Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation

Poetics of Exile

Carmen Bugan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781907975646
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351191890
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Poetry born of historical upheaval bears witness both to actual historical events and considerations of poetics. Under the duress of history the poet, who is torn between lamentation and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for and commitment to the Irish and English poetic traditions, and a strong desire to search for models outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-). In this study, Carmen Bugan looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has encountered the'historically-tested imaginations' of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, as he aimed to fulfil a Horatian poetics, a poetry meant to both instruct and delight its readers. Carmen Bugan is the author of a collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter."

CHAPTER 1
Writing 'for the Joy of It': Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam

The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave
of its breathing.

— Osip Mandelstam, ‘355’¹

To wrench our age out of prison
A flute is needed
To connect the sections
Of disarticulated days ...

— Osip Mandelstam, ‘My Time’²

This is how poems help us live.
They match the meshes in the sieve
Life puts us through; they take and give
Our proper measure
And prove themselves more transitive
When they give pleasure.

— Seamus Heaney³

None of the East European poets captivates Seamus Heaney’s imagination more powerfully than the Russian Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). The title of this chapter borrows the expression to write ‘for the joy of it’ from Heaney’s poem ‘Station Island’: it is a piece of advice that Heaney imagines Mandelstam gives to him.⁴ Heaney first read about Mandelstam’s astonishingly tragic fate as a poet under Stalin during the 1920s and 1930s in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope (1971).⁵ As collections of Mandelstam’s poetry followed in various translations and after reading Clarence Brown’s biography, Heaney became a devotee of the poet and his work. By 1987 he reviewed the principal texts by and about Mandelstam in English.⁶ By 1995, when he won the Nobel Prize, Heaney attributed a significant area of his poetic development to the Russian poet. Speaking of his own ‘predicament’ — that of a poet in a time of public violence and expectation — as ‘puny’ compared to the ‘tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam’s fate’ and alluding in that context to his own migration from Northern Ireland to the Republic, Heaney said, ‘I was longing for [...] a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology’.⁷ The ‘territories that lie in between’ the ‘extremes’ of ‘suffering’ and ‘song’,⁸ which Heaney traverses as he ponders the work of Mandelstam during the 1980s, are of interest here. In articulating his role as a poet in the title poem in Station Island (1984), where he aimed to ‘probe the validity’ of his ‘commitment’, Heaney expressed, in poetry, the ‘tension [...] between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self’.⁹ The Irish poet says that the ‘advice’ Mandelstam might have given him was to ‘write | for the joy of it’. In other words, Heaney says that although the conclusion of his poem (section XII) is indebted to Dante, Eliot, and Joyce in respect of its form, it ‘is finally in debt to Mandelstam for what it says’.¹⁰ Influence then is here understood as Heaney’s ‘debt to Mandelstam’.

In the Irish poet’s view Mandelstam’s work ‘sponsors all over again the Keatsian proposition that beauty is truth, truth beauty’.¹¹ Such a concept of poetry — an extended formulation of ‘art for art’s sake’¹² — is closest to Heaney’s intuitive creative self. I argue that it is precisely because of this concept that Mandelstam captivates and influences Heaney. Mandelstam’s particular kind of ‘truth’ and his particular kind of ‘beauty’ arise from testing the meaning of beauty against history, thus investing the Keatsian affirmation with a social relevance.¹³ In defining truth as beauty, beauty as truth after he absorbs Mandelstam’s work, Heaney extends the ‘notion of what art can encompass’¹⁴ and brings East European and Western poetics into meaningful dialogue.¹⁵

Heaney’s prose pieces on Mandelstam, ‘Faith, Hope and Poetry’, ‘Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam’, and the two essays both poets wrote on Dante (Heaney’s aforementioned ‘Envies and Identifications’ and Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about Dante’)¹⁶ furnish the main ideas discussed in this chapter. The Mandelstam presented is, therefore, ‘Heaney’s Mandelstam’. The idea of the ‘compellingly wise’ poem that Heaney spells out in his Nobel lecture can be traced to Mandelstam’s concept of poetry as ‘remedy’ for the people’s ‘ “living hearts” ’;¹⁷ we can follow this development as Heaney tests the truth of his poetics in view of Mandelstam in his prose pieces in The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995). Furthermore, his poem ‘Exposure’,¹⁸ which alludes to Mandelstam’s ‘Tristia’,¹⁹ prefigures a poetics that will be fully articulated at the end of ‘Station Island’. In these texts, where ‘language’ is given the status of ‘a poet’s faith’,²⁰ we see how Heaney, in the process of his reading of Mandelstam, expands the scope of lyric poetry to become socially responsive and responsible. For Mandelstam, the ‘flute’ is an instrument used to ‘wrench our age out of prison’ and poetry is a ‘secret’ that keeps people ‘awake forever’.²¹ The ‘surprise’ of the ‘compellingly wise’ poem, Heaney tells us in his Nobel lecture, should be ‘transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture on the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm’.²² It is by expanding the Keatsian proposition in a sense closer to Mandelstam, to include the ‘transitive surprise’ of the poem, that Heaney can ‘credit marvels’, thereby allowing himself to be ‘dazzled’ and his ‘heart to lighten’.²³

Heaney’s engagement with Mandelstam is a reflection of his own need to confirm poetic values to himself; in the poet’s words, he turned to the ‘great masters of the past’ for an ‘image of [his] own creation’, which reflects his ‘own imaginative needs’, his ‘artistic inclinations and procedures’.²⁴ The poetics Heaney develops as a result of reading Mandelstam’s work is a poetics of exile, understanding an exile in the sense of an ‘inner émigré’, a role embraced as part of the creative process where ‘solitudes and distresses are creditable’.²⁵ The idea that a form of ‘exile’ is either needed by Heaney in order to ‘put the practice of poetry more at the centre’ of his ‘life’,²⁶ or turns into a consequence of his choice to ‘credit marvels’, comes across in Heaney’s ‘Exposure’, and in some of his prose; in his exile Heaney reaches for and responds to images of Mandelstam’s work. Yet the link to Mandelstam — the Irish poet’s predisposition towards a form of exile — also appears in Heaney’s image of Mad Sweeney in Sweeney Astray (1983). Sweeney provides a portrait of the artist as an exile, ‘guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance’,²⁷ in a situation where exile is creatively enabling and where poetry has a ‘homeopathic benefit’²⁸ for him. If the Sweeney figure is enabling for Heaney in the sense of turning ‘exilic’ utterance into ‘assuaging’ utterance, Mandelstam validates the importance of a poetry of ‘exuberant rhythm’, of ‘display of metrical virtuosity’ which helps the poet and reader alike know themselves better.²⁹ If the figure of Sweeney allows Heaney to develop the idea of poetry as remedy, Mandelstam and his work allow him to elevate this idea into a poetic principle. There is indeed in Heaney’s development of poetics through Mandelstam a romanticized aspect of a form of exile embarked upon out of conviction, in order to write for joy.

Bernard O’Donoghue, Michael Parker, Stephen James, and Clare Cavanagh are among critics who point out affinities between Mandelstam and Heaney.³⁰ In particular, O’Donoghue shows how the Russian poet is seminal in shaping Heaney’s poetics in Government of the Tongue: his discussion of Heaney’s definition of lyric language through Mandelstam is central to understanding Mandelstam’s influence on Heaney. It is important to underscore that even though Heaney’s ‘debt’ to Mandelstam can be sometimes seen in some features of Heaney’s diction, there is mostly an influence upon Heaney’s ‘artistic inclinations and procedures’.³¹ In other words, Mandelstam affected Heaney’s view of poetic language more than the poetic language itself, though Heaney does indeed sometimes also incorporate Mandelstam’s imagery into his own poems. This is one of the reasons why it is not possible to trace elements of poetic language from Mandelstam to Heaney.

In ‘An Afterthought to Translation’ in the Penguin Selected Poems, for example, Brown says that W. S. Merwin ‘translated Mandelstam into Merwin’ from the files with notes and previous translations that Brown provided.³² It is not part of my aim to trace particular uses of language from Merwin to Heaney while talking about Mandelstam (and the same holds true in relation to the other translators of Mandelstam’s poetry, James Greene, Robert Tracy, and Richard and Elizabeth McKane). Finally, though I stress certain powerful affinities and parallels between the two poets, it should be clear from the beginning that Mandelstam and Heaney belong to different times and places, have been nourished by entirely different local influences, languages, and histories, and are very different poets. I do not claim otherwise, or suggest that Heaney ‘identifies’ himself unreservedly with the figure of Mandelstam.

A 'responsible tristia': The 'inner émigré' in Heaney and Heaney's Mandelstam

Although he was born in Warsaw to a Jewish family, Mandelstam considered St Petersburg his native city because it was there that he received a good part of his education, began to write, and was first recognized as a poet. Like Florence for Dante, Petersburg remained the point of departure and return (physically and imaginatively) throughout Mandelstam’s life.³³ Mandelstam’s relationship with his Russia was complicated by historical and political pressures, which affected his poetry directly. In one of the poems written in 1935, he laments:

My country conversed with me,
Spoiled me, scolded, didn’t listen.
She only noticed me when,
Grown-up, I became an eye-witness.
Then suddenly, like a lens, she set me on fire
With a beam from the Admiralty square.³⁴

His Russia was the country of Stalin’s Socialist Realist aesthetics, which made the poet an icon of the ‘Great Purge’.³⁵ In 1924 Iosif Stalin rose to power after Lenin died and at the First Writers’ Congress in 1932, he, Andrei Zhadonov, and Maxim Gorky drafted the first principles of Socialist Realist aesthetics. These can be summarized as prescriptions to write completely transparent literature meant to exalt the virtues of an idealized proletariat led by an all-knowing party, which was to be celebrated in the same manner that artists celebrated God (though no religious overtones were acceptable).³⁶ The moral pressure/duty placed on the writers was tremendous: Stalin called them ‘engineers of the human soul’ who were meant to create a sensibility tuned to the party doctrine.³⁷

Mandelstam, on the other hand, had ‘no wish to make a special effort to educate or attract’ his reader; according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, one of his poetic ambitions (around 1934, only four years before his death...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Writing 'for the Joy of It': Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam
• 2 'Audenesque': Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky
• 3 How to be a Responsible Poet: Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney
• 4 'Keeper of Civilizations': Seamus Heaney and Zbigniew Herbert
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index