Introduction: ‘And Every Evening Surprised that I Was Still Alive I Repeated Verses’

Abstract

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are three of the most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a connection to pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Within their work, they establish parallels and differences between Russia and Northern Ireland in terms of history, politics, literature and culture, while at the same time creating correlations between themselves and various Russian authors. In this way, the three writers set out to generate an innovative outlook on the Troubles and encourage the reader to examine the traditional discourse of the Northern Irish situation from an unconventional angle. Despite this common source of inspiration, their poetic approaches are very different. Heaney and Paulin allude directly to historical facts and personalities, or translate poems by Russian masters. McGuckian, on the contrary, constructs her works using a collage technique on the basis of unacknowledged quotations taken from English biographies dealing with Russian writers and politicians, or from prose texts by Russian authors in their English translation.