Kind Words Spoken in Welcome:The Translations of Seamus Heaney Spencer Hupp (bio) Translation is famously difficult. Or rather, its difficulty is famous and means a great deal of the talk on translation occurs in the negative, in what translations—and translators—can't do; their hesitant authority, their deference to the source material or, more often, their pillaging of it. Robert Lowell in his Imitations of 1961 includes poems in several languages he didn't read, and the collection was received by classicist Dudley Fitts as "fun; but schoolboys should read it in a salt mine." Most poets don't make translations, and those who do prefer them in the background, a project to return to when the poems dry up. Randall Jarrell's partial translation of Faust began in his despair at not writing enough poems: "A wicked fairy has turned me into a prose writer," he wrote his wife before disappearing into Goethe. Seamus Heaney seemed somehow immune to this problem. Translating wasn't a compromise or a distraction, a detour or a pastime; his life was for [End Page 357] and of poetry, and there's lots of it. And yet in addition to his own work, which numbered twelve collections in forty-four years, he did translate, and often, with five hundred pages in his Translations, plus two hundred more of commentary by its editor, Marco Sonzogni. Heaney affected a self-consciously public persona; he didn't despise preaching—not all the time—or hymns or paeans. Which means people read him. Joe Biden still repeats his favorite passage from Heaney's The Cure at Troy, the poet's riff on Philoctetes where "hope and history rhyme." But things shift when Philoctetes, mellowed by the likelihood of violence, opts to join the Greek siege of Troy: I'm like a fossil that's being carried away, I'm nothing but cave stones and damp walls and an old mush of dead leaves. The sound of waves in draughty passages. A cliff that's wet with spray on a winter's morning. I feel like the sixth sense of the world. It's a strange, numinous gesture, in line with the play's Auden epigraph: "For in my arms I hold / The Flower of the Ages, / And the first love of the world." The iambic lift of "the sound of waves in drafty passages" provides a buoyancy which scans as workmanlike, not workaday—crafty, not crafted—never the "grotesque, stilted, archaic language that no one ever spoke and that no one but translators ever wrote" that Randall Jarrell warned against. Instead, Heaney makes the poem hum, and almost sing, across two millennia of cultural and linguistic drift. English translation is itself a dialect, a third code, a bureaucratic compromise between two languages with an authoritarian if sometimes admirable economy of means—major-key, unprepossessing, civil. "Old mush of dead leaves," for instance, isn't heroic or quite [End Page 358] colloquial. Heaney renders his Philoctetes as an animal-original, a noble Caliban who thinks, and speaks, in plain and unreal clauses: "I'm a fossil … I'm nothing but cave stones … The sound of waves … I feel like the sixth sense of the world." Heaney quietly championed this kind of complication almost everywhere in his writing. It's easy to think—or lapse into thinking—that Heaney affected a plain style, dotting it with local color, awaking sometimes into a chirruping provincial diction fitted with interesting words like "thole" or "hirpling." These Translations help cede Heaney's real interest in capital-L language with the accompanying tack and gear, seeking after, as he wrote in his introduction to Beowulf, "a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some prepolitical, prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain." This took him first to the languages closest to him, not only the older English of Beowulf but the pre-Roman Celtic of Irish and Scots. Here is Heaney's version of Robert Henryson's "The Cock and the Jasper," from a fifteenth-century round of fables in Scots...
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Jun 13, 2024
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