Heaney Translating Heaney: Coupling and Uncoupling the Human Chain

Translation is a central element in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Early in his poetic career, he found ways of locating in other languages, or even other media, particular sites of anxiety or tension in his own circumstances and using his responses to, or translations of, those sites to record and interrogate those tensions. The photographs of P. V. Glob in The Bog People; the conflicted circumstances of Sweeney, the medieval Irish king driven astray; and the peculiar political tensions at the core of Greek drama have all provided Heaney with opportunities to explore, albeit obliquely, the psychic and political consequences of living in the midst of division and civil violence. At times, Heaney has been criticized for the liberties he takes in his translations, especially his versions of Sophocles, at one point being accused of bleaching out all political ambiguities in Antigone (Wills n. pag.) and at another of using Philoctetes as a kind of knacker’s yard, a handy source of raw material for his Muse (Turner 131).¹

Heaney himself does not seem to have been particularly disturbed by these criticisms and in many ways saw Robert Lowell’s 1961 Imitations as a permission-granting exemplar. In a diverting exchange with Robert Hass discussing various approaches to the act of translation, Heaney proposes an analogy with the strategies employed by the Vikings in their early assaults on the islands of England and Ireland—one involving a raid, the other a settlement. As he says, “Now, a good motive for translation is the Raid. You go in—it is the Lowell method—and you raid Italian, you raid German, you raid Greek, and you end up with booty that you call Imitations.” In contrast, “there is the Settlement approach in which one enters the oeuvre, colonizes it, takes it over—but you stay with it and it changes you a little bit. Robert Fitzgerald stayed with Homer, Lattimore stayed with him, Bob Hass has stayed with Czeslaw Milosz. I stayed with Beowulf.” Heaney then goes on to describe his raid on Dante when he translated the Ugolino section of the Inferno in Field Work. He admits that he added imagery and thought that his translation did not have the smooth fluency of the original. Even more, when he thinks back to his initial translation of the passage from Book VI of The Aeneid where Aeneas has to find the golden bough, he describes that translation as “a raid, and it led into a book where I met my father in a poem called ‘Seeing Things.’” But then Heaney adds a significant explanatory afterthought: “As ever in the raid system, there was something out there in the other language that I needed” (Heaney and Hass n. pag.).

In this essay, I am specifically interested in the way Heaney weaves and transposes translations into the poems of Human Chain, particularly in his grafting of the circumstances of the original texts to crucial situations and tensions in his own life. Even more, it seems Heaney wishes to expand and modify the entire notion of translation itself so that the poems he finds in other languages become an avenue for reprising and addressing unresolved anxieties in his own formation. In this sense, the “need” these translations seem to address in this, his final volume, is considerably more personal and autobiographical than in earlier Heaney poems. At times, this translation, or transference from one circumstance or location to another, seems straightforward. For example, “A Herbal,” a sequence of poems after Eugène Guillevic’s “Herbier de Bretagne,” becomes in Heaney’s translation a herbal of Derry, as the graveyard flowers of Brittany become the whin and docken and broom of Northern Ireland, imparting a local flavor and fragrance to the self-elegaic memento mori ambiance of the sequence (Human Chain 35–44; hereafter HC). But even here, it is clear that, in paring Guillevic’s already sparse and elemental evocation of the Brittany landscape by almost a hundred lines and carefully rearranging the closing sections of the sequence, Heaney is more interested in what Denise Levertov calls in her translations...