THE TRANSLATIONS OF SEAMUS HEANEY, edited by Marco Sonzogni
Over the past few years, Joe Biden has made much of quoting from Seamus Heaney’s luminous translation of Sophocles’ play “The Cure at Troy”:
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Hope and history don’t actually rhyme in any known human language, past or present. However, Sophocles’ words (carried over into modern English) resound for many people, reverberating against our own great longing. They provoke in modern readers what Heaney, in the same translation, calls a “double-take of feeling” — that moment when actors in a distant play become “self-revealing” — that is, when they become figures by which we come to know ourselves.
Heaney translated the poetry of others in large part to discover this self-revealing double-take. Among the most important things that we learn in Marco Sonzogni’s newly collected “The Translations of Seamus Heaney” — an immense and informative gathering of the late Nobel Prize winner’s translations — are the ways that Heaney, as translator, thought less of carrying over the so-called literal, and more of finding the pitch and resonance that help an audience receive a poem.
Sonzogni peppers both introduction and notes with liberal sprinklings of Heaney’s comments to this effect: “Verse translation is not all that different from original composition,” and “In order to get a project underway, there has be a note to which the lines, and especially the first lines, can be tuned.” In the same vein: “Until this register is established,” Heaney writes, “your words … cannot induce that blessed sensation of being on the right track, musically and rhythmically.”
Heaney, to his credit, repeatedly induces that blessed sensation, fast. Having done so, he introduces us, his latter-day readers, to poets from far-flung times or places whom we might not have otherwise met.
As a translator, Heaney was an omnivore, reading across time and culture, finding poets he carried over to English with a freshness and diversity of tone — voices ancient and contemporary, male and female, Romanian, Spanish, Dutch, Old Irish, Czech, Greek. Sometimes he forged projects for a small eon: His most ambitious, like “Beowulf,” spanned decades, and his work on the medieval Irish folk tale that became “Sweeney Astray” spanned at least 10 years. Bits of translated poems would get woven into books, echoing against poems he cast in his own voice: A sequence of elegies for those lost to the sectarian violence of Heaney’s Northern Ireland would be quickly followed by a bit of Dante’s Guelphs and Ghibellines, suffering in their own underworld. Heaney’s translations would thus triangulate and echo his contemporary elegies back through their mythic proportions.
Which is to say, all along, translation was a parallel career, a parallel track, that marched alongside Heaney’s long practice of writing poetry. In my mind, I imagine them as two horses, pulling the same huge cart of Heaney’s literary imagination.
It might not sound tremendously fun to read 600 pages of someone else’s translations, but Heaney’s voice is so unusually lucid that his translations are a triple gift. There’s the ravishing selection of poems, picked by Heaney, the shrewd curator. There’s the chance to hear Heaney again — almost as if we’re being given new poems by Heaney himself. There is also the chance to see how translation and poetry reverberate across a career.
Here for instance is Heaney’s translation of a short, vital verse by the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu:
ANGLE
Overhead, the traditional lines
Of cranes:
Sonnets for countrymen.
This image is fast and radiant. Though the poem is Sorescu’s, “sonnets for countrymen” also fits Heaney, who wrote more than a few sonnets for countrymen. (Indeed, this translation chimes against Heaney’s earlier poem “Requiem for the Croppies.”) Again and again there’s a congruence, even a covalence, in the subjects Heaney picks for his own poems and those he picks for translation. One enormous example: Heaney begins his career with “Digging,” which introduces a lifelong theme of excavation. “Digging” is about watching his father dig potatoes and about the way Heaney will and will not follow his father’s path. He ends his career by translating Book VI of the “Aeneid” — the very section in which Aeneas goes underground, to the underworld, to follow his father.
Between digging potatoes and digging the dead, Heaney resurfaced material from various literary underworlds, helping make them known in his voice and dialect and time. To understand just how much he did so, it can be instructive to set two translators against each other. In Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Le Squellette Laboureur” (a somewhat gory poem about admiring anatomical drawings at a bookshop on a Paris quay), the figures are “mannequins” that resemble “skeletons, digging bone on bone.” In contrast, Heaney’s translation adds a precise (and very Irish) angle of anguish to the over-labored bodies. For him, the figures are “navvies” with “red slobland” around their bones.
Sonzogni’s notes situate not only the poets Heaney chose to translate, but also the moments he chose to translate them. We learn that Heaney began his embrace of translation during 1970-71, when he’d been given reprieve from emergent violence in Northern Ireland to live as a guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he read translations that Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky were making of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He felt what he called “the impact of translation,” and upon his return to Ireland this worldly practice became one way that he faced a troubling era of national violence.
To the benefit of us all. As we face down our own troubling era, this book is a potent reminder of literary possibility and literary imagination on a large scale. I was glad to have the most ambitious translation projects gathered, “The Cure at Troy” among them. I felt grateful for the small ones, too — including a particularly lyrical take on the 19th- and 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, the 18th-century Gaelic poet Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain’s poem “Poet to Blacksmith” and a beautiful poem called “Inhabited by a Song,” by the still-living Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, whose verse begins:
The song isn’t mine,
It just passes through me sometimes,
Uncomprehended, untamed,
Lightly dressed in my name;
The way the gods in the old days
Would pass among people
Dressed in a cloud.
Here, Heaney dresses old songs in new clothes. He frees them to pass through us, too. “An original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations,” he is quoted as saying. Of course, for any new translation to be heard, to keep engendering, it paradoxically requires a perfect disguise of its own. Over and over again, to many varied verses, Heaney, with a touch both sure and shape-shifting, offers exactly that.
Tess Taylor’s most recent book of poetry is “Rift Zone.” An anthology she edited, “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them,” will be released in August.
THE TRANSLATIONS OF SEAMUS HEANEY | Edited by Marco Sonzogni | 687 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $50
No comments:
Post a Comment