subject for his poem. 

However, as noted, the precise and regimented religious framework that Heaney sketches for his journey includes elements that are far less clear, and deviate, sometimes ironically, from the usual content of a pilgrimage. The three levels at which the speaker appears in the poem - personal, literary and political - are inextricably intertwined. Childhood memories, the violent conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants, sources of inspiration and literary influences, dilemmas that he faces as a poet - these are the main subjects of  "Station Island," but all of them are variations on a single theme.

  All cast blame

  The personages who come to Heaney, each at a different station, and each at the center of one of the 12 parts of the poem, are very different from one another. The first character is a frightening gypsy traveler he remembers from his childhood ("`I was your mystery man ...'"), and after him appear in sequence a sister who died when he was a child whose name "they hardly ever spoke" at home; an old teacher from his school; a childhood love; a priest from Heaney's village who became a missionary and died in the prime of his life in Africa; an archaeologist friend who died at the age of 32 from heart disease ("`Ah poet, lucky poet, tell me why / what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?'"); the 19th-century Irish poet William Carleton ("`O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?'"); a cousin who was murdered by Protestants; a childhood friend who was murdered by Protestants ("His brow was blown open above the eye and blood / had dried on his neck and cheek."); a monk to whom Heaney once confessed; a professional hit man from the IRA; James Joyce.

  In all this, despite the variation, there is a regular pattern that characterizes these encounters. First of all, all the characters are already dead, and their presence is therefore an absent presence. All of them, almost without exception, cast specific blame on Heaney or indirectly cause him to feel guilt toward them. All of them confront him with the weakness, fear or indecision within him; all of them are stronger than he is - passive, dragged along, defensive and not knowing.

If we make an incautious reduction of this wonderful, rich poem, we could say that the main issue in the poem is guilt. He feels guilt about being alive, while the figures he meets are not alive. He feels guilt about the fact of the pilgrimage, which is a kind of request for absolution that he perhaps does not have the right to make, and apart from that is a primitive, ritual act of which he should be ashamed. He feels guilt about his inferiority relative to poets and writers he presents as stronger than he. And he feels guilt - perhaps most of all - about his lack of political commitment, his flight, as a poet and as a man, from taking a clear stance with respect to the terrible conflict between the Catholics who are seeking their independence and the Protestants who support British rule - a conflict that has shadowed his life and the lives (and deaths) of all the characters involved in the poem.

  In the second poem, in a confrontation with Carleton, a Catholic poet and writer of the previous century who defected to the Protestant lines, Heaney justifies being apolitical: ("`I have no mettle for the angry role,' I said ... `Obedient strains ... tuned me first / and not that harp of unforgiving iron'"). At a later stage in the work, in the eighth poem, Heaney meets his murdered cousin, Colum McCartney, about whose death he learned at a conference of poets. Heaney, says Litani in a footnote, did not leave the conference despite the news. And this is what McCartney says to him: "`You confused evasion and artistic tact. / The Protestant who shot me through the head I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / who now atone perhaps upon this bed / for the way you whitewashed ugliness ... /and saccharined my death with morning dew.'"

  It appears that here Heaney expresses, through the ghost of his cousin, the recognition that poetry, those "obedient strains" - cannot be apolitical. This inability is not only value-based, but also logical: The escape from politics is an immoral stance but it is also, paradoxically, a political stance in itself. And poetry, which for Heaney serves - as he testifies - as a cover and excuse to evade politics, arouses in him self-disgust and self-hatred. His poetry tries here, in "Station Island," to do the opposite: It bombards the reader in a very violent and focused way with the hatred, the violence and the killing of Ireland.

  Nevertheless, when the overall structure of the poem is surveyed, there is no escape from the conclusion that Heaney does not undergo a transformation. It seems to suffice that he has set the dybbuk free; and now that he is out, it is possible after all to go back to that same "morning dew," to that same poetry that evades the difficult political reality.

  At the last station, where Heaney takes his leave of Station Island, he finds justification for this; there he meets a "tall man" who looks blind, whose helping hand grasps him, "fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide / or to be guided I could not be certain." And this is how the man - James Joyce, the famous exile, who fled Ireland in desperation - absolves him: "`The main thing is to write / for the joy of it ... Take off from here. And don't be so earnest // let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes. / Let go, let fly, forget. / You've listened long enough.'"

  This is the final station in Heaney's journey of self-discovery. The advice offered in these last lines expresses reservations about Catholic nationalism, the same reservations about which Heaney feels so much guilt; after all, this is not the "correct" political stance in the eyes of most of the figures he encountered on his journey, apart from Joyce. Submitting to these guilt feelings will cause him, in the end, "to lose himself" as a poet.

  The introduction, the epilogue and the footnotes written by Yehuda Litani reflect a great deal of knowledge and a strong emotional attachment to Heaney's work and its subjects. The Hebrew translation of the poem (along with three short poems by Heaney) for the most part succeeds in preserving Heaney's fluid and natural language - an ostensibly clear and simple language that has often been compared to the language of Robert Frost for its deceptive simplicity.

  Nevertheless, the translation is not of uniform quality, and from time to time things get a bit tangled in the elevation of register to which translation into Hebrew is so often prone. This could have been smoothed out in the editing. A second, less common problem, is the occasional plain inaccuracy. In the ninth poem, for example, "hit man" in the sense of "assassin" is mistranslated into Hebrew as "the man who was hit."

  Litani tried to visit Lough Derg himself, like Heaney - in order to penetrate the nooks and crannies of the consciousness of the poet he so loves. It was as if he tried to get "inside" the poem, an aspiration that is doomed to chronic failure, and not only because on the day he went there the island was closed to visitors, but also because seeing the island with his own eyes is not equivalent to seeing the island with Heaney's eyes.

  However, alongside the failure, there is also a success here: In his attempt to get to Station Island, Litani replicates something of what happens in the poem itself. He tries to reach the island in order to meet a literary figure who pursues him. The act of translation - like the journey Heaney takes in the poem itself - is thus an act of pilgrimage.

September 24, 2010

Ply the Pen

By WILLIAM LOGAN

HUMAN CHAIN

By Seamus Heaney

85 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

For a poet, life after the Nobel can be pottering, or bookkeeping, or simply keeping busy — it’s rarely full of radical departures or stunning new poems. (Eliot called the prize a “ticket to one’s own funeral,” and indeed it proved the funeral of his poetry.) Even pottering can be difficult when you are constantly in demand to judge this prize or sign that public letter, to give a blurb to old X or a recommendation to young Y. For a poet, all life can be a distraction from the siren call of the page. When you read that Seamus ­Heaney has a secretary to help him answer correspondence, you wish he had half a dozen, and perhaps a few armed guards. Yet apart from Pasternak, who was bullied by his government, no poet has ever turned down the poisoned chalice.

Heaney is the most popular literary poet since Frost, who managed to convince most of his readers that he wasn’t a literary poet at all, that he booted up ­poems while mucking out a spring or driving a buggy — and perhaps, in a way, he did. Readers often love in Heaney what they loved in Frost, the unassumed and unassuming wisdom. Heaney has rubbed shoulders, as Frost did, with some of the most important literary figures of his day; Heaney has spent a long share of nights in hotels and on the road, as Frost did; yet often they write as if, just out the window, the cows were bawling to be milked and the first green shoots were sprouting in the fields — and as if neither man had spent more nights in a hotel than the Queen of Sheba.

In “Human Chain,” Heaney’s latest collection, the poet is again a child in the world of things, his attention drawn to objects common as a coal sack:

Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal
The lorryman would lug in open bags
And vent into a corner,

A sullen pile
But soft to the shovel, accommodating
As the clattering coal was not.

In days when life prepared for rainy days
It lay there, slumped and waiting
To dampen down and lengthen out

The fire, a check on mammon
And in its own way
Keeper of the flame.

This isn’t lump coal, the top screening from the mine, but the bottom-deck “slack coal,” the cheap bits and grindings that fall through the other meshes. This refuse coal trims the cost of the fire (hence the mention of the Bible’s Mammon). “Keeper of the flame” is its own droll joke, as if the coal, like the poet, honors the dead. Heaney is not a plain poet, at least not as plain as he seems — the poems often have to be prodded and stirred to yield their meanings.

At times the Ireland of Heaney’s poems seems trapped in amber. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger and the bursting of the bubble afterward have made little impression on his work. Yet this love of the things of this world has made a world, even if one somewhat sealed off (Susan Sontag once said to an American novelist that he was living in his own theme park, and ­Heaney’s Ireland is sometimes like Disney Dublin). “Human Chain” is a gallery of things — of the binder and the baler (“the clunk of a baler / Ongoing, cardiac-dull”), of the heating boiler and the mite box and the gold-banded fountain pen, possessions that also possess, things that seize the people who use them, like the boy

Who would ease his lapped wrist

From the flap-mouthed cuff
Of a jerkin rank with eel oil,

The abounding reek of it
Among our summer desks

My first encounter with the up close
That had to be put up with.

Given the poet, given the future, it’s hard not to think that the Troubles lie there before him. That would suit his passive temper. At ease with forgotten manners, at ease with a sentence winding toward two final prepositions, Heaney manages to stiffen his syntax with an Anglo-­Saxon rectitude of rhythm; yet where most poets live by eye, Heaney likes to press the reader’s nose into the carnal stench of things.

This love of the way things work, this delight in the hard practical craftsman, is very different from Auden’s boyish romance with mining equipment. Auden loved such machines partly for the rust. Heaney likes to see a task efficiently done, and his poems are full of characters who know a job of work. Like Virgil’s “Georgics,” his poems offer a quiet master-class on how a farm used to be run, the homage of someone who returns again and again to the Irish fields that bore him.

“Lick the pencil” we might have called him
So quick he was to wet the lead, so deft
His hand-to-mouth and tongue-flirt round the stub.

Or “Drench the cow,” so fierce his nostril-grab
And peel-back of her lip, so accurately forced
The bottle-neck between her big bare teeth.

Or “Catch the horse,” for in spite of the low-set
Cut of him, he could always slip an arm
Around the neck and fit winkers on

In a single move.

Perhaps we give too much respect to a poetry lost in pastoral — it’s the strain of Romanticism most palatable to contemporary taste (palatable, and often deeply conservative). A lot of modern poetry comes out of Wordsworth’s leech-­gatherer, and at times Heaney drags in too many old grubbers with dirt under their thumbnails. Lewis Carroll wrote a howling parody of “The Leech-Gatherer” (­later titled “Resolution and Independence”), and I doubt he would let the Irishman off any more lightly. Yet ­Heaney’s nostalgia is rarely simple — he understands the cost of love too well.

Heaney has Frost’s avuncular voice, the bootstrap wisdom, the love of the natural world caught and rendered; yet he’s not really a teller of tales, and his poems are slow to draw the homilies beloved by Frost — the endings are hesitant, unrevealing, morally ambiguous. One of the great virtues of Heaney’s poems is patience — when he lingers over a description of a shopcoat, he gives the thing edge and weight. (Frost never paused for such descriptions and had an aversion to ingenious metaphor.) However much this is poetry, it is not “poetry,” the long-winded sentimental bombast that makes schoolchildren run screaming from poems ever after.

For decades Heaney has been a model citizen in the state of literature. He has produced useful translations (most popularly of “Beowulf,” a best seller), idiosyncratic anthologies, a respectable body of criticism and, every few years, a new book of poems. He’s unlikely to be remembered for more than the poems, and among the poems unlikely to be remembered for much written in the past 10 or 20 years.

There’s a state of innocence poets need, a state hard to reach when they’ve been frog-marched out of paradise to the memorial dinners and honorary degrees of experience. Many of Heaney’s new ­poems start with the old flair and dash, but after a few lines they lose their way and sputter out. The late work has been solid, composed to a high level of craftsmanship; but the poems are like footnotes to poems already written, with all of his mastery but little of his passion and less of his subdued outrage. They become that evil thing, ­poems written for the sake of writing poems.

“Human Chain” is far from Heaney’s best book — the short and short-winded sequences rarely smolder like a peat bog afire underground. He’s still good at the character sketches from the Irish hinterlands, the deft evocations of common objects (the evidence of the ordinary bewitches him), the elegies and funerals that increasingly have dominated his work. Troubled by the losses memory is heir to, most moving on his father’s decline and death, the poems are evocations of a life now past.

Heaney still has the great virtue of never saying too much, of letting the poem do so much work and no more. He can make buying a copy of Book VI of the “Aeneid,” that sturdy companion of young Latin scholars, as haunting as the visit to the Underworld within. For a poet of such ambition, Heaney has long given modesty a good name.

William Logan’s most recent book of poetry is “Strange Flesh.”