The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry: Toward Heaven (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)

The Art of Translation in Seamus Heaney's Poetry is a critical study of the later work of Seamus Heaney. While exploring the poet's practice as a translator, it also traces his increasing preoccupation with the possibilities and conditions of translation in the theological sense of being lifted up in spirit by finding your feet in the ground of your own understanding. To the work of this philosophical poet, who would be both "earthed and heady," this book brings the insights of ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Stanley Cavell. It devotes separate chapters to Station Island and two later collections: Seeing Things and Electric Light. The first of these addresses the most fundamental change in Heaney's life when he acknowledges the "need and chance to re-envisage" his Irish-Catholic upbringing; it is also replete with both the activity and the trope of translation. Published seven years later, Seeing Things begins with a translation of Virgil's golden bough episode and ends with a similar crossing over into the underworld by Dante. Heaney transforms both into poems about poetry to go along with his lengthy ars poetica entitled "Squarings." A decade later in Electric Light, Heaney returns to Virgil, but now he finds himself not in the epic hero of the Aeneid but in the poet whom Dante honored as "the singer of the eclogues." This collection contains eclogues but also many other poems showing and enacting Heaney's new found appreciation of the pastoral mode as a model for his own time and place of "devastated order."