Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Europe

On 1 May 2004, the day when ten new member states from Eastern Europe joined the European Union, an enlargement ceremony took place in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. One of its high points was the moment when Seamus Heaney read ‘Beacons at Bealtaine’, a villanelle written especially for the occasion:

So on a day when newcomers appear

Let it be a homecoming and let us speak

The unstrange word, as it behoves us here,

Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare

Like ancient beacons signalling, peak to peak,

From middle sea to north sea …

The reading was a symbolic event, not only for the socio-political climate of the new Europe, but also for the poet who in his poems and critical texts had already undertaken themes of European identity, its genealogy, dangers and antinomies, and explored (in a lyrical fashion) the chronological and spatial parameters of the continent and its millennia-long tradition. Recognized early as an important Irish voice, a medium of both a minority culture and a suppressed language, Heaney may today be called a poet of Europe – not an obvious attribution, perhaps, but justified in the light of many poems, essays, occasional statements and gestures like the one in Phoenix Park.

The European context of his work is discreet but persistent. At the same time, especially when we read his work in its entirety, it is quite ambivalent. Probably the main reason why this is so is the fact that for Heaney the cultural legacy of Europe, from its ancient and Mediterranean genealogies to the Northern modernist revaluations, was mediated by the English language. Like his great predecessor James Joyce, Heaney was aware of the infinite complexities and ambiguities involved in one’s self-identification in a speech not one’s own yet not utterly foreign. So when he praised the Joycean attempt ‘to marginalize the imperium … by replacing the Anglocentric Protestant tradition with a newly forged apparatus of Homeric correspondences, Dantesque scholasticism and a more or less Mediterranean, European, classically endorsed world-view’ (Heaney, 1995: 199), he must have noticed the bitter irony of Joyce’s words: after all, the act of replacement is accomplished in the dialect of the imperium. Besides, Heaney’s Northern Irish credentials provided him with a sense of being dramatically suspended between different linguistic, cultural, religious or social lineages and trajectories, each of which seemed equally valid for him. As he put it in his seminal essay ‘Place and displacement: recent poetry from Northern Ireland’, there is the ‘strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness’ which belong to ‘a place that is patently riven by notions of belonging to other places’ (Heaney, 2002: 115). Such contradictions informed much of Heaney’s thinking about himself as a regional poet but they also gave rise to his uneasy feelings about the authenticity and validity of his European passport, making him aware of the existence of at least two incompatible visions of Europe. These deserve a brief introduction.

On the one hand, many of his poems and critical statements point to the poet’s belief in the principle of the national and ethnic identity understood in essentialist terms. Quite surprisingly, this argument makes Heaney a somewhat uneasy follower of Matthew Arnold, with the latter’s ideas of cultural elitism, preference for Hellenism over Hebraism and praise of the Celtic spirit, and of T. S. Eliot with his speculations about the mind of Europe and his fervent cultivation of the homogeneous European classicism. The Northern Irish poet was of course very much alive to the dangers inherent in the canonical, elitist and nationalistic variants of the European identity. At the same time, though, he kept thinking of national and local identities in terms of essences rather than cultural constructs or attributes. This kind of sensibility runs throughout his entire work, its most contentious (if cautious) manifestation expressed by means of several sympathetic pictures of tribal bonds and closed communities in the ‘bog poems’ section of the volume North (1975).

Strong evidence may be found in critical texts and occasional statements. For instance, in his essay ‘Englands of the Mind’ Heaney praised Hughes’s, Larkin’s and Hill’s sense of Englishness, their ‘desire to preserve indigenous traditions’ as well as their emphasis on a ‘continuity of communal ways and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened’ (Heaney, 2002: 77). Much later, in a 2001 interview, while commenting on his work as a translator, he stated: ‘Sweeney Astray was my “hidden Ireland’”, Beowulf was my “hidden England”, and now [Heaney speaks of his translation of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid] I have a “hidden Scotland’” coming up’ (quoted in Russell, 2014: 341). Such declarations indicate that what the Northern Irish poet was after was a sense of some absolute, transcendental identity as well as a feeling of strong kinship with clearly defined and essentially understood communities. In fact, one can risk the statement that the poet was not far from what Edward Said called ‘nativism’ with its ‘emotional self-indulgence of celebrating one’s own identity’ and its ‘ceremonies of belonging’, as the Palestinian critic put it in his essay on William Butler Yeats (Said, 1994: 229). It should be noted that, unlike Yeats, Heaney was cautious and sober in his formulations relating to the issues of national and supra-national identity, particularly in its essentialist variant. But a part of him embraced the idea of the homogeneous European spirit (tradition, culture, self-identification) as definitely valid and worth preserving.

The second vision is, contrarily, based on the poet’s consideration of the European tradition as multi-layered and devoid of clear outlines and a stable centre. From its very beginnings, Heaney’s poetry was sensitive to minute and shibboleth-wise differences between regions and cultural paradigms, both on the macro (South versus North, Latin versus vernacular, etc.) and the micro (local accents and dialects) scale. Significantly, this second vision is informed by the complex history and ambivalent status of the Northern Irish identity as well as the issues of regional particularities, the theme recently analysed by Richard Rankin Russell in his magisterial Seamus Heaney’s Regions (2014). In a peculiar way, Heaney’s narratives of the regional utopia reveal their own self-contradictory character – they celebrate the virtues of the idealistic pastoral community but at the same time undermine the convention in that they unfold against the poet’s fascination with the etymologies of words, varieties of local dialects (Heaney’s preoccupation with nuances of sound and sense emerging at the crossroads of Gaelic, Scots, Old English and Hiberno-English is particularly intriguing) and semantic displacements due to the processes of translation and the palimpsest-like nature of languages.

This latter point is worth a closer look. Very often the reality described by Heaney in his poems takes on the form of a stratified and multi-levelled configuration of layers and strata of historical sedimentation and endlessly modulated meanings, yet at the same time it unmistakably hints at a hidden centre. Similarly, etymological speculations are presented by the poet in the context of his insight of words as primary and ultimately indissoluble entities which constitute the core of speech and our memories. This kind of sensibility is at work in such poems as, for example, ‘Fodder’, ‘Anahorish’ or ‘Broagh’ (all from Wintering Out) where the spectral effects produced by language unveil for Heaney specific memories which then add up to provide him with a sense of the ultimately real. This hard-core reality is, however, made ambivalent precisely at the moment when it is articulated. One of the best illustrations of how this ambivalence works is the poet’s description of his native Mossbawn as omphalos, the navel of the world. Apparently central to the poet’s private mythology, the place is identified by means of a Greek word:

I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. (Heaney, 2002: 3)

What is striking in this passage is the fact that a personal recollection is articulated via a foreign language, giving in to the play of linguistic mediations which undermine rather than strengthen the poet’s sense of identity. As Eugene O’Brien has noted, ‘from the very outset Heaney is opening up his home place to the wideness of the world’ (2002: 34).

At stake is not only the poet’s use of a foreign word to describe his home but also the fact that the word is being repeated to the effect that it loses its depth and starts functioning as a purely phonetic sound. O’Brien adds to his interpretation some interesting remarks which may be easily generalized and applied to the discussion of Heaney’s vision(s) of Europe:

Writing at a remove from the actual experience, many years later, he is transforming the simple pieties of home through his use of the foreign signifier of centrality; it is as if he is gesturing toward the point that different cultures have different centres, and it is only through interaction and dialogue that the ‘tribal dirt’ of which he spoke can be loosened from the roots of his identity. (O’Brien, 2002: 35)

This implies a perspective of Europe as devoid of stable identity or identities, giving us instead an intuition of something hardly definable, inconclusive and open-ended rather than distinctly outlined. Significantly, Heaney was always interested in the European margins and peripheries, minorities, cultures and local sensibilities, the hue and cry of clashing sentiments and cultural boundaries. At the same time he rarely allowed himself to be distracted from the mainstream of the European tradition, celebrating the legacy of Homer, Virgil and Dante. The dialectic of the two perspectives was never resolved in his texts, adding to the tension of his poems and essays, and it is this heterogeneity which makes his work so intriguing and thought-provoking.

Heaney’s Europe is a space of contradictions. These he viewed through the prism of some obvious geographical divisions of the continent. Thus, we have in Heaney a conspicuous divide between the violent, pagan North and the sensual South, the former symbolized by, say, mad King Sweeney, Beowulf and the bog people, the latter carrying associations of wine, open windows, flowers, limestone, grapes and clear light (just a few items from ‘Summer 1969’, ‘Oysters’ and ‘The Otter’, poems written after trips to Spain, France and Italy, respectively). It might be added that the North–South axis, together with its changing landscapes and temperaments, involves palpable divergences between the imperial, universal Latin and numerous vernacular dialects and accents – the issue subtly and often indirectly handled by the poet. Second, we can see Heaney coming gradually to terms with the ethos represented by such Eastern European ‘poets under pressure’ (writing under Communist regimes) as Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and, particularly after 1990, Czesław Miłosz, all of them constituting for the Northern Irish poet a strong tradition of political dissent (the names of the Russian poets Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky might be added here, too). And it is worth noting that Heaney ends his essay ‘The impact of translation’ by looking to Eastern Europe as ‘the road not taken by us’ (Heaney, 1988: 44). One assumes that the pronoun is largely inclusive and that ‘road’ has poetical as well as political meanings.

But these geographical oppositions were resisted by the poet who realized how schematic such accounts of his poetry were. The just quoted poem, ‘Summer 1969’, one of several Mediterranean lyrics written by Heaney, includes a significant scene with the poet visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid and looking at Goya’s brutal late paintings: ‘the thrown-up arms / And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted / And knapsacked military … Saturn / Jewelled in the blood of his own children, / Gigantic chaos turning his brute hips / Over the world’ (Heaney, 1998: 140). The fragment may bring to our minds Heaney’s adaptation of Dante’s story of Ugolino (placed at the end of Field Work) as well as his translations of Sophocles (The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes), texts dealing with human destructiveness and savagery in the Mediterranean context. It is interesting to compare it to the meditative tone of ‘The Peninsula’, an early poem about silence, moments of contemplation and ‘things founded on their own shapes’ (Heaney, 1998: 21), which manages to bring forth more positive aspects of the poet’s idea of North. It is also interesting to consider the motif of religious pilgrimage in the 1984 volume Station Island, the title referring to a small island, called St. Patrick’s Purgatory, on Lough Derg in County Donegal, that combines northern austerity with Catholic symbolism (it is worth noting that the sequence follows the formal pattern of Dante’s rhyming terza rima). These and other examples demonstrate Heaney’s nuanced perception of the cross-sections and interdependencies of two poles of the European tradition, making his poems vehicles of its dynamism and open-endedness.

Heaney’s preoccupation with the Eastern European poets resulted in a different kind of complication. Attracted by the concept of poetry as an expression of protest and thus a ‘necessary and fundamental human act’ (Heaney, 1988: 36), Heaney turned to such poets as Herbert or Miłosz because he found in them an alternative to what he described in reference to the Western poets as a ‘procession of ironists and dandies and reflexive talents’ (Heaney, 1988: 40). The paradox was that the examples of the writers associated with the democratic opposition in, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia, led the Northern Irish poet to assume the notion of literature as a didactic, accountable and mimetic art. This developed into what Thomas Docherty rather severely called an ‘imperialism of thought’ (quoted in Quinn, 2009: 95): a view of poetry as great, canonical and elitist, unavoidably reducing alterity to all-embracing identity. Such assumptions found their culmination in the late essay ‘Secular and millennial Miłosz’ where Heaney flatly enumerates the features of the great poet: ‘one who keeps alive the idea of individual responsibility in an age of relativity’, ‘somebody on a secret errand, with ancient and vital truths in his keeping’ and, this time with an eye on Miłosz himself, a ‘sage on the mountain, maintaining the gravity of being even as he inhales the increasingly weightless, late-capitalist, post-modern air of California’ (Heaney, 2002: 410–11). Surprisingly enough, what Heaney discovered in the Eastern European poets was the old-fashioned concept of the poet as a bard and a moral authority, an odd mixture of motifs from Blake (poet as prophet), from Shelley (poets as unacknowledged legislators of the world), from Yeats (poet as a sage in the tower) and from Eliot (poet as a voice of the Christian culture).

As a cultural, aesthetic and linguistic space, Seamus Heaney’s Europe is far from obvious. In fact, it might be possible to speak in this context about ‘Europes of the mind’ (echoing the title of the already quoted essay) or at least point out the ambivalent status of the European legacy in Heaney’s work. His work is a massive and multi-vocal body that invites divergent interpretations and does not rule out contradictory conclusions. Even if the poet himself seems to have privileged the Homeric trope of homecoming (as in the fragment of ‘Beacons at Bealtaine’ that opens this Introduction), his poetry is rather an invitation to a journey than the completion of the poetic course. Or, to use another figure, it resembles rather the endless efforts of a tailor who ‘unpicks the stitches’ with his needle and ‘restitches’ the material ‘into a different shape’ from the work of ‘digging into the centre’ (this is Heaney disowning his favourite metaphor in a 2001 interview; all quotations are from Jarniewicz, 2002: 172). In a somewhat similar fashion, what we have tried to achieve by including here the few essays devoted to the European context of Seamus Heaney’s work is not so much finding a unified and all-embracing vision, the Heaneyan vision of Europe, but making room for some more ways in which the issue announced in our title may be addressed.

The essays that follow are concerned with Heaney’s interest in various Romance languages and in Latin as well. In this context, it is important to note that Heaney was also interested in ancient Greek and translated ancient Greek plays for performance in English; and also that he translated three early texts, one from Irish Gaelic (Buile Shuibhne), another from Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf), and the third from fifteenth-century Scots (Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid). With regard to Heaney the translator, it is equally important to note that he only ever read Eastern European poets – and Mandelstam and Brodsky – in translation. His ‘translation’ of these poets was a question of mood and situation. A distinction needs to be made therefore between the modern languages Heaney knew and those he did not. Finally, Heaney’s great interest in the poetry of the British Isles, both ancient and modern, should also be noted.

The subject of this special issue is partly, then, Heaney the European poet: the poet who, in postcolonial terms, ‘writes back’ to an English imperial centre while looking increasingly to Europe for confirmation. He looks to pre-1989 Eastern Europe for modes of writing that befit his chosen status as ‘inner émigré’; and he looks to Western Europe as the fons et origo of what we might call Poetry with a capital P. We referred earlier to Heaney’s essay, ‘The impact of translation’, which discusses why we should pay attention to poets from Russia and Eastern Europe. Heaney also discusses Edwin Muir’s poem, ‘The Interrogation’, as an example of how it is possible to sound European by dint of sounding a particular note (Heaney, 1988: 41–3). It is a note that Heaney himself attempts to sound in poems like ‘The Toome Road’ in Field Work and in ‘From the Frontier of Writing’ and other parable-like poems in The Haw Lantern. But at the same time the subject of this special issue is also Heaney seen from Europe. What happens, for example, when Heaney’s poetry passes through the prisms of French, Italian and Polish? And what can one say about Heaney’s relationship with and use of Irish, itself a European language since 2004? It is to such questions and such areas of interest that our contributors speak.