Of Furies and Forgers: Ekphrasis, Re-vision, and Translation in Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon's poetry has long been noted for a broad range of intertextual procedures that exert a fundamental structuring effect on his work. Quotation is as frequent in his poetry as explicit allusion to other writers, their lives and their texts. This finds a correlation in the self-referential dimension of his poetry, which "resists fixity" because Mahon constantly rewrites himself, re-presenting his poems in successively altered versions.¹ His commitment to translation is also akin to this interest in rewriting: both poetry and drama have attracted Mahon's attention in this respect, as shown by his translations of several French poets—Gérard Nerval and Philippe Jaccottet, for example—as well as by his versions of both Classical and French plays by Euripides, Molière, and Racine.²

Mahon's attention to other artists and to the rewriting of other texts is not contained within the boundaries of the verbal, for other media are also prone to representations whose rationale is not fundamentally different from Mahon's practice of revision, glossing, and translation. The breadth of his interest in the pictorial is apparent in the reproductions of paintings, from different periods and traditions chosen for the covers of some of his books.³ His poems about paintings and painters confirm that interest. They include poems on the biographical circumstances and specific paintings by, among others, van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Pieter de Hooch. Indeed, Mahon has avowed an attraction to the visual in the construction of his verse:

WILLIAM SCAMMELL: How did you arrive at the stanza form you use in 'The Hunt by Night'? Borrowed, invented, evolved?

DEREK MAHON: Evolved, I seem to remember, very slowly, word by word, as if putting paint on a canvas: staining the silence, improving (I hope) on the blank page. Poetry, I often think, is a visual art among other things.⁴

Mahon highlights, thus, his condition as a practitioner of a mode as old as Western writing itself and popular enough for "at least one poem about a work of visual art [to have] come from almost every major poet of our time"—a diagnosis that, in fact, holds true for contemporary Irish poetry. ⁵ Irish poets as diverse as Durcan and Heaney, or Muldoon and McGuckian, have also tried their hand at ekphrasis—at creating poetry by way of describing a painting or sculpture.

The study of ekphrastic poetry often proves that, rather than being loosely incidental, such verbal representations of the visual tend to put in evidence the distinctive lineaments of a poetic. This aesthetic centrality is buttressed by a range of historical and epistemological factors at work both on poets and readers, whose broader consequence for literary study has over the past two decades been considered from various theoretical standpoints by, among others, W. J. T. Mitchell, Murray Krieger, and James A. W. Heffernan.⁶ The study of the ekphrastic poetry of Derek Mahon proves its heuristic value by foregrounding the connections between his verbal explorations of the visual and such other characteristic aspects of his work as revision, translation, and a pervasive intertextuality—all integrated in a coherent writerly practice.

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A text from which this practice can be productively approached is one of Mahon's best-known poems, "Courtyards in Delft," first published in 1981 in a small collection by the same title and offered the following year again as the opening poem of The Hunt by Night. The poem has the double distinction of being one of the most conspicuous examples of Mahon's habit of revision as well as the best-known instance of ekphrasis in his work. The poem's ekphrastic design is made explicit from the start, since readers who might fail to recognize the pictorial reference in the title "Courtyards in Delft" are given the name of the painter Pieter de...