Collecting Paul Celan

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Etching

Reading these letters doubled with poems is also to delimit the space where Celan habitually deployed his language, and which he referred to – not entirely seriously – as his “Celanie”: the Rue des Ecoles, the Rue de Lota, the Rue de Montevideo, the Rue de Longchamp, the Rue d’Ulm, the Rue Cabanis (Faculty Clinic, Saint-Anne), the Rue Tournefort and Avenue Émile Zola …

– Bertrand Badiou, “Notice Editoriale”. In Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970). 2 vols. Librairie du XXIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001): 2: 10.

Map of Bukovina
[Israel Chalfen (1979)]

I did some translations from Paul Celan, from his posthumously-published book Schneepart (1971), in about 2001 (You can find them online here).

Now, ten years later, I've re-entered the Celanian labyrinth (not that I ever really left it), and am working on some more translations (mostly from the poems included in his letters to his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange).

A lot of new books have appeared or been translated in these ten years. I did read most of what was available (in English) in 2001, when I made my first set of versions. Since then I've ranged a bit further afield - into the latest German editions, as well as the sumptuous 2-volume French edition of his correspondence with Gisèle.

The advantage of this is that he generally included vocabulary lists and comments on the poems he sent to her (her German was far from fluent) - sometimes complete literal French versions - which gives one a kind of authorial double-focus on each of the poems: very useful in the case of a poet so famously "difficult" as Celan.

The point of this post, though, is to make my own list of the most useful materials by and about Celan available at present to any reasonably enterprising English-speaking reader (it's worth going to this website, by the way, to hear the man himself reciting "Todesfuge").

There are certainly some omissions from the list: I haven't recorded all the translations of the poetry - only the ones I myself have found useful (some of the older versions are now, in fact, out of print and hard to find). Nor have I been at all exhaustive in my listing of secondary materials.

For what it's worth, though, here's my working bibliography of Celan materials:

Paul Antschel [Paul Celan]
(1920-1970)

[Texts:]



Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke


1. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Erster Band - Gedichte I: Mohn und Gedächtnis; Von Schwelle zu Schwelle; Sprachgitter; Die Niemandsrose. 1952, 1955, 1959, 1963. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.


2. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Zweiter Band - Gedichte II: Atemwende; Fadensonnen; Lichtzwang; Schneepart. 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.


3. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Dritter Band - Gedichte III: Der Sand aus den Urnen; Zeitgehöft / Prosa /Reden. 1948, 1976. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.


4. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Vierter Band: Übertragungen I - Zweisprachig. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.


5. Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Fünfter Band: Übertragungen II - Zweisprachig. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.



This is the standard German edition of Celan's works (now expanded to seven volumes, with the addition of some juvenilia and manuscript materials).




Paul Celan: Die Gedichte


6. Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. Barbara Weidemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.



The best edition of the complete poetry available at present.




Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke



•

[Correspondence:]



Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Correspondence


7. Celan, Paul, & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. I – Lettres. Ed. Bertrand Badiou & Eric Celan. La Librairie du XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.


8. Celan, Paul, & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. II – Commentaires et Illustrations. Ed. Bertrand Badiou & Eric Celan. La Librairie du XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.



An indispensable work for true Celan fans. It's also available in German, but not (as yet) in English.




Paul Celan & Nelly Sachs: Correspondence


9. Celan, Paul, & Nelly Sachs. Correspondence. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. 1993. Trans. Christopher Clark. Introduction by John Felstiner. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995.



An important correspondence with the Nobel-prize winning poet Nelly Sachs.




Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli: Correspondence


10. Gillespie, Susan H., trans. The Correspondence of Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli. 2004. Preface by John Fesltiner. Introduction by Norman Manea. Afterword by Ilana Shmueli. Conversation between Norman Manea & Ilana Shmueli. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2010.



Letters to his last love, whom he first knew as a girl in Romania, then met again long after the war in Israel.




Paul Celan & Ingeborg Bachmann: Correspondence


11. Bachmann, Ingeborg, & Paul Celan. Correspondence: With the Correspondence between Paul Celan and Max Frisch, and between Ingeborg Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Ed. Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll & Barbara Weidemann. 2008. Trans. Wieland Hoban. The German List. London: Seagull Books, 2010.



Ingeborg Bachmann, herself an important German poet and fiction-writer, was Celan's lover in the late 40s and again (for a time) in the early sixties.




Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan



•

[Translations:]



Paul Celan: Selected Poems (1972)


12. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Trans. Michael Hamburger & Christopher Middleton. 1962 & 1967. Introduction by Michael Hamburger. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.



This is the Celan volume in that wonderful series, the Penguin Modern European Poets. Middleton only supplied a couple of versions to what is essentially the first draft of Hamburger's larger translation project.




Paul Celan: Collected Prose


13. Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. 1986. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2003.



Still a very useful book, often reprinted.




Paul Celan: Selected Poems


14. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 1988. Penguin International Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.



A beautiful and poetic version, frequently revised and reprinted.




Paul Celan: Selected Poems and Prose


15. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. John Felstiner. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2001.



The scrupulousness of Felstiner's scholarshop makes this an indispensable volume for Celanians.




Paul Celan: Romanian Poems


16. Celan, Paul. Romanian Poems. Trans. Julian Semilian & Sanda Agdidi. Green Integer, 81. København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2003.



Rather weird surrealist prose poems, written by Celan in Romanian immediately after the war. Of interest mainly because they show that German was not the only language in which he could write creatively.




Paul Celan: Selections


17. Celan, Paul. Selections. Ed. Pierre Joris. Trans. Pierre Joris & Jerome Rothenberg. Poets for the Millennium, 3. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press / London: University of California Press, Ltd., 2005.



A well-judged selection of Celan materials, imaginatively edited and beautifully translated. Perhaps the best single-volume introduction to his work.




Paul Celan: The Meridian


18. Celan, Paul. The Meridian: Final Version - Drafts - Materials. Ed. Bernhard Böschenstein & Heino Schmull, with Michael Schwarzkopf & Christiane Wittkop. 1999. Trans. Pierre Joris. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011.



I have this on order but haven't seen it yet: twenty pages of text to 200 pages of notes and false starts. Just what the Doctor ordered!




Paul Celan: From Threshold to Threshold


19. Celan, Paul. From Threshold to Threshold. ['Von Schwelle zu Schwelle', 1955]. Trans. David Young. Grosse Point Farms, Michigan: Marick Press, 2010.



Some translators have started to provide us with complete dual-text versions of each of his major books - a trend which I for one certainly welcome. This is the first of three promised middle-period Celan books to be translated by David Young.




Paul Celan: Breathturn


20. Celan, Paul. Breathturn. ['Atemwende', 1967]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Sun & Moon Classics, 74. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995.



Joris has a good claim to be considered the most subtle living interpreter of Celan's poetry and thought. This is the first of a trilogy of versions of his last three books.




Paul Celan: Threadsuns


21. Celan, Paul. Threadsuns. ['Fadensonnen', 1968]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Sun & Moon Classics, 122. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000.



Paul Celan: Fathomsuns


22. Celan, Paul. Fathomsuns / Fadensonnen and Benighted / Eingedunkelt. 1968. Trans. Ian Fairley. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2001.



It's nice to have Ian Fairley's complete translation of Fadensonnen to set beside Pierre Joris's. I'd have to award the palm to Joris, but that's not to say that Fairley's doesn't have considerable merits also (as well as including the strange "abandoned sequence" Eingedunkelt).




Paul Celan: Lightduress


23. Celan, Paul. Lightduress. ['Lichtzwang', 1970]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Green Integer, 113. København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2005.



Paul Celan: Snow Part


24. Celan, Paul. Snow Part / Schneepart. 1971. Trans. Ian Fairley. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.



This is Fairley's second volume of Celan translations, a complete version of his posthumously-published last book Schneepart.




Paul Celan reads



•

[Jack Ross:]



This might seem vainglorious, but - after all - it is my blog. I've included here a list of my published work to date (translations, versions and critical essays) about Celan. There's quite a bit more to come, but this is where I am at present:




Jack Ross: The Britney Suite


25. (May 1, 2001) The Britney Suite, by Paul Celan, Wendy Nu & Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001. [25 copies (20 numbered)]
    • [Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt … (22/1/68)
    • Snowpart (24/10-30/11/2000)
    • [Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER, tief im … (20/7/68)
    • Orespark (24/10-30/11/2000)
    • [Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS, im … (24/8/68)
    • Chalk-Crocus (24/10-28/11/2000)
    • [Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho … (5/9/68)
    • Dark (24/10-28/11/2000)
    • [Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE Frühe … (29/9/69)
    • Both-Handed (24/10-28/11/2000)






26. (August 17, 2006) “Coromandel" (after Paul Celan, 'Corona').



Percutio 1 (2006), ed. Bill Direen
[front cover image: Sandra Bianciardi]


27. (September 12, 2006) “Poems from Schneepart: Translations into English.” Percutio 1 (2006): 60-62.
    • Snowpart (24/10-30/11/2000)
    • Orespark (24/10-30/11/2000)
    • Chalk-Crocus (24/10-28/11/2000)
    • Dark (24/10-28/11/2000)
    • Both-Handed (24/10-28/11/2000)



Albrecht Durer, Melancholia II


28. (March 23, 2007) “Meeting Paul Celan." Poetics of Exile conference, Auckland University (July 2003)




All Together Now (2010)


29. (August 24, 2010) “Celanie.” All Together Now: A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney / Kia Kotahi Rā: He Arawhata Ipurangi mō Tamaki Makau Rau me Poihākena (March-September 2010). [visited 25/8/10]
    • Leave [24/6/67] (8/2-25/4/10)



brief 41 (2010), ed. Richard von Sturmer


30. (December 31, 2010) “Celanie: 5 Versions from Paul Celan.” brief 41 (2010): 54-59.
    • Maïa [7/1/52] (9/3-11/4/10)
    • Islandward [22/6/54] (5/3-11/4/10)
    • Matter of Britain [13/8/57] (9/3-29/4/10)
    • Heart (for René Char) [6/1/60] (9/3-11/4/10)
    • Kew Gardens [6/4/69] (11/3-25/4/10)



Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange


31. (July 12, 2011) “The Twenty-Year Masterclass: Paul Celan’s Correspondence with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (1951-1970)." Literature and Translation conference, Monash University, Melbourne (11-12 July 2011)




Rabbit


32. (September 24, 2012) “Channeling Paul Celan." Rabbit 5 - The RARE Issue (Winter 2012): 118-31.
    • Matter of Britain [13/8/57] (9/3-29/4/10)




Gisèle Celan-Lestrange & Paul Celan


33. (November 25, 2012) “Interpreting Paul Celan." brief 46 - The Survival Issue (2012).
    • What's stitched [10/1/68] (28/1-14/9/11)




Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan (2012)
[cover image: Emma Smith / Cover design: Ellen Portch


34. (November 25, 2012) Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan. Poems by Jack Ross & Drawings by Emma Smith. Introduction by Jack Ross. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN: 978-0-473-22484-4. Pania Samplers, 3. Auckland: Pania Press, 2012. 168 pp.
    • Introduction: The Twenty-Year Masterclass




Ka Mate Ka Ora, Issues 1-13 (2005-2014)
[cover images: Richard Killeen


35. (April 14, 2014) “Paul Celan & Leicester Kyle: The Zone & the Plateau.” Ka Mate Ka Ora 13 (2014): 54-71.



Jack Ross: The Britney Suite (2003)
Front cover image: Gabriel White



•

[Secondary Texts:]



These are mainly biographical rather than critical works. There are just too many for me to list in the latter category. Felstiner's is the major biography still, but Israel Chalfen is necessary too for the earlier period:




Israel Chalfen: Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth (1979)


36. Chalfen, Israel. Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth. 1979. Trans. Maximilian Bleyleben. Introduction by John Felstiner. New York: Persea Books, 1991.



Jean Daive: Under the Dome (2009)


37. Daive, Jean. Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan. 1996. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Série d'écriture, 22. Anyart, Providence: Burning Deck Press, 2009.



John Felstiner: Paul Celan (1995)


38. Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.



James K. Lyon: Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger (2006)


39. Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

•

For further updates on this matter, see my subsequent post Collecting Paul Celan (2) (4/6/16).

•

Marc Chagall: Bridges over the Seine (1954)

Rest in peace

•

On Not Writing Disaster Poems

[Earthquake / Tsunami (Japan 11/3/11)]

I was walking down the corridor yesterday when one of my colleagues stopped me to ask, "Written any poems lately?"

Rather a surprising question, I thought. Practically unprecedented, in fact.

"No, not really," I replied.

"I'd have thought there'd be quite a lot to write about at the moment," she continued.

"Yeah, I suppose so."

It was only then that I understood what she was getting at. "Disaster" = "disaster poem" / "Multiple disasters" = "suite of disaster poems".

"Where," she was asking (in effect), "is your Christchurch poem? Your Japanese earthquake poem? Maybe even your Libyan insurrection poem?"

There aren't any, I'm afraid.

I certainly don't want to legislate for other people, since a brief sampling of the blogosphere would reveal a number of Canterbury & Japanese earthquake poems already out there, and who am I to say if they're good or bad individually? "It's all just a matter of your opinion," as my Creative Writing students keep on reminding me. I do think it's an interesting matter to discuss, though.

I remember on the morning of 9/11, waking up to the news of the fall of the Twin Towers with the somewhat shamefaced realisation that I'd actually been at a poetry reading the evening before. Counting back through the time difference, I was glad to work out that I hadn't actually been intoning stanzas at the moment of the calamity - not that that would matter at all to anyone else - but had been asleep instead.

Who cares what I was doing? But somehow it mattered to me. I felt almost physically nauseated at the thought of standing there smugly self-promoting while other people were dying in flames. Irrational, really, but there you are ...

The only 9/11 poem that sticks in my mind is Amiri Baraka's ("Someone Blew Up America"), and not entirely for good reasons. It was those lines "Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion" which caused most of the problems, as I recall - though my memory had transformed the last bit into "laughing they asses off" ... Never mind. The point of his poem is clear enough.

For weeks and months afterwards, though, you couldn't go anywhere without a shower of 9/11 poems dropping around you like confetti. Somewhat perversely (or so it must have seemed), I determined not to write any. I know such decisions are generally futile - one is immediately struck with an idea for a verse epic on the subject. In this case, though, they've mostly faded on the page.

It seems obvious in retrospect that there was something spurious, second-hand, video-linked about the whole idea of writing verses about 9/11. I felt even at the time that one would need some exceptionally cogent personal link or angle to attempt it at all. Amiri Baraka's certainly fulfilled that criterion - with a vengeance. It was undeniably heartfelt, whatever else it was.

How can I explain what probably sounds like a rather pointless set of prescriptions about when (I think) one should and shouldn't write poetry (or, rather, publish it - an important distinction)? There's a fine section in Huckleberry Finn where Huck (or, rather, Mark Twain: the authorial mask wears pretty thin at this point) is describing the poetic efforts of one Emmeline Grangerford:

She warn't particular, she could write about anything you choose to give to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker - the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long. [ch. xvii]

[Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1884)]

And what were Emmeline's poems like? The one Huck quotes, "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd", is certainly a stirring piece:

... Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

All I can say is that you would have to go a lot broader nowadays for this to stand out as conspicuously bad poetry. Emmeline understands metre and rhyme better than most. She has a certain tendency towards the bathetic, but then that's hard to gauge at the best of times.

If you want to see a lot more of this sort of stuff - far less accomplished technically, far clumsier and more naive in subject-matter - go to the obituary page of the NZ Herald (or most other daily newspapers). The funny thing is: I adore the poems I read on the back page of the Herald. I love the way that the people who write them often stop looking for rhymes after a while and just stop any old where. I admire the way in which they always go for the half-remembered scriptural / hymn-tune phrase rather than any concrete or living expression.

There's a sort of blunt-force trauma behind the words they seem to have literally wrenched out of themselves to express the sheer depth of their passionate feelings of loss. Very few of them resort to quotation from more accomplished bards. Most appear to feel they have to go it alone, through the shaky quagmire of five or ten lines of rhymed (or vaguely rhythmic) verse.

What Twain deplores in Emmeline, I feel, is her slick facility with words. She may not be entirely in control of her medium yet, but you can see that she had a great future ahead of her compiling the nineteenth-century equivalent of greeting-cards.

So what's all this got to do with 9/11?

I remember a few weeks afterwards seeing a TV interview with one of the survivors, who'd actually managed to get out of (I think) the second building just before it collapsed. The most striking thing about the whole event, for this woman, was the fact that she'd been personally rung up by Bruce Springsteen, who'd spoken to her for almost twenty minutes on the subject of her sensations and impressions during her journey down those smoke-filled stairs.

Twenty minutes talking to the Boss! What a thrill! And, sure enough, a few months later a Springsteen album was duly churned out, replete with husky, breathy phrases about "stairways filled with smoke / can hardly breathe / how'm I gonna get out?" Nice to see how the Master is able to achieve these striking effects ...

Now, I'm sure all the proceeds were donated to charity, and I don't doubt Mr. Springsteen's honest good intentions, but I just can't bring myself to take his "9/11" album very seriously. Why? Because he's just a bigger, slightly more professional version of Emmeline Grangerford, so far as I'm concerned. Shutting up would be the best thing he could do about 9/11, and that goes for most of the rest of us too. If you were trapped in there and got out, or know someone who was, or lost a friend, those might (to me) constitute legitimate prompts (or excuses) for penning some verses on the subject. If not, don't waste my time. I can watch the TV as well as you can.

One of the first pieces of writing preserved by the youthful Eric Blair (later to become famous as George Orwell) was an Ode on the Death of General Kitchener, drowned when his warship was sunk by a mine in 1916. He was not alone. Just about everyone in Britain seems to have found this watery death sufficiently striking to deluge the newspapers with similar poems (mostly along the lines of "we will fight on to avenge you ...")

I don't think Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen bothered, though - they had more important things to write about. Or perhaps one should say that they had more to think about. Facile verses full of patriotic cliches were, in that year of the Somme and Verdun, the last thing that anyone needed to hear. Similarly, a few less "Yahda yahda yahda 9/11 yahda yahda yahda I'm so angry yahda yahda yahda & kinda blue at the same time" poems might have provided a bit more room for thinking about whether it would be such a great idea to ... start a new war in the Middle East. Don't you think?

Perhaps it's foolish of me to think of poems as having any particular importance for anyone anytime when it comes to "serious" issues of politics and history (or natural disaster, for that matter). But, foolish or not, that's what I believe. It's for that reason that I'm not particularly into people churning out the equivalent of "Lord Kitchener is dead / the mighty warrior lies cold / with the coiling fishes / every hair of his moustache we shall avenge / on the dastardly foe" poems every time some new sensation comes up on the evening news.

It's not in the least that I have no sympathy for the tragic events in Japan and Christchurch (or NY in 2001, for that matter). It's just that I have nothing to say about them beyond what's being pumped out nineteen yards to the minute by every news medium known to man - until the next disaster sends all the reporters jetting off somewhere else. It's perhaps a little exigent of me, but I'm afraid I really do judge people as much by what they don't write as by what they do.

Second-hand emotions are, by and large, easy to access and not particularly difficult to express. Getting across something of how you actually feel about your life in this world is on a completely different order of complexity.

[Bruce Springsteen: The Rising (2002)]

Pania Press Giveaway!

Bronwyn is inviting people to enter a giveaway competition over at her blog Mosehouse Studio. All you have to do is leave a comment on her latest post by this Friday (24th September).

The prize is a copy of Pania Press's new publication: Michele Leggott's poetry chapbook Northland, available in a numbered, limited edition of seventy-five copies.

Go on! What do you have to lose? Alternatively, you could buy the book from the Pania site for $55, or (as usual) from Parsons Bookshop in Auckland.

I suspect this book will become a collector's item. How could it not? Once we've sold those sixty-odd copies, we don't plan to print any more.

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]