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Wintering Out with Irish PoetryMaria Tymoczkoa

a University of Massachusetts Amherst, USAPublished online: 21 Feb 2014.

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ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

The Translator. Volume 6, Number 2 (2000), 309-317 ISBN 1-900650-31-2

Revisiting the Classics

Wintering Out with Irish PoetryAffiliation and Autobiography in English Translation

MARIA TYMOCZKOUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Sweeney Astray. Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984.viii+85 pp. ISBN 0-374-27221-2 (hbk). First published 1983 by Field Day.

In 1972 Seamus Heaney began translating Buile Suibhne, an anonymous Mid-dle Irish narrative dating principally from the 12th century, about Suibhne, aking of northern Ireland. As a result of a curse by a Christian saint, Suibhnesuffered battle shock at the great historical engagement at Mag Rath, becamemad, fled from his territory into the wild, and turned poet. Heaney began thetranslation in September 1972, during the early years of the Troubles in North-ern Ireland; he had finished his collection Wintering Out (1972) and thetranslation was taken up after his decision to commit himself to the role ofpoet and writer. Spurred in part by the massacre of Bloody Sunday on 30January 1972, Heaney resigned his professorial position at Queen’s Univer-sity, Belfast, and moved from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland,taking up residence in Wicklow in a house lent to him by Ann Saddlemyer, anoted scholar of Anglo-Irish literature. Working from the scholarly Englishversion of the tale by J. G. O’Keeffe, Heaney translated steadily through April1973, even as he began his next collection of poetry, North (1975). The trans-lation was then set aside for several years, but Heaney picked it up again in1979 after his first semester of teaching at Harvard; he revised the poetryextensively and published the translation with Field Day in 1983 under thetitle Sweeney Astray. How does one evaluate and assess such a translation,which by now is not only a representation of a canonical early Irish narrative,but has also become a canonical part of contemporary Anglo-Irish literature,a central element in the work of a Nobel Prize winning poet?

First, of course, there is a pragmatic evaluation, centred on the very exist-ence of Sweeney Astray. Any medievalist and teacher of Irish literature, as Iam, must be grateful that Heaney turned his attention to Buile Suibhne in thefirst place and brought into existence a translation that offers an alternativerepresentation to that of O’Keeffe, who edited and translated the tale for the

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Irish Texts Society in 1913. There are very few scholars of early Irish, a fac-tor that partially explains why the tale had not been translated in the interveningyears before Heaney took up his work.1 The fact that Heaney later went on tohave such an illustrious and high-profile poetic career means that this ex-tremely interesting early Irish literary work has been brought to the attentionof the world in ways that otherwise would not have occurred. Such attentionis essential to a text’s – and even a literature’s – survival, its Überleben asWalter Benjamin astutely argued in his now classic essay, ‘The Task of theTranslator’.

But an evaluation of the translation does not stop there. I look at SweeneyAstray secondly as a historical document and attempt to assess it as such. It is,for starters, a document that can tell us much about Seamus Heaney himself.For over two millennia Western poets have translated as a way of learningtheir craft, and it is no coincidence that Heaney took this route at a point in hislife when he committed himself professionally to writing. Heaney was, more-over, under the influence of Robert Lowell, and Lowell had used translationas a mode of poetic creation in his various translations, notably Imitations(1961), which had had a great impact on both poets and readers of poetry ofthe time. Thus, Sweeney Astray tells something about Heaney’s means of es-tablishing himself as a poet. It is significant in this regard that Heaney chosethe title he did, subtitling the work ‘A Version from the Irish’: nowhere on thetitle page did he indicate the name of the Irish work he was translating nor didhe claim the role of translator.2 Thus, Heaney allied his activity more closelywith Lowell’s mode of creation than with that of Irish scholars, includingO’Keeffe, whose English Heaney depended upon.3

At the same time the translation is an index of Heaney’s struggle with thequestion of nationality. When Heaney took up his translation, Dublin was thecentre of Irish intellectual life; writers from Northern Ireland, British citizensas they are still, had been somewhat marginalized from the cultural changesachieved in the state of Ireland in fits and starts during the fifty years afterindependence.4 One can surmise that Heaney felt a number of pressures toprove his ‘Irishness’ – his commitment to the dispossessed of Ireland ratherthan its colonizers – stemming not only from his British citizenship, but alsofrom his decision to publish with Faber and Faber, a London publishing house,for a British audience. Moreover, he had made a decision to fly south, fleeingthe turmoil in the north, refusing a partisan stance in the sectarian struggle.Heaney’s later gesture of refusal to be labelled as British in An Open Lettershould not blind us to this problematic of affiliation in the early 1970s whenHeaney began working on Buile Suibhne. Translation of Irish literature intoEnglish offered a partial solution for Heaney, for translation and rewritinghad been a mainstay of Irish patriots and poets, from Davis, Mangan, andFerguson, to Yeats, Gregory, Clarke, and Kinsella. By translating a majorIrish literary work into English, Heaney inserted himself into this lineage of

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committed Irish writers and nationalists, without compromising the interna-tional significance of the gesture that linked his work to Lowell.5

As a historical document, Sweeney Astray also offers evidence about thepolitics of the time and its impact on various forms of cultural production.Heaney chose to translate a narrative about a figure from the north of Ireland,in part to integrate himself as northerner into the main line of Irish literaturein the 20th century. Ironically for Heaney, stories of the chief northern herohad already been translated by a contemporary, namely the stories of CúChulainn which are the principal subject of Thomas Kinsella’s great decolon-izing translations published as The Táin by Dolmen Press in 1969. Kinsella’stranslations had both asserted a tradition of heroism for Ireland and alsodeconstructed patriotic views of Irish heroism that had been dominant since1890. Even if Kinsella’s translations had not existed, however, Heaney mightnot have chosen to translate stories about Cú Chulainn, for early in the re-newal of hostilities in Northern Ireland, Cú Chulainn had been appropriatedas a symbol of violence by both sides of the conflict, figured, for example, inwall murals in both Catholic and Protestant partisan areas. This use of CúChulainn further complicated the position of poets from Northern Ireland whowished to indicate their Irishness and their northern affiliation through the useof elements from literature in Irish, yet who wished to distance themselvesfrom the violence, as Heaney did. One result, as I remember from conversa-tions with Irish poets at the time, was to denigrate Cú Chulainn – to reject himas a useful symbol – for being too violent, too ‘masculine’, in favour of more‘feminine’ models like some of the female figures of Irish literature or, infact, Suibhne. There are traces of this discourse in Heaney’s poetry and es-says. One might see here some self-serving invidiousness on the part of poetscompeting for public recognition and patronage, in view of the tremendouscultural reception of Kinsella’s translations. However that might be, it is clearthat Heaney needed some other symbolic figure to work with than Cú Chulainn.In fact Heaney not only translated Buile Suibhne, he went on to developSweeney as a personal symbol in a number of poems, notably those in‘Sweeney Redivivus’, the final section of Station Island (1984), which ap-peared after the publication of Sweeney Astray. In these poems, the poeticmadman who flees violence and goes to live in the refuge of nature, endingup in the south of Ireland, becomes a symbol of Heaney himself.6 Heaneyrefined his relationship to this symbolic other throughout the ten-year periodthat the translation of Buile Suibhne occupied him.

Third, I evaluate a translation like Sweeney Astray in terms of its represen-tation of the source text, as a metastatement about that source text. BuileSuibhne is a very interesting text, posing many questions for readers, criticsand translators. Like most early Irish narratives, Buile Suibhne is composedin prose with inset poetry spoken by the principal characters, and one of theattractions of this story is that it contains many moving poems about ‘nature’.

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One must ask, however, whether the text is one text,7 how it was compiledand why, what its historical purview was, and how it reflects the culturalproduction of its time (including why it was recast and recopied in the 17thand 18th centuries) – in short, what the cultural functions of the text were.There are thematic issues to be faced as well, including the relationship be-tween heroic secular culture and Christianity (Suibhne is cursed by one saintand given refuge and sanctity by another), the character of early Irish saints,the meaning of madness, and the relationship of early Irish culture to ‘na-ture’ (because many ‘nature’ poems are spoken by Suibhne in the tale, thetranslator must decide the sensibility that this interest in natural phenomenareflects, disambiguating it from the views of Wordsworth and Romanticism,for example).8

On these matters Sweeney Astray is almost totally silent and useless. Per-haps the most frustrating aspect of Heaney’s translation, one that makes itvery difficult for me to use it as a teaching text, is its lack of direction withrespect to the source text. Even as he worked, Heaney (1989:18) suspectedthat the result would not be “an integrated text”; though he tried to correct thesituation in his final revisions, the centripetal impulse remains. For example,at times a Romantic sensibility toward nature is blithely assumed, right downto the pathetic fallacy; at other times Heaney seems to flirt with an alternatesense of nature in the text, but does not realize this sensibility in a sustainedway. He does not seem to have worked with a conscious – or even consistentunconscious – set of translation decision procedures with respect either to thetextual questions or the thematic ones raised by Buile Suibhne. NeitherHeaney’s translation nor his paratextual materials address the largest ques-tions raised by his source text, with the consequence that Heaney’s work doesnot result in an apprehensible interpretation of and metastatement about thesource text in its own terms. The interpretive features one discerns – for ex-ample his insistent introduction of lexical items pertaining to birds (e.g.perched, launched himself, flew, cooped up, roosted) that are not found in theIrish text, emphasizing Sweeney’s bird-like nature – return us more to Heaney’slife and his “autobiographical neediness” with respect to flight than to BuileSuibhne. The translation atomizes, persistently keeping the focus on Heaney’sown poetic talent per se.9 The reader at times even has a sense of reading acollection of related poems more than a cohesive narrative text. Indeed, Heaney(1983:intro) originally considered only translating the poems of the text, andone sees traces of this dominant interest in the total effect of the publishedversion.10 Thus, Sweeney Astray offers little penetrating vision of the sourcetext in its entirety – ironically so for a translation of a text about poetic vision.

It is very difficult for a culture to move toward decolonization, toward anautonomous cultural identity, particularly after a long history of political andcultural oppression such as that suffered by Ireland at the hands of England. Ifthe former colony has adopted the language of the colonizers, it is especially

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risky for writers to attempt to decentre the dominant culture, for decentredtexts are often irritating in their refusal of the dominant norms of the formercolonial power and can alienate the dominant readership. For more than fiftyyears, Irish writers from the Republic have attempted to work toward such adecolonized stance in their work in English and also in their translations intoEnglish. An evaluation of a translation on the third level will look not only atthe ways that the translation represents the source text specifically, but alsothe ways that it stands metonymically as a representation of the source litera-ture and source culture as a whole. Here again, although Heaney speaks of theimportance of “form feeling” in a translation (1989:18-20), this interest forhim was apparently restricted to the poems per se; either Heaney is ignorantof the formal features that distinguish literature in Irish from English litera-ture or, more likely, he backs away from representing them in his translation,choosing instead to assimilate the text to dominant English narrative normsso as to avoid the risk of dislocating and decentring his dominant readers. Wesee Heaney’s conservative stance in the elimination of most of the repetitionand redundancy inherited from an oral esthetic or textual tradition, the omis-sion of proper names (including many place names, patronymics andgenealogies, thus muting the historicized surface that is characteristic of Irishtales), and the enjambment of stanzas instead of a staccato progression char-acteristic of Irish verse. Moreover, Heaney abridges the end of the tale severelyin order to construct a more emphatic climax that will satisfy readers schooledin English literature, and he omits Irish cultural concepts, even those like geis(similar to ‘taboo’) or Samhain (the Irish name for the Celtic new year festi-val on November 1) which have become generalized in most Irish writing,choosing instead standard English lexical items for his translation of thesecultural concepts. These assimilated representations in Sweeney Astray makeit comparable in many respects to translations at the turn of the 20th century;indeed, Sweeney Astray represents possibly one of the lowest levels of com-mitment to Irish formalism undertaken in a literary translation of an Irish textin Ireland since 1922 (see Tymoczko 1999), despite the fact that Heaney con-sciously attempted to revise his 1972-73 version of the translation towardgreater fidelity to Irish poetics when he took the text up again in 1979. It isalso one of the most timid representations of Irish cultural difference sinceIrish independence. Rather than the decolonized cultural confidence found inrecent translations and writing from the Republic of Ireland, Heaney’s trans-lation betrays a diffidence that suggests the remnants of a lingering colonizedmentality.11 If these characteristics of his translation – as of his poetry – are afactor in his having received the Nobel Prize, it strikes a discouraging note fortranslators and writers from former colonies who are attempting to decentredominant cultural domains.

A fourth level of evaluation – a comparison of the actual words chosen bythe translator with the words of the source text and the words of previous

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translators – is beyond the scope of this review. But I have hinted at the shapesuch an assessment would take in the foregoing examples, for ultimately thisfourth level is inseparable from the question of representation inasmuch asrepresentations are created in large measure by choice of words. If there werespace here, such an examination would be engaged both to deepen the histori-cal assessment of the translation and to show how the translation constructs(or in this case fails to construct) structured representations of the source text,of Irish literature, and of Irish culture as distinct and different. Such an assess-ment takes time and patience, linguistic sophistication as well as critical skillin reading texts. One might be tempted to offer symptomatic indications ofthe arguments with a few readings, but in fact a sufficient mass of data mustbe mobilized in order to ground one’s points on this level of evaluation. If Iwere to begin on the task in this case, however, I’d start by looking at thetreatment of the Irish personal names and place names, which Heaney hasgenerally assimilated to English orthographical and phonological standards(e.g. Sweeney for Suibhne). Although he indicates that a major interest in thetale for him was topographical (1983:intro), the placenames in his translation,like the personal names, have again and again been anglicized. His practicehere departs radically from decolonized standards of representation that evolvedin the Republic of Ireland after 1922 (cf. Tymoczko 1999:ch. 8), and the po-litical implications of Heaney’s anglicization of names are spelled out in yetanother Field Day production, Brian Friel’s Translations, where a characternotes that “it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguisticcontour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact” (1981:43). Heaney’sstrategy for translating names again suggests that a dominant English audi-ence is the intended readership that Heaney consciously or unconsciously wrotefor. He partially explains the motives underlying his translation decisions insaying that he wanted “to offer an indigenous text that would not threaten aUnionist ... and that would fortify a Nationalist” (1989:16). What is notice-able here is Heaney’s level of temerity in judging what would threaten aUnionist reader, namely a level of linguistic representation that had been wellestablished in Irish culture by the Irish Revival at the beginning of the 20thcentury.

One of the less attractive aspects of Heaney’s translation is his implicitdenigration in paratextual materials of J. G. O’Keeffe, whose literal andscholarly translation Heaney depended on more than the Irish text itself. Heaneyrefers to O’Keeffe’s translation repeatedly as a ‘trot’ or a ‘crib’ and in onearticle even misspells his predecessor’s name, calling him “D. G. O’Keefe”(1989:13). Heaney’s stance is not unique in Ireland, but I find it ungenerous,to say the least, to fault the work of scholarly forebears whose ground-breakingeditions and translations make our own work possible, particularly as in thecase of Heaney when one’s linguistic skills may not be up to the challenges ofdealing with very difficult linguistic materials independently. This attitude is,however, of a piece with Heaney’s translation method; his text implicitly and

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explicitly keeps the focus squarely on Heaney’s own interests, achievements,poetics, politics and struggles with violence in his own life. Thus, SweeneyAstray is the epitome of a translation that operates almost entirely within thesystem of the target culture, paradoxically offering little insight into earlyIrish literature and culture in its own right.

It will be interesting to see evaluations of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf asthey emerge over time, to see how his most recent translation reflects Heaney’sstruggle with his Britishness, to see whether he has a deeper cultural engage-ment with his Old English text than he does with the early Irish text that hechose to translate. It is provocative to reflect upon Heaney’s implicit politicaltrajectory in the almost three decades since he began work on Sweeney Astray:to see that in his translations he now celebrates British heroism where earlierhe deigned to celebrate Irish heroism, choosing instead an Irish work thatrefuses violence, combat and affiliation with the tribe.

MARIA TYMOCZKODepartment of Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts atAmherst, 309 South College, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. tymoczko@complit.umass.edu

Notes

1. Although no full translation of the narrative appeared during the period, anumber of translations of specific poems had appeared, parts of the tale hadbeen translated by Flann O’Brien and incorporated into At Swim-Two-Birds,and an unpublished dramatic version of the story, entitled The Frenzy ofSweeny, had been written by Austin Clarke.

2. Although in later writing Heaney acknowledged that the work was a trans-lation, he here seems to make the distinction between translation and version,following dominant criteria for translations in twentieth-century Westernculture that a translator know both source and target language well, and thata translator adhere closely to the source text. In fact, his translation prac-tices are well within the range of variation found in English-languagetranslations by poet-translators and by translators associated with the Ameri-can translation workshop movement. Moreover, many cultures have adoptedtranslation procedures that turn on the use of an intermediate literal transla-tion or an intermediate language by a translator who does not (fully) masterthe source language.

3. Heaney (1989:17-18) explicitly acknowledges the indebtedness of his firstversion of the translation to Lowell which resulted, he indicates, in a “jacked-up performance” where “voltage” was added to the diction, new metaphorswere planted, and there was a readiness to “subdue the otherness of the origi-nal” to his own “autobiographical neediness”. He notes that he was usingBuile Suibhne as a “trampoline”.

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4. The Republic, for example, reformed its educational systems, while thosein Northern Ireland still remained more British and more ‘colonialist’ intheir outlines. Moreover, in the state of Ireland, literature in Irish was morevalorized as the centre of the literary system than was the case in the north.

5. In an essay about translating Buile Suibhne, Heaney (1989:13) explicitlysays that he was following in the footsteps of those Irish writers who “‘sangto sweeten Ireland’s wrong’”, naming as his predecessors also CharlotteGuest [sic], Douglas Hyde and Frank O’Connor, as well as some of theothers noted here. We should observe that affiliation with American modelsof poetry, represented by Lowell in Heaney’s case, also offered Irish poetsin the postwar period another means of breaking their dependence on Brit-ish cultural models.

6. Despite the irony of the contrast between them: Heaney laments being dis-placed from his element by the command to obey history, where Suibhnelaments being displaced from history by the command to deal with the ele-ments.

7. Most early Irish texts, Buile Suibhne included, show different linguistic lev-els, with the poetry generally being earlier than the prose. O’Keeffe doesnot attempt to date the language of Buile Suibhne in such detail, but at leastone poem attributed to Suibhne dating from the 8th or 9th century has sur-vived in another manuscript, and there is a reference in the tenth-centuryBook of Aicill to the existence of poems attributed to Suibhne (see O’Keeffe1913:xvi-xvii).

8. Heaney (1980:186) suggests that the early nature poetry springs from pa-gan roots, “deep unconscious affiliation to the old mysteries of the grove”,but does not elaborate the implications of this view for the tale. For anotherapproach to some of these issues, see Tymoczko (1983).

9. Heaney also admitted in an interview for BBC that he chose Sweeney forthe rhyme with his own name. See Hardy (1994:157).

10. His major revision of the translation also concentrated on the poetry ratherthan the text as a whole (Heaney 1989:18ff.).

11. In Station Island, speaking through his poetic persona, Heaney implicitlyacknowledges these issues, pleading (1984:80) “Forgive the way I have livedindifferent– / forgive my timid circumspect involvement”, and again ex-postulating (ibid.:85) “I hate how quick I was to know my place. / I hatewhere I was born, hate everything / That made me biddable and unforth-coming”. Heaney attempts to assuage his guilt by invoking James Joycewho is ventriloquized to say “That subject people stuff is a cod’s game”(Heaney ibid.:93), but in fact Joyce was deeply engaged with Irish literatureand a project of decolonization, and his interest in the Irish language in-creased throughout his lifetime (see Tymoczko 1994). Heaney’s stance hasbeen epitomized in some literary criticism by the title of his own poem,‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ (North, 1975), written as Heaney wastranslating Buile Suibhne.

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References

Friel, Brian (1981) Translations, London: Faber & Faber.Hardy, Barbara (1994) ‘Meeting the Myth: Station Island’, in Tony Curtis (ed)

The Art of Seamus Heaney, Dublin: Wolfhound, 149-63.Heaney, Seamus (1989) ‘Earning a Rhyme: Notes on Translating Buile Suibhne’,

in Rosanna Warren (ed) The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, Bos-ton: Northeastern University Press, 13-20.

------ (1984) Station Island, London: Faber & Faber.------ (1980) Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, New York: Farrar, Straus,

Giroux.O’Keeffe, J. G. (ed and trans) (1913) Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne),

being The Adventures of Suibhne Geilt: A Middle-Irish Romance, London:Irish Texts Society.

Tymoczko, Maria (1999) Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Lit-erature in English Translation, Manchester: St. Jerome.

------ (1994) The Irish “Ulysses”, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of Cali-fornia Press.

------ (1983) ‘“Cétamon”: Vision in Early Irish Seasonal Poetry’, Éire-Ireland18(4):17-39.

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