Heaney in Bloomington, pt. #2

Most poets don’t stand up to their work.  Meeting the writer, you can’t help but wish he compared favorably with his poems. If their work is defiant, they are timid and speechless at the lectern.  If the work seems intelligent on page, they are a show-off in person. It’s a rare writer who is as engaging in life as in words.  Luckily, Seamus Heaney is the genuine article. He read to a capacity audience at Indiana University which enjoyed every word.  A few highlights and the poems he read:

• He began with a note from S.S. Prawer about attending a Peter Huchel reading with Auden:

Auden beckoned me aside afterwards to complain that I had allowed Huchel to read far too many unfamiliar texts for the audience to take in. All poets, he said, were tempted to do that; what the chairman should do at such recitals is to suggest reading far fewer poems and reading most of them twice. I wonder whether he ever followed that rule himself? He never did in my limited experience.

Heaney apologized that he would probably read too many poems and would only read them once.

• He read “The Strand at Lough Beg,” speaking of a cousin, Colum McCartney, who was assassinated by the IRA in Aug. 1975. He seemed to have a soft spot for the poem, but discussed his own moral dilemma in writing it. He acknowledged “theoretical problems” with the piece, calling into question its “aestheticized violence.” He followed immediately with “Station Island” – where the same cousin is not merely eulogized, but actually resurrected to question Heaney about “The Strand at Lough Beg.” It was not a disavowal of the former poem, but rather his way of highlighting the difficulty of faithfully translating human experience into stylized poetry. The cousin accuses Heaney of capitalizing on his death and then not attending the funeral:
  

  You were there with poets when you got the word
  and stayed there with them, while your own flesh and blood
  was carted to Bellaghy from the Fews.
  They showed more agitation at the news
  than you did.

• He spoke about friendship with Milosz and Brodsky. He called Milosz “the greatest living poet when he was alive.” Milosz discovered a hard-won wisdom through intense study and his experience in the destruction of Warsaw. He wrote his poetry feeling guilty and with a tragic sense of history. Brodsky, on the other hand, was “not a sage like Milosz, but a star.” Igneous to Milosz’ sedimentary rock.
• Asked about his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, his sense of humor immediately came through: “Translation is a strong word for what I did with Philoctetes.”  The play fascinates Heaney for its thematic struggles – how to represent something (a nation, a cause) that you believe in and are enthusiastic for but nonetheless suspicious of? This challenge can often lead to political work without nuance.  “Politically pressing poetry can be shocking to the artistic sensibility.”
• He read two of his own translations, both of which he counted as “retro-justification” for “Digging,” the first poem in his first book.  The first translation, quoted from Sounding lines: The art of translating poetry:
  

  This is a translation of a poem that has been translated many times also. It is twelve lines long, about a scribe being tired of writing. The images in it are in the original; this is a faithful translation. The poet, for example, has a wonderful image of a beetle, being like ink, sparkling. This poem was printed in the Irish Times in June 1997. It is supposed to be written by St. Colmcille, who died on the seventh of June 597, so it was his 1400th anniversary and I thought, “OK, now we can do another translation.” Anyhow, there was a line in it that I was pleased with, a “beetle-sparkle of ink” – and they printed it “beetle-spark.” That really shows you how much can be lost in one syllable. I think it is proper to read the poem here because it is about writing. It wasn’t actually written in the sixth century, by the way – it was written around the twelfth century, but it pretends to have been written by Colmcille. Certainly it was written by a scribe:

  My hand is cramped from penwork.
  My quill has a tapered point.
  Its birdmouth issues a blue-dark
  Beetle spark of ink.
  Wisdom keeps welling in streams
  From my fine drawn, sallow hand:
  Riverrun on the vellum
  Of ink from green-skinned holly.
  My small runny pen keeps going
  Through books, through thick and thin
  To enrich the scholars’ holdings:
  Penwork that cramps my hand.

• And the second, “Poet to Blacksmith”:
  

  –Eoghan Rua O Suilliabhdin’s (1748-84) instructions to Seamus MacGerailt, translated from the Irish

  Seamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth,
  A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground,
  Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift,
  Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand.

• No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade,
  The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain,
  The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight,
  And I’ll work with the gang till I drop and never complain.

  The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked–
  I see it well shaped from the anvil and sharp from the file,
  The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted,
  And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.

Heaney read the following:

1. Digging
2. Personal Helicon
3. Mid-term Break
4. A Drink of Water
5. Sunlight
6. A Constable Calls
7. The Strand at Lough Beg
8. Station Island
9. Oysters
10. Clearances
11. The Skylight
12. At the Wellhead
13. St. Kevin and the Blackbird
14. Miracle
15. The Blackbird of Glanmore