The Greeks in Ireland: Irish Poets and Greek Tragedy

Abstract

The successful translation of ancient Greek drama, and the adaptation of such work for the modern stage, has been an occupation as attractive as it is difficult for many European writers in the present century. Whether poets rather than playwrights are especially suited to this tricky and demanding task is open to debate. Robert Browning's very Victorian Agamemnon has not been without its dubiously accomplished heirs in more modern times, and the obviously bold translations of the Oresteia by Robert Lowell or Tony Harrison may well come to seem just as curiously of their period in due course. A poet's Aeschylus, like a poet's Sophocles or Euripides, cannot succeed solely on the strength of its ancient source, and the authority of the translation lies not in fidelity to an original, but in the harnessing of that original in the service of a recognizable and distinctive poetic design. Lowell's Oresteia serves to deepen and complicate the resonances of his already original poetic voice; Harrison's, likewise, invests the ancient material in a stylistic project with direct connections to the poet's 'own' writing. In Browning's case, the utter dependence of the translation upon the verbal world of the translator is all too apparent; as W. B. Stanford, the Dublin Professor of Greek, is said to have remarked, it is a good thing that the Aeschylus is there to help explain what Browning meant. None of this need necessarily be taken as a criticism of poets' translations, or of these particular poets' translations. It does serve, however, as a necessary preliminary to consideration of the place of translation from the ancient Greek (and in particular Greek drama) amongst modern Irish poets. Here, questions of poetic authority are inevitably to the fore; moreover, the authority of the ancient texts themselves is brought to bear on contemporary conditions through the medium of personal poetic voice. The topic of the present essay is the employment of ancient Greek dramatic material by some Irish poets, and a number of its principal exhibits come from the years after 1980, and from poets whose origins are in Northern Ireland. Two translations in particular are of great interest: that of Sophocles' Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney, to