The Sheila Variations

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.

Sometimes when writers discuss their methodology, the “why” of certain choices, they end up sounding dry and uninspired. It’s all a bit intellectual and self-serving. But, for whatever reason, I never have that problem with Seamus Heaney writing about his own work. The end result usually feels so effortless, so perfect, every word feeling found rather than chosen … that it is fascinating to hear him give a DVD-commentary about why he made that choice, and the many mistakes along the way to arriving at that choice. I am not a poet and I am also not an intellectual. I am cerebral, but not intellectual. So listening to Seamus Heaney discuss the derivations of certain words, the feeling behind a certain poem, and what that feeling dictated to him, the motivation that started him off, and how that ended up changing in the course of writing whatever it is … it’s all fascinating to me. He’s such an earthy writer, and I don’t just say that because his poems are filled with images of dirt and potatoes and insects. He uses words in a visceral way. Think of his first well-known poem, “Digging,” where he sits at his desk and looks out at his father in the yard, digging up the dirt with a spade. He feels a gulf between the “real” work done by his father, and the brain-work done by him, and yet at the end of the poem, he picks up his pen: “I dig with it.”

And that’s it. That was his attitude.

The political background is important, and his feelings about language come from being an Irish person who grew up in Ulster. He grew up on a literal border, and would have to cross multiple linguistic/social/religious borders on his walk to school. He was not aware of what that would all mean when he was a child, but it was something he sensed. (He writes a lot about borders.) If you grew up with an Irish heritage in Protestant Ulster, especially in the 1960s, then everything is political. Your last name is political. Your religious ceremonies are political. Your funerals are political. Even if you were “just” a poet, and you loved, say, Robert Lowell (as Heaney did) … you couldn’t really be a Robert Lowell in Northern Ireland. Robert Lowell was a personal confessional poet, who grew up in the United States. That meant he was free to devote his imagination to himself and himself alone. The poets in Northern Ireland were not granted that space. You were thrust into the political limelight and even the most personal statements had political implications. It was part of the air breathed. Heaney knew that, understood that, accepted that, rejected it … You know, it was a lifelong process. There were times when he wanted to escape the “North,” and he did. But his heritage followed him.

The essay “Earning a Rhyme” is about Heaney’s translation of the medieval text Buile Suibhne (that’s “Mad Sweeney” to you). It was eventually published as Sweeney Astray.

He started the translation in 1972, dreadful times in Northern Ireland. Poets/writers who grow up in safety don’t feel the need to justify WHY they decided to work on a certain thing. You follow the art, right? But if you’re in the middle of a civil war, and you decide to work on a translation of a famous medieval text, written in Middle Irish, about an Irish king who goes mad and turns into a bird … The context is different. Heaney understands that context. In describing the process of translation, Heaney talks about how his own impulses changed, through the course of the work itself. It started out as a desperate attempt to retrieve a piece of the past that might somehow inform/help/contextualize the present-day conflict. It also might have just been an understandable desire to escape, to work on something ELSE, to take the burden off of himself of having to explain or describe the mood in Ulster at that time. It could be seen as a total retreat. Heaney talks about all of that.

But the work, once begun, started to engage him on an entirely different level.

Translation is an important (and, of course, political) act in Ireland. Brian Friel wrote a whole play called Translations, about the stomping-out of the native language, the total loss of continuity with their past and culture that the Irish endured. James Joyce was always aware that when he write, in English, he was writing in a language that his ancestors did not speak, that there was some other tongue he SHOULD have been speaking in. Hence, his genius. Language is political. And translation is personal. Heaney devoted himself to the story of “Mad Sweeney” with an urgency that you can feel in the following essay. What should the rhyme scheme be? Did he feel comfortable imposing himself on this text? How to work with that?

He also had before him the unforgettable example of Flann O’Brien’s great absurdist novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which re-imagines Mad King Sweeney, bringing him into a modern urban Dublin setting. Another attempt at integration, an attempt at closing the gap between the past and the present. If you are cut off from the wellsprings of your own past (as any conquered people are) … then the sense of disconnect can be shattering. Much of what Heaney tries to do, as Flann O’Brien tried to do in his outrageously hilarious way, is an act of reclamation. This is ours. This is a part of us.

Buile Suibhne is woven into the fabric of my family. It’s hard to even discuss because it’s so everywhere. When I first started my blog, I referred to myself as “Sheila A-stray”, echoing the phrase “Sweeney Astray” (which was the title of Heaney’s translation). Mad King Sweeney, as seen through Flann O’Brien’s eyes, was also part of the “allowance ritual” my dad put us through as kids. We each were assigned an Irish author (mine was Yeats), and had to memorize the titles of all of their works in order to receive a quarter. I described the allowance ritual in an essay that was published in the Irish Letters edition of The Sewanee Review in 2006, my first published piece ever. (And, not too shabby, a quote from my essay was on the back of the volume, right beneath a quote from William Trevor. Major proud moment for me.) The title of the essay was “Two Birds,” which had multiple layers of meaning, but really came from Flann O’Brien’s book. “Swim-Two-Birds” (Snámh dá Én), is a place in Ireland, out near Clonmacnoise (which I had been to when I was a kid, and many times since) where Mad King Sweeney, in bird-form, came to rest. I didn’t know any of this when I rattled off the titles for my dad in order to get my allowance, but it was a rich heritage given to me, and that was the purpose of the essay (as well as being a tribute to my wonderful father – who was still alive when the essay was published. Very happy about that.)

So anyway. None of this probably makes any sense, it’s all a wash of connections and contemplations … but that’s the thing with something like Sweeney Astray. It’s IN us. In many different forms. It was in Heaney, and he tasked himself with bringing it out, with working on a proper translation of it, while shopping malls and pubs were exploding in Ulster and London.

Here’s an excerpt about the genesis of the project.

Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, ‘Earning a Rhyme’ by Seamus Heaney

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 demented 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 the 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 majority 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.