Famous Seamus: Lament for a Maker

i.m. Seamus Heaney


Bobbie Hanvey: Seamus Heaney

born County Derry, Northern Ireland
13 April 1939
died Dublin, Eire
30 August 2013

I went to a talk by the distinguished Irish writer Dermot Healy recently, while I was at a conference in Singapore. As well as plays, screenplays, and fiction - most famously his haunting and terrifying novel A Goat's Song (1994) - Healy has also published a number of books of poetry. He's a pretty unpretentious sort (in fact, when I last saw him, at the conference dinner, he was trying to imitate Tibetan throat music to an increasingly unenthusiastic throng). One of his quips was that he was getting used to people coming up to him and saying how much his poems meant to them, then producing a copy of Death of a Naturalist for his signature ...

Dermot Healy / Seamus Heaney - the names are not really that similar, but he claimed that he got mistaken for the more famous Seamus on a regular basis, and had in fact taken to signing some of his books simply in order to avoid further explanations.

Famous Seamus - that was his nickname in Ireland, another Irish friend told me. Virtually from the beginning of his career, in the mid-sixties, it was apparent that his was a talent on a different scale from most of his contemporaries. As Gavin Ewart put it, wryly: "I think I'm Auden, he thinks he's Yeats." That was the competition - not the other poets he knew, or (increasingly) that he'd taught at Queen's University in Belfast.

I wrote a fairly long piece about Heaney and his sense of poetic genealogy for a guest lecture I gave to Jo Emeney's somewhat bemused English students at Kristin School in 2010. Not just Yeats, but Homer, Shakespeare - above all, Dante, who inspired his wonderful dream vision Station Island of 1984, and whom he translated piecemeal in various collections throughout his career.

He bore his burden of fame (the Nobel Prize, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford) with grace, I think. It can't have been easy at times, when each of his pronouncements was taken so seriously, weighed up with such scrupulous attention - particularly as the Troubles dragged on, and he had somehow become the voice of Catholic Northern Ireland itself.

His was a fate rather like Dante's - and Yeats's - then: a partisan political as well as a poetic role to play in the tragi-comedy of late twentieth-century history.

Now all that's over and we can go back to the poetry. A few years ago I bought the recordings he'd made of his entire body of work to date: a 15-CD set which I've listened to a couple of times since then. It's a very different experience from reading the books (I have all of them, as well: the 12 collections, at any rate). His shaping and patterning is so clear on the page. When spoken aloud, the poems become more genial and anecdotal, more like the fragments of a complex life story they were always, I imagine, meant to be.

It seems rather fitting that it was Jo Emeney who sent me a link to an obituary by Colm Tóibín, and thus informed me indirectly of his death yesterday. I don't know quite what to think, actually. He was one of the major shapers of poetry in our time. It seems rather unfair that we should have to part with him so soon. I suppose the true breadth of his work will come into focus now, though - that journey he started on almost fifty years ago.

I'll quote a part of his translation of Canto 1 of Dante's Inferno. It seems to say so much more than I can find to say at this moment:

How I got into it I cannot clearly say
for I was moving like a sleepwalker
the moment I stepped out of the right way,

But when I came to the bottom of a hill
standing off at the far end of that valley
where a great terror had disheartened me

I looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed
already in the rays of the planet
which leads and keeps men straight on every road.

Then I sensed a quiet influence settling
into those depths in me that had been rocked
and pitifully troubled all night long

And as a survivor gasping on the sand
turns his head back to study in a daze
the dangerous combers, so my mind

Turned back, although it was reeling forward,
back to inspect a pass that had proved fatal
heretofore to everyone who entered.

- from Dante's Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets, edited by Daniel Halpern (New York: Ecco Press, 1993)

What more can one say? It comes to us all in the end, that "pass that had proved fatal/ heretofore to everyone who entered" - in Seamus Heaney it took away one of the best and the brightest ... Perhaps one might conclude, instead, with some lines from Dunbar's "Lament for the Makaris":

I se that makaris amang the laif
Playis heir ther pageant, syne gois to graif;
Sparit is nocht ther faculte;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

[I see that makers among the rest
play here their pageant, then go to grief;
their faculty is not exempt;
The fear of death obsesses me].

Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems (2009)

Seamus Justin Heaney
(1939-2013)

Poetry collections:


1. Death of a Naturalist (1966)
   • Death of a Naturalist. 1966. London: Faber, 1969.
2. Door into the Dark (1969)
   • Door into the Dark. 1969. London: Faber, 1985.
3. Wintering Out (1972)
   • Wintering Out. 1972. London: Faber, 1993.
4. North (1975)
   • North. 1975. London: Faber, 1992.
5. Field Work (1979)
   • Field Work. London: Faber, 1979.
6. Station Island (1984)
   • Station Island. 1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
7. The Haw Lantern (1987)
   • The Haw Lantern. London: Faber, 1987.
8. Seeing Things (1991)
   • Seeing Things. London: Faber, 1991.
9. The Spirit Level (1996)
   • The Spirit Level. London: Faber, 1998.
10. Electric Light (2001)
    • Electric Light. London: Faber, 2001.
11. District and Circle (2006)
    • District and Circle. London: Faber, 2006.
12. Human Chain (2010)
    • Human Chain. London: Faber, 2010.

Selected editions:


13. Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1980)
    • Selected Poems 1965-1975. London: Faber, 1980.
14. New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990)
    • New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London: Faber, 1990.
15. Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (1998)
    • Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. London: Faber, 1998.
16. New Selected Poems 1988–2013 (2014)
    • New Selected Poems 1988-2013. London: Faber, 2014.
17. 100 Poems (2018)

Prose collections:


18. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (1980)
19. The Government of the Tongue (1988)
20. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (1995)
    • The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. 1995. London: Faber, 1996.
21. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (2002)
    • Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

Plays:


22. The Cure at Troy: A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (1990)
    • The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. London: Faber, in association with Field Day Theatre Company, Derry, 1990.
23. The Burial at Thebes: A version of Sophocles' Antigone (2004)
    • The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone. 2004. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Translations:


24. Sweeney Astray: A version from the Irish (1983)
    • Sweeney Astray. 1983. London: Faber, 1984.
25. Sweeney's Flight. Photographs by Rachel Giese (1992)
26. The Midnight Verdict: Translations from the Irish of Brian Merriman and from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1993)
27. [with Stanisław Barańczak] Laments, a cycle of Polish Renaissance elegies by Jan Kochanowski (1995)
28. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (1999)
    • Beowulf: A Verse Translation. 2000. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Daniel Donghue. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
29. Diary of One Who Vanished, a song cycle by Leoš Janáček of poems by Ozef Kalda (1999)
    • Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song cycle by Leos Janacek / Poems by Ozef Kalda. London: Faber, 1999.
30. The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables (2009)
31. Aeneid: Book VI (2016)
32. The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022)
    • The Translations of Seamus Heaney. Ed. Marco Sonzogni. 2022. London: Faber, 2023.

Chapbooks & Limited editions:


33. Eleven Poems (1965)
34. The Island People (1968)
35. Room to Rhyme (1968)
36. A Lough Neagh Sequence (1969)
37. Night Drive (1970)
38. A Boy Driving His Father to Confession (1970)
39. Explorations (1973)
40. Stations (1975)
41. Bog Poems (1975)
42. The Fire i' the Flint (1975)
43. Four Poems (1976)
44. Glanmore Sonnets (1977)
45. In Their Element (1977)
46. Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and an Elegy (1978)
47. The Makings of a Music (1978)
48. After Summer (1978)
49. Hedge School (1979)
50. Ugolino (1979)
51. Gravities (1979)
52. A Family Album (1979)
53. Toome (1980)
54. Sweeney Praises the Trees (1981)
55. A Personal Selection (1982)
56. Poems and a Memoir (1982)
57. An Open Letter (1983)
58. Among Schoolchildren (1983)
59. Verses for a Fordham Commencement (1984)
60. Hailstones (1984)
61. From the Republic of Conscience (1985)
62. Place and Displacement (1985)
63. Towards a Collaboration (1985)
64. Clearances (1986)
65. Readings in Contemporary Poetry (1988)
66. The Sounds of Rain (1988)
67. The Dark Wood (1988)
68. An Upstairs Outlook (1989)
69. The Place of Writing (1989)
70. The Tree Clock (1990)
71. Squarings (1991)
72. Dylan the Durable (1992)
73. The Gravel Walks (1992)
74. The Golden Bough (1992)
75. Keeping Going (1993)
76. Joy or Night (1993)
77. Extending the Alphabet (1994)
78. Speranza in Reading (1994)
79. Oscar Wilde Dedication (1995)
80. Charles Montgomery Monteith (1995)
81. Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (1995)
82. Commencement Address (1996)
83. Poet to Blacksmith (1997)
84. An After Dinner Speech (1997)
85. Audenesque (1998)
86. The Light of the Leaves (1999)
87. Ballynahinch Lake (1999)
88. Something to Write Home About (2001)
89. Towers, Trees, Terrors (2001)
90. The Whole Thing: on the Good of Poetry (2002)
91. Hope and History (2002)
92. A Keen for the Coins (2002)
93. Hallaig (2002)
94. Arion, a poem by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a note by Olga Carlisle (2002)
95. Eclogues in Extremis (2003)
96. Squarings (2003)
97. Anything can Happen (2004)
98. Room to Rhyme (2004)
99. The Testament of Cresseid (2004)
100. Columcille The Scribe (2004)
101. A Tribute to Michael McLaverty (2005)
102. The Door Stands Open (2005)
103. A Shiver (2005)
104. The Riverbank Field (2007)
105. Articulations (2008)
106. One on a Side (2008)
107. Spelling It Out (2009)
108. Writer & Righter (2010)
109. Stone From Delphi (2012)
110. The Last Walk (2013)
111. My Yeats (2019)

Edited:


112. [with Ted Hughes] The Rattle Bag (1982)
     • [with Ted Hughes] The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry. 1982. London: Faber, 1985.
113. [with Ted Hughes] The School Bag (1997)
     • [with Ted Hughes] The School Bag. London: Faber, 1997.

Recordings:


114. Collected Poems (2009)
     • Collected Poems: Death of a Naturalist (1966); Door into the Dark (1969); Wintering Out (1972); North (1975); Field Work (1979); Station Island (1984); The Haw Lantern (1987); Seeing Things (1991); The Spirit Level (1998); Electric Light (2001); District and Circle (2006). Read by the Author. Set of 15 CDs. Dublin: RTE / Lannan, 2009.

Letters:


115. The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2023)
     • The Letters of Seamus Heaney. Ed. Christopher Reid. 2023. London: Faber, 2024.

Secondary:


116. O'Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber, 2008.

Seamus Heaney (2010)

•

Divine Comedies (3): A Dante Translator's Primer

[Francesco di ser Nardo da Barberino:
Ms. of Dante's Divine Comedy (1337)]

A couple of years ago I posted a version of Eugenio Montale's poem "L'Anguilla" [The Eel] on this blog: first in my own translation, then as a literal Italian / English dual-text crib.

Quite a few of you took the opportunity to write in with your own suggested translations - while my one actually ended up in Marco Sonzogni's book Corno inglese: An anthology of Eugenio Montale's poetry in English translation (Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2009).

It occurred to me that it might be fun to try out the same thing with Dante. After all, as I've tried to illustrate in my last two posts, the English-speaking peoples seem to have a positive obsession with the Divine Comedy, so it seems a pretty safe bet that at least some of you are harbouring a secret desire to compose your own version of the whole colossal thing.

I don't think we can go quite that far (though if you do want to, there are plenty of resources to help you here). Instead, I thought I'd take the first 30 lines of the first canto - technically an introduction to the whole poem rather than just the first of three Canticas (which explains why the Inferno seems to have 34 cantos, rather than the 33 cantos of Purgatorio and Paradiso).

I've given them in various different versions:

1. First, in the original Italian;
2. Secondly, in Longfellow's nineteenth-century blank verse translation;
3. Thirdly, in Dorothy Sayer's mid-twentieth-century verse translation (which preserves the original terza rima rhyme scheme);
4. Fourthly, in Sandow Birk & Marcus Sander's millennial recasting into contemporary West-coast Valley-speak;
5. and Finally, as a dual-text, with my own literal prose translation (together with a few notes).

I promise to try my hand at a verse translation of my own if any of you do. Otherwise, I can't help feeling that there are quite enough of them in existence already.

•


[Giotto (attrib.):
Dante Alighieri (c.1314)]

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant'è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.

Io non so ben ridir com'i' v'intrai,
tant'era pien di sonno a quel punto
che la verace via abbandonai.

Ma poi ch'i' fui al piè d'un colle giunto,
là dove terminava quella valle
che m'avea di paura il cor compunto,

guardai in alto, e vidi le sue spalle
vestite già de' raggi del pianeta
che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle.

Allor fu la paura un poco queta
che nel lago del cor m'era durata
la notte ch'i' passai con tanta pieta.

E come quei che con lena affannata
uscito fuor del pelago a la riva
si volge a l'acqua perigliosa e guata,

così l'animo mio, ch'ancor fuggiva,
si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo
che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

Poi ch'èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,
ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,
sì che 'l piè fermo sempre era 'l più basso.

- Dante Alighieri (1308-21)

[Johann Neumeister & Evangelista Angelini:
First printed edition of Dante's Divine Comedy (1472)]

•


[Southworth & Hawes:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (c.1850)]

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders
Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart's lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously

And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

After my weary body I had rested,
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867)

[Gustave Doré:
Divine Comedy, Plate 7 (1861)]

•


[Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1928)]

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! how hard to speak of it - that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

How I got into it I cannot say,
Because I was so heavy and full of sleep
When first I stumbled from the narrow way;

But when at last I stood beneath a steep
Hill's side, which closed that valley's wandering maze
Whose dread had pierced me to the heart-root deep,

Then I looked up, and saw the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from that planet bright
Which guides men's feet aright on all their ways;

And this a little quieted the affright
That lurking in my bosom's lake had lain
Through the long horror of that piteous night.

And as a swimmer, panting, from the main
Heaves safe to shore, then turns to face the drive
Of perilous seas, and looks, and looks again,

So, while my soul yet fled, did I contrive
To turn and gaze on that dread pass once more
Whence no man yet came ever out alive.

Weary of limb I rested a brief hour,
Then rose and onward through the desert hied,
So that the fixed foot always was the lower;

- Dorothy L. Sayers (1949)

[Dorothy L. Sayers:
Hell (1949)]

•


[Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders:
Dante's Inferno. Illustrated by Sandow Birk. 2003
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004)

About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,
I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place.
I'm not sure why I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.

I can't really describe what that place was like.
It was dark and strange, and just thinking
about it now gives me the chills. It was so bleak
and depressing. I remember thinking I'd rather be
dead than stuck there. But before I get too far off track,
I should tell you about the other stuff that happened,
because, in the end, everything came out alright.

First off, I don't have a clue how I ended up there. I can't
remember anything about it because I had been pretty
tipsy when I wandered off the night before, and I was tired
and must've fallen asleep. After I got up, I wandered around
in the dark for a long time looking for a way out. Just when
I was feeling completely lost and was ready to give up,
I looked up and saw a faint light in the distance.
I figured that meant there must be a way out up ahead
somewhere. When I saw that light, I felt better, and the
fear I'd been holding inside of me that whole time started
to lift a little bit, because I figured I'd be outta there soon.
It felt like I'd almost been pulled over for something in a
car, but then the cop had turned away. I was sweating with
relief after making it through such a close call. As I started
up the hill, I looked back into the darkness behind me and
it seemed like no one could ever find their way out of there.

I was so exhausted; I sat down for a short rest,
then dragged myself uphill toward the glimmer
of light, leading with my left foot at every step.

- Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders (2003)

[Birk & Sanders:
Inferno (2003)]

•


[Christopher D. Cook, curator:
Dante in Translation Exhibition (c.2005)]

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
[In the middle of the road of our life]
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
[I found myself in a dark wood]
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
[because the straight way was lost]

You can see straight away just how accurately Longfellow has echoed the word order of the Italian. Unfortunately, that makes for pretty barbarous English:

I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

The noun-adjective inversion "forest dark" doesn't sound very idiomatic to me - neither does "the straightforward pathway." But is Sayers much better in this respect? There's been quite a lot of criticism of her decision to change the "road of our life" to "this way of life we're bound upon," but I don't myself see any falsification of the original meaning there. The expansions of simple Italian expressions - "wholly lost and gone" for smarrita, for example - required to pad out her lines to the requisite length (and to provide a convenient rhyme) seem rather more serious. Strangely enough, I find myself preferring Sandow and Birk's rather prolix - but conceivable - slacker-speak:

About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,
I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place.

True, there's nothing to match "my pathetic life" in the original, nor does actually Dante find himself "in a stupor" - but both could be seen to be justified by the illustrations of the poet's spiritual state given further down.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
[Oh, it's such a hard thing to say what it was like]
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
[that wild and harsh great forest]
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
[that in thought it renews the fear!]

Longfellow's forest is "savage, rough, and stern;" Sayers' is "rude / And rough and stubborn." One can't really reproduce the effect of the expression "selva selvaggia" in English: perhaps the closest approach would be Shakespeare's "wood within this wood" (using "wood" in the old sense of mad, you understand) ...

Tant'è amara che poco è più morte;
[It was so harsh that death isn't much worse]
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
[but to treat of the good that I found there]
dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.
[I'll speak of the other things I discovered there.]

Birk & Sanders' "other stuff that happened" actually isn't too far off from the simplicity of "l'altre cose ch'i v'ho scorte" - the real trouble with putting Dante into English is that one tends to lose the directness and casualness of his phrasing. Finding equivalent expressions tends to shift one into a rather more pompous register, partly, also, because of the (comparative) paucity of rhymes in our language.

Io non so ben ridir com'i' v'intrai,
[I don't really know how to repeat how I entered there]
tant'era pien di sonno a quel punto
[so full of sleep was I at that point]
che la verace via abbandonai.
[when I abandoned the true way]

Longfellow has him as "full of slumber," Sayers "heavy and full of sleep" - there's certainly no suggestion of his being "pretty tipsy," but then Birk & Sanders' Dante does seem to be far more of a contemporary Angeleno than a medieval Italian.

Ma poi ch'i' fui al piè d'un colle giunto,
[But since I had arrived at the foot of a hill]
là dove terminava quella valle
[there where that valley ended]
che m'avea di paura il cor compunto,
[which had filled my heart up with fear]

Birk & Sanders leave out the hill altogether at this point; Sayers makes it a "steep hill," Longfellow a "mountain." Some have seen it as Mt. Purgatory itself, which Dante is trying to approach without having first acknowledged and named his sins. Certainly its sunlit top looks like a prefiguration of the earthly paradise which he'll encounter towards the end of the Purgatorio. If so, he must travel pretty far (from the Earth's Antipodes to Jerusalem) in the next few lines of the poem.

guardai in alto, e vidi le sue spalle
[I looked up on high, and saw its shoulders]
vestite già de' raggi del pianeta
[already dressed with the rays of that planet]
che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle.
[which leads everyone straight on every path.]

The "planet" is the sun - Longfellow is probably correct in writing "Which leadeth others right by every road" [my emphasis], rather than Sayers' "Which guides men's feet aright on all their ways." The question is, though, is Dante himself included among those who are guided by its light? I don't see how he can be excluded from their number, however far astray he's gone lately.

Allor fu la paura un poco queta
[Then my fear quietened down a little]
che nel lago del cor m'era durata
[which in the lake of my heart had lasted ]
la notte ch'i' passai con tanta pieta.
[the night that I had passed so pitifully.]

There's not much that one can do with that "lago del cor" metaphor: Longfellow calls it "my heart's lake," Sayers "my bosom's lake" (mainly for metrical reasons, I suspect). Perhaps the idea of a lake of blood at the heart of every individual seemed more natural before Harvey's 17th-century discovery of the circulation of the blood ...

E come quei che con lena affannata
[And just like one who with panting breath]
uscito fuor del pelago a la riva
[escaped out of peril to the bank]
si volge a l'acqua perigliosa e guata,
[turns back towards the dangerous water and looks,]

Longfellow gives us "with distressful breath," Sayers cuts that down simply to "panting." Birk & Sanders try out the first of their substitute metaphors for Dante's originals. In this case, they turn the drowning swimmer to a DUI driver:

It felt like I'd almost been pulled over for something in a
car, but then the cop had turned away. I was sweating with
relief after making it through such a close call.

Personally, I rather like their boldness. I can see how purists might be irritated, though.

così l'animo mio, ch'ancor fuggiva,
[so my soul, which was still fleeing,]
si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo
[turned back to look again at the pass]
che non lasciò già mai persona viva.
[which no-one alive has ever yet left.]

Longfellow calls it "the pass," Sayers the "the dread pass," Birk & Sanders simply "the darkness" - whatever one calls it, it's clearly the same as the "dark forest" Dante's just emerged from: one might with perfect fitness call it the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," given the fact that no one has hitherto escaped from it alive.

Poi ch'èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,
[Then, after I had rested my tired body for a bit]
ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,
[I resumed my way along the desert shore]
sì che 'l piè fermo sempre era 'l più basso
[so that the more firmly planted foot was always the lower.]

Does he lie down for a sleep or simply have a bit of a sit-down?. Birk & Sanders are perhaps a bit over-explicit here:

I was so exhausted; I sat down for a short rest,
then dragged myself uphill toward the glimmer
of light, leading with my left foot at every step.

It's hard to dispute their reading of that last detail about the "more firmly planted foot," though - it clearly means that he's heading upwards (though he'll shortly be chased from his path by those three famous wild animals: the leopard, the lion and the wolf ...)

- JR: literal translation & notes (2012)

[W. S. Merwin:
Translation drafts for Purgatorio (2000)]

•

So there you go. Not so easy as it looks, is it? Hats off to everyone who's ever accomplished the task of a Dante translation - even those (such as Seamus Heaney) who've only given us a few cantos out of the whole hundred ...

[Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets (1993)

Poetic Genealogies

[Antaeus]

I've been asked to talk about Seamus Heaney to Jo Emeney's sixth-form class at Kristin. I hope they're kind to me. I'm a bit scared of High Schools, to tell you the truth. I'm always afraid I'm about to be hauled off to the headmaster's office for some ritual humiliation followed by a good caning ...

Anyway, the idea is to talk about the idea of poetic genealogy and inheritance (particularly appropriate in Heaney's case, I think: he's one of those who's constantly measuring himself up against the "mighty dead").

[Family tree (a)]

It's an obvious commonplace about genealogy that it can either be seen to spread backwards from one individual like a fan, or else to move down from that person like a root system.

[Family tree (b)]

If you start off with your own parents, then their parents, and then their parents, each generation is going to double (at a minimum) the number of people you could potentially include in your family tree. If, on the other hand, you start off with some mighty ancestor, you'll disappear in the fine filaments of their innumerable and constantly growing lines of descent. The only way to manufacture a genealogy is therefore to apply some pretty arbitrary rules of selection.

Lines of intellectual descent, charts of mutual influence, are (of course) equally arbitrary, but perhaps no more arbitrary. Clear evidence has to be
produced in both cases.

Starting with Seamus Heaney, then: It's clear that an Irish poet of his generation was unlikely to be able to avoid entirely the example of Yeats. Whether he could or he couldn't, Heaney certainly didn't. The "anxiety of influence" - that complex combination of appropriation and misreading outlined in Freudian terms by Harold Bloom - can be most clearly seen in Heaney's adaptation of Yeats's self-appointed role as spokesman for a reborn Ireland (above all in poems such as "Easter 1916").

[Yeats]

What lies behind Yeats, though? An equally complex tangle of influences and forefathers, Blake and Shelley prominent among them - but I think, above all, an attempt to (re)create an "Irishness" to match the Protestant Ascendancy's "Englishness", seen most clearly in the innumerable masks and facets of that body of work we generally refer to as Shakespeare.

[Shakespeare]

And what about Shakespeare? We know he read (among other things): Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, and Montaigne's essays. "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen" are not the only signs of his long and intricate conversation with Geoffrey Chaucer, though.

[Chaucer]

What about Chaucer? Well, his influences seem to have come mainly from the continent, from French and Italian literature: The essentially medieval Romance of the Rose, on the one hand, the Renaissance Humanism of Boccaccio and Petrarch, on the other. Behind both of these traditions, though, stands Dante's Divine Comedy.

[Raphael: Dante]

Now the story becomes more familiar. Dante's guide through hell is Virgil, whose Aeneid serves as a model (and a rival) for him throughout.

[Virgil]

Dante's precedent for this is Virgil's own relation to the master of all European poets, Homer. The Aeneid attempts to combine the intense warlike seriousness of the Iliad with the more romantic and adventurous atmosphere of the Odyssey.

[Homer]

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

- Seamus Heaney, "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing" (1975)

So what does this main trunk route of influence actually tell us about Seamus Heaney? Well, it's a bit hard to empathise with the ponderous poetic machinery of, say, Station Island (1984), without understanding just how living a presence Dante is for him. Chaucer can certainly be felt in his emphasis on character studies and portraits of friends (mostly rural, mostly Northern Irish). And when it comes to Yeats, just try paralleling some of the poems in his book about the troubles, North (1975) with Yeats's "Easter 1916."

I've quoted above from some lines from "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing," which appear to compare his own status as a Catholic in Northern Ireland with the Greek warriors hidden in the Trojan Horse. That poem concludes as follows:

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was déjà-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

That's really very like:

I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn

"We hug our little destiny again" does seem to echo the concept of a land where "motley is worn." Yeats's poem, however, goes on to try and analyse just how all this has "changed, changed utterly", and why

A terrible beauty is born.

Heaney's is not so sure.

Perhaps a closer parallel can be found with "Punishment," Heaney's famous (and controversial) poem comparing a female sacrificial victim found preserved in prehistoric bogland to certain contemporary events in Northern Ireland:

My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This woman, too, had (he claims) committed adultery, and thus been punished with the "exact / and tribal, intimate revenge":

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.

Heaney claims to "feel" all this with her, but his evocation of her "naked front" with nipples like "amber beads ... the frail rigging of her ribs" is (as he admits) almost voyeuristic in its intensity. He's quite prepared to acknowledge that while he connives in "civilized outrage" at her contemporary sisters, shaved and tarred consorting with British soldiers, he understands and somehow sympathises with the motvations behind these "exact and tribal" acts.

There's an almost gruesome honesty in that. Of course it recalls the culmination of Yeats's catalogue of the Easter martyrs: Countess Constance Markievicz, that woman whose days were spent "in ignorant good will"; the poet Patrick Pearse, who "rode our winged horse"; Thomas MacDonagh, his "helper and friend [who] / Was coming into his force"; John MacBride, the "drunken vain-glorious lout," who so miserably mistreated his wife, Yeats's beloved Maud Gonne:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

The fanaticism that deformed these conspirator's hearts, that somehow excepted them from the laws of nature, turned them into unwavering pivots, damming and breaking up the flow of life, has now been somehow transformed. But how, exactly?

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

Is that last bit a cop-out on Yeats's part? He assigns himself the motherly role of murmuring "name upon name" of those who have died, while resigning to "Heaven" the task of deciding when all this sacrifice will be sufficient.

And yet, is this any less honest than Heaney's self-characterisation as a silent co-conspirator in atrocity?

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage

Yeats's poem concludes:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

There's a terrible seductiveness in that "what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died". So were they right or were they wrong? Whose side are you on, exactly, Mr. Yeats? Auden thought that any poet who could write so compellingly about the tragedy of the Easter rising without offending either party was fatally two-timing both history and truth.

Heaney's voyeuristic dumb witness to the "tribal, intimate revenge" taken by the women of Ireland aspires (perhaps) to be seen more like the Euripides of the Trojan Women, whose play was meant to point out the tragic parallels between Homer's heroic age and his own times, the era of the unprecedentedly vicious Peloponnesian war - not so much a partisan response as an attempt to do justice to the complexities of civil war.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy.

Yeats composed plenty of more rousing patriotic plays and poems (Cathleen ni Houlihan, for instance - "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot"?). When you're a poet people listen to - both your own countrymen and foreigners - you have a set of responsibilities weighing on you that the rest of us don't really have to feel to the same degree.

Heaney, for good or ill, has inherited that mantle. It must have weighed on him particularly heavily in 1975.

[Collusion]