Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn

Intertextuality in the work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian

S. Schwerter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137271723
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union. Through their references to Russia the three poets achieve a geographical and mental detachment allowing them to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.

1

No Vodka, Aquavit or Uisquebaugh: The Russian Connection in the Work of Seamus Heaney

In Heaney’s writing, a strong desire to view ‘the matter of Ireland’¹ through another language and culture can be found. Eugene O’Brien interprets the poet’s recourse to difference and otherness as a reflection of Stephen Dedalus’ desire ‘to fly by those nets of language, nationality and religion’.² With this image, O’Brien captures Heaney’s quest for a kind of poetry situated ‘above’ the established ideological positions of Irish Nationalism and British Unionism.³ Through Russian literature, Heaney departs from his native country, intending to assess the Northern Irish reality from a different angle. The poet maintains that Northern Irish writers have to ‘take the strain of being in two places at once’ as they belong to a region which is ‘riven between notions of belonging to other places’.⁴ Therefore, writers from the North are expected to accommodate ‘two opposing conditions of truthfulness’⁵ in their poetry. The complexity of the local situation, according to Heaney, explains the large number of poems in which Northern Ireland is viewed from ‘a great spatial or temporal distance’.⁶ Many pieces of work are imagined from ‘beyond the grave’ or from ‘the perspective of mythological or historically remote characters’.⁷

In Heaney’s own poetic and critical writing, this spiritual distance is frequently achieved through the prism of poetry from the East. Conscious of the need to open up new perspectives, he states that the ‘surest way of getting to the core of the Irish experience’⁸ is the contemplation of the country from outside. In this context, he quotes Stephen Dedalus’ enigmatic declaration that the shortest way to Tara goes via Holyhead. Heaney claims that, nowadays, we could say that the shortest way to Whitby, the monastery where Caedmon sang the first Anglo-Saxon verses, leads via Warsaw and Prague.⁹ Employing Warsaw and Prague emblematically for Eastern Europe, he suggests that nowadays Ireland cannot be reinvented in a mere Irish–British context but can usefully be considered from a perspective radically different from Western points of view. Against this background, O’Brien claims that in the works of Eastern European writers, Heaney is able to find examples demonstrating that ‘the Northern Irish situation is not unique’ but ‘part of a world-wide struggle’.¹⁰ Heaney’s poetic and critical writing shows a particularly strong identification with Russian authors and history. The poet draws attention to the ‘closeness between the Irish crowd and the Russian’ as they share an ‘elegiac and tragic view of life’.¹¹ In his opinion, the Russians are closer to the Irish than the English as they are ‘less humanist’ and ‘less trusting in perfectibility’. Apart from that, Heaney discerns a ‘note of intimacy’ in their literature, which he does not see in English writing in the same sense.¹²

In his collection of essays, The Government of the Tongue, he draws on the life and art of Russian authors such as Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Brodsky, Boris Pasternak, Nikolay Gumilev, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova. According to Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney takes Eastern writers as examples, desiring to achieve ‘the balance they maintained between guarding private integrity and engaging subtly with public issues’.¹³ The poet repeatedly expresses his admiration for the bravery of Russian authors, who continued to exercise their art under Stalin despite severe state repression. He explains his early interest in Eastern European literature with the fact that it suited the ‘mood and attitudes of the minority population’¹⁴ he belonged to in Northern Ireland. Read in translation, poetry from the East became an indispensable ‘spiritual companion’¹⁵ to him.

Heaney maintains that the translations of poetry written in Eastern Bloc countries did not only familiarise Western readers with new literary traditions, they also drew attention to a modern kind of ‘martyrology’¹⁶ and functioned as a ‘record of courage and sacrifice’.¹⁷ Strongly drawn to Eastern European writers’ sense of integrity, Western poets had to recognise that ‘the greatness’ was ‘shifting away’ from their language.¹⁸ For that reason, they were compelled to ‘turn their gaze East’.¹⁹ Heaney further argues that the translation of Eastern European poetry gave Western readers a feeling for the ‘scope of Russian poetry’ and thus provided a ‘bench at which subsequent work will have to justify itself’.²⁰ In this sense, Eastern poets became a challenge to those writers, whom Heaney sees as belonging to the ‘professionalized’ and ‘grant-aided’ literary milieu of the West.²¹ Whereas Eastern authors had to fear for their lives, their Western counterparts could exercise their art without danger. Ironically qualifying his Western colleagues as a ‘procession of ironists’, ‘dandies’ and ‘reflexive talents’,²² Heaney accuses them of having abandoned the search for moral and political truth. Eastern European writers, however, are seen by him as ‘poets tested by dangerous times’.²³ He perceives their resistance to the pressure exercised by the state as an intentionally political act and as their personal refusal to abandon their ideals of justice, humanity and the right of free speech for the sake of security. Heaney explains his affinity to Russian and Eastern European authors with their common experience of political instability and violence. In The Government of the Tongue, he states that their situation makes them ‘attractive to a reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish’.²⁴ The poet venerates his Eastern colleagues for ‘surviving amphibiously, in the realm of “the times” and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect’.²⁵ According to Heaney, the challenges they have faced are immediately recognisable to anyone having lived with the ‘awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland’s history’.²⁶

The poet repeatedly underscores his identification with his Eastern European fellow writers and thus establishes a mental link between the Russian authors and himself. Quoting Nadezhda Mandelstam, he describes poetry as ‘source of truth’ while also being a ‘vehicle of harmony’.²⁷ He further states that Northern Irish poets were subjected to the pressure of ‘being true’ to their originary community. For that reason, they felt the urge of writing poetry, which was both ‘socially responsible and creatively free’.²⁸ Moreover, Heaney maintains that Eastern European literature taught him to ‘hold on at the crossroads where truth and beauty intersect’.²⁹ For Jerzy Jarniewicz, Heaney’s attraction to poetry ‘written beyond the Iron Curtain’ stems from his ‘ongoing concern with the problematic relationship between poetry and history’.³⁰ We could argue that Heaney finds himself drawn to Eastern European poets as they respond to the pressures of history without sacrificing their artistic integrity. The question to what extent poetry should function as an expression of individual imagination, and how far it should be politically committed, is frequently addressed in Heaney’s poetic and critical writing. Referring to Zbigniew Herbert’s poem ‘A Knocker’, he outlines his personal attitude towards the consumption of poetry as follows: ‘Enjoy poetry as long as you don’t use it to escape reality.’³¹

The poet creates a parallel between Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland by claiming that in both places ‘the idea of poetry as an art’ runs the danger of being overshadowed by ‘the quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes’.³² He vehemently rejects propaganda-type poems. Referring to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he warns of authors who display ‘the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth’.³³ However, Heaney does not deny the political connotations of his writing. He considers it as his duty to open ‘unexpected and unedited communications’³⁴ between himself and the audience. Thus, he suggests that the poet is to come to terms with his or her cultural environment by using poetry as an agent of proclaiming and attempting to correct injustices without taking sides.³⁵ Heaney underlines that a poem which exists outside the realm of political discourse can still have a political status.³⁶ Whereas poetry of ‘hermetic wit’ and ‘self-mocking ironies’ could appear ‘fastidious’ to ‘the activist with the microphone on the street’, it may exercise in its own way a ‘fierce disdain of the amplified message’.³⁷ In this context, Heaney claims that in politically tense situations, lyric poets should ‘hold out against herd-speak’³⁸ by taking on the unheard voices of dissent. However, he does not deny the difficulties of proclaiming the inconvenient truth at times ‘when closed ranks and consensus are the things most in demand’.³⁹

According to Justin Quinn, Heaney’s commitment to Slavic poets is ‘ paradoxically both profound and superficial’.⁴⁰ He qualifies the poet’s engagement as ‘profound’ as the Eastern European writers provide him with new ways to respond to the pressures of politics on poetry. The fact that Heaney does not speak any Eastern European language, however, would seal him hermetically from the original texts of Slavic poetry.⁴¹ It could, however, be argued that even if he does not have any command of Russian, Polish or Czech, his engagement with Eastern European writing cannot be dismissed as superficial. The translated works provide him with an important source giving him entry to a number of countries whose cultures were often regarded as obscure in the West. The poet feels urged to engage with the spirit of Eastern poetry in order to explore his own ambivalent feelings about his environment of origin. In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, he states that without the works of Eastern authors, he would not have been as much convinced about the ‘worthwhileness of writing’ itself.⁴² Comparing Heaney to Eastern European writers, Helen Vendler maintains that his allegories have a different aim to those employed by his Eastern counterparts. She explains that they are not written to avoid the censor but to escape the ‘topicality of political journalism’ and to ‘define the realm of the invisible’.⁴³ Thus, Vendler points to the subversive force of Heaney’s poetry functioning through the framework of different cultures.

‘Making Strange’: Heaney’s interest in Russian Formalism

Published in Station Island, the poem ‘Making Strange’⁴⁴ is a defining moment in Heaney’s engagement with Russian literature and culture. The title of the poe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by John Goodby
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘And Every Evening Surprised that I Was Still Alive I Repeated Verses’
• 1 No Vodka, Aquavit or Uisquebaugh: The Russian Connection in the Work of Seamus Heaney
• 2 ‘Punching Holes in History’: Tom Paulin’s Interest in Russia
• 3 The Russian Dimension in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: ‘My Words are Traps through which you Pick your Way’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index