Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  Baronies, parishes met where I was born. When I stood on the central stepping stone

  I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

  There was no way, given their historical circumstances, that O'Neill and Essex could cross to each other's side. Their march had turned into something irrevocably military. They were at the terminus, in an extreme sense of that word. There was no room for

  two truths. The brutality of power would have to decide the issue, not the play of mind. And yet as we think about the scene, we want each of them to be released from the entrapment of history. We want the sky to open above them and grant them release from their earthbound fates. And even if we know that such a release is impossible, we still desire conditions where the longed-for and the actual might be allowed to coincide. A condition where borders are there to be crossed rather than to be contested:

  Running water never disappointed. Crossing water always furthered something. Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

  I wrote the 'Terminus' poem in the mid-1980s, when the political situation in Northern Ireland was totally locked and blocked; in the post-hunger-strike world, when the IRA's campaign showed no sign of abating and the Thatcher government was prepared to live with what was termed an acceptable level of violence. Maybe that is one reason why the poem ends in stasis, with the Earl arrested in midstream and his opposite out of reach on the bank beyond him; the poem is saying that the inheritance of a divided world is a disabling one, that it traps its inhabitants and corners them in determined positions, saps their will to act freely and creatively. But before that moment and since that moment, things nevertheless were and have been different.

  Nearly thirty years ago, for example, long before I gave any thought to Basho or Terminus or Hugh O'Neill or the Sluggan drain and all that they might mean, I wrote a poem called 'The Other Side'. It began with a recollection of something a Presbyterian neighbour had said about a field of ours that marched a field of his and was divided from it by a little grassy stream, but then the poem went on to play with the notion of separation, of two sides of the march drain being like the two sides of the divided community in Northern Ireland—two sides divided by the way they pray, for example, and in little subtle but real ways (as I was suggesting earlier on) by the way they speak. The poem, however, ended up

  suggesting that a crossing could be attempted, that stepping-stones could be placed by individuals who wanted to further things.

  Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

  mournfully on in the kitchen

  we would hear his step round the gable

  though not until after the litany would the knock come to the door and the casual whistle strike up

  on the doorstep, 'A right-looking night', he might say, 'I was dandering by and says I, I might as well call.'

  But now I stand behind him

  in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

  He puts a hand in a pocket

  or taps a little tune with the blackthorn shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger's weeping.

  Should I slip away, I wonder, or go up and touch his shoulder and talk about the weather

  or the price of grass-seed?

  There were times during the last thirty years when I thought 'The Other Side' might be too consoling. Given the actual conditions on the roads and the streets, I thought it might be too benign, too tender in the face of assassination and explosion, too hopeful. And yet the subject had called words from my inner mind. They had dan-dered in and reminded me of the possible boundlessness of our sympathies. In the end they reminded me also of what Basho called 'the world of true understanding', which is always lying just beneath the surface and just beyond the horizon of the actual words we speak. They reminded me that the marching season

  need not just be the season of parades and provocation but that in the ground of the language and the ground beneath our feet there is another march which promises far more creative conditions for the mind and soul. For it seems to me that the confrontation between O'Neill and Essex represents where we arrive if we walk in a military manner, a condition of stasis and embittered rigor vitae that hampers the emergence of a better future; but the encounter at the march drain represents the possibility of going out on the stepping-stone in order to remove yourself from the hardness and fastness of your home ground. The stepping-stone invites you to change the terms and the tearmann of your understanding; it does not ask you to take your feet off the ground, but it refreshes your vision by keeping your head in the air and bringing you alive to the open sky of possibility that is within you. And that still seems something to write home about.

  Earning a Rhyme

  The translation of a text from the Irish language into English by an English-speaking Irish writer usually involves considerations other than the strictly literary. The additional contexts are historical, cultural and political, as when a Native American author turns to material in one of the original languages of the North American continent. In each case, a canonical literature in English creates the acoustic within which the translation is going to be heard; an overarching old colonial roof inscribed 'The land was ours before we were the land's' is made to echo with some such retort as 'You don't say!'

  The translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem by an English writer is a less complicated affair: what is missing is the element of answering back. The invasion of England by the Normans did bring about great changes in the language, but what occurred was a mutation rather than an obliteration. Native translations of the Old English deposits are acts of retrenchment rather than retaliation. They reinforce the English myth of continuity. They give new form to that from which English itself has been formed. The newness may be a disruption or countering of settled conventions, but it will not be a challenge to the deep structure. Hopkins's innovations, for example, though not strictly translations, did in fact employ an Anglo-Saxon stress in order to produce the double-effect I have just outlined: they went against the grain of contemporary English verse-craft in a completely salutary way, and at the same time they went with an older English grain of collective memory and belonging.

  When, however, John Millington Synge created a new mandarin idiom in his plays and in his prose book The Aran Islands, the purpose of the enterprise was very different. It may have

  looked the same: an attempt to refresh the language of English literature, one of those periodic returns to the spoken idiom which Donne and Dryden and Wordsworth had initiated in their times, and which T. S. Eliot would set in motion shortly after Synge's own death. But Synge was more concerned to found a new literary tradition than to renovate the old one. The collective memory and sense of belonging that Synge aspired to resuscitate were not English; on the contrary, his search for a new style was just one of the several moves afoot at the time to bring about 'the de-anglicization of Ireland'. For Synge to base his style upon an otherness of usage in the absent Irish language was therefore more than a mere exoticism: it constituted solidarity with all those other cultural and political efforts of a separatist nature that were happening in the 1890s.

  The Irish Literary Revival is by now, of course, a historical phenomenon. As are the Tudor Conquest of Ireland and the English colonization of North America. Yet in Northern Ireland in the late sixties and early seventies those remote occasions began to assume a new relevance. Questions about identity and cultural difference, which were being raised by Afro-Americans and Native Americans in the United States, were coming up again urgently and violently in Ulster; poets were being pressed, directly and indirectly, to engage in identity politics. The whole unfinished business of the England/Ireland entanglement presented itself at a local level as a conflict of loyalties and impulses, and as a result the search was on for images and analogies that could ease the strain of the present. The poets were needy for ways in which they could honestly express the realities of the local quarrel without turning that expression into yet
another repetition of the aggressions and resentments which had been responsible for the quarrel in the first place.

  It was under these circumstances that I began work in 1972 on Buile Suibhne, a Middle Irish text already well known because of Flann O'Brien's hilarious incorporation of its central character into the apparatus of At Swim-Two-Birds. And Buile Suibhne is indeed strange stuff—the tale of a petty king from seventh-century Ulster, cursed by a saint, transformed by the shock of battle into a de-

  merited flying creature and doomed to an outcast's life in the trees. But what had all this amalgam in verse and prose to do with me or the moment? How could a text engendered within the Gaelic order of medieval Ireland speak to a modern Ulster audience riven by divisions resulting from the final destruction of that order? The very meaning of the term 'Ulster' had been forced. Originally the name of an ancient Irish province and part of a native Gaelic cosmology, it had become through Plantation by the English in the 1620s and partition by the British Parliament in the 1920s the name of a six-county British enclave that resisted integration with the Republic of Ireland, and indulged in chronic discriminatory practices against its Irish nationalist minority in order to maintain the status quo. What had the translation of the tale of a Celtic wild man to do with the devastations of the new wild men of the Provisional IRA?

  My hope was that the book might render a unionist audience more pervious to the notion that Ulster was Irish, without coercing them out of their cherished conviction that it was British. Also, because it reached back into a pre-colonial Ulster of monastic Christianity and Celtic kingship, I hoped the book might complicate that sense of entitlement to the land of Ulster which had developed so overbearingly in the Protestant majority as a result of various victories and acts of settlement over the centuries. By extending the span of their historical memory into pre-British time, one might stimulate some sympathy in the unionists for the nationalist minority who located their lost title to sovereignty in that Gaelic dream-place.

  I did not, of course, expect Sweeney Astray so to affect things that political conversions would break out all over Northern Ireland. I did not even think of my intention in the deliberate terms which I have just outlined. I simply wanted to offer an indigenous text that would not threaten a unionist (after all, this was just a translation of an old tale, situated for much of the time in what is now County Antrim and County Down), but that would fortify a nationalist (after all, this old tale tells us we belonged here always and that we still remain unextirpated). I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would

  also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.

  II

  First time round I went at the work speedily and a little overbearingly. I was actually taking off from J. G. O'Keefe's parallel translation (published in 1913, volume 12 of the Irish Texts Society's editions) more than I was attending to the Irish itself. I was afraid that I might not finish the whole thing, so in order to forestall as far as possible the let-down of such a failure, I hurled myself at the task. My main pitch, day by day, was to keep up an animated rate of production. I could not afford to dwell upon any single eddy of difficulty or subtlety in case it slowed me down to a discouraging rate. Consequently, the first draft was mostly in free verse, bowling along in the malleable quatrains that had become a habit with me in the course of writing Wintering Out.

  First time round I was also far more arrogant in my treatment of the sense. That is to say, I arrogated to myself the right to follow suggestions in the original, to develop a line of association out of the given elements of the Irish rather than to set down an obedient equivalent. I allowed myself to import echoes from the English literary tradition, from the Bible, to perform in metaphor what the text delivered in statement. O'Keefe, for example, gave the following direct translation of part of a typical Sweeney lament:

  Though I be as I am to-night, there was a time when my strength was not feeble over a land that was not bad.

  On splendid steeds, in life without sorrow, in my auspicious kingship I was a good, great king.

  In 1972, however, I was in no mood to follow the drab, old-fashioned lead of this kind of thing. It became a much more jacked-up performance altogether:

  Though I am Lazarus, there was a time when I dressed in purple and they fed from my hand.

  I was a good king,

  the tide of my affairs

  was rising, the world

  was the bit in my horse's mouth.

  Robert Lowell's example was operative here. His trick of heightening the sense by boosting the diction and planting new metaphors into the circuit was not lost on me. Nor was his unabashed readiness to subdue the otherness of the original to his own autobiographical neediness. I began to inflate myself and my situation into Sweeney's, to make analogies between the early medieval Ulsterman who rocketed out of the North, as a result of vehement squabbles there among the petty dynasties, and this poet from County Derry who had only recently come south to County Wicklow for purposes of retreat and composure. It all contributed to a velocity that was its own reward. I cuffed the original with a brusqueness and familiarity that had not been earned but that gave me immense satisfaction. I was using Buile Suibhne as a trampoline. I should have been showing it off, but instead it was being pressed into service to show me off.

  Naturally, I did not feel this from day to day as I went baling through the stanzas. But I did have a nagging sense that the freedoms being exercised were not going to yield an integrated work. Riff by riff, it felt good, but there was no sense, as the pages piled up, of 'thoughts long knitted to a single thought'. I had wanted the pressure and accumulating oneness which is the reward—and justification—of a sustained writing; what I was getting was a series of lyric highs, exciting enough in themselves but not gathering

  force between themselves. Nevertheless, since my primary aim had become the completion of a version of the whole text, I forged ahead until that goal was achieved. Then I simply went flat, fell into a kind of post-composition tristesse. I knew that it would all have to be done over again but I had not the stamina or the relish necessary for a fresh start.

  I cannot remember when I got the idea that the stanzas should be recast in a more hard-edged, pointed way; that they should have the definition of hedges in a winter sunset; that they should be colder, more articulated; should be tuned to a bleaker note; should be more constricted and ascetic; more obedient to the metrical containments and battened-down verbal procedures of the Irish itself. At any rate, it was while I was spending a month on Long Island in 1979, after my first semester at Harvard, that I suddenly started one morning to reshape stanzas from scratch, rhyming them and keeping my eyes as much to the left, on the Irish, as to the right, on O'Keefe's unnerving trot.

  It was this closer inspection of the thickets of the Irish that made the second stint a different kind of engagement. Instead of the energy being generated by hurry and boldness, a certain intensity gathered through the steadier, more lexically concentrated gaze at individual words. Instead of the rhythmic principle being one of lanky, enjambed propulsion, the lines hurdling along for fear they might seize up, the unit of composition now became the quatrain itself and the metrical pattern became more end-stopped and boxed in.

  The eight lines I quoted earlier sounded now both more literal and more limited within the stanza-shape:

  Far other than to-night,

  far different my plight

  the times when with firm hand

  I ruled over a good land.

  Prospering, smiled upon, curbing some great-steed, I rode high, on the full tide of good luck and kingship.

  I still tried to get a self-igniting life between the words but kept them flintier and more niggardly than before. My favourite instance of the new asceticism comes at Section 73, where Sweeney praises the setting of a little monastery at Alternan. O'Keefe gives the place its
Irish name and renders the relevant stanza as follows:

  Cliff of Farannan, abode of saints, with many fair hazels and nuts, swift cold water rushing down its side.

  In my original handling of this, I took fire at the possibility of making the saintliness of the place more resplendent than either the original poet or the unflashy O'Keefe would have dreamed of:

  O the tabernacle of the hazel wood on the cliff of Farannan, and the cataract glittering like the stem of a chalice!

  Seven years later, the gilding came off and the exclamation was at least minus its 'O':