Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf"

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf"Author(s): Thomas McGuireSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 79-99Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20646522 .

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Thomas McGuire

Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney s Beowulf

In the introduction to his translation of Beowulf (2000), Seamus Heaney makes

clear his commitment to an anticolonial project aimed at revealing and revers

ing the baleful effects of colonial violence. This is a project, as Heaney suggests, founded upon the cultural force and political suggestiveness of the vernacular.

Describing his decision to refer to Hrothgar s reced or great hall with the Ulster

dialect word bawn, a word originally derived from the Irish b?-dh?n ("cattle

fort") and appropriated by early English settlers to signify the fortified dwellings meant to keep dispossessed Irish natives at bay, Heaney writes in the introduc

tion that

it seemed the proper term to apply to the embattled keep where Hrothgar waits

and watches ... every time I read the lovely interlude that tells of the minstrel

singing in Heorot just before the first attacks of Grendel, I cannot help thinking of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading the early cantos of The Fairie

Queen to Sir Walter Raleigh, just before the Irish would burn the castle and drive Spenser out of Munster back to the Elizabethan court.1

Thus, by foregoing more standard equivalents for reced such as "keep" or

"fort" and putting a bawn into Beowulf Heaney attempts, as he says, to come to

terms with a "complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resis

tance, integrity and antagonism, a history that has to be clearly acknowledged

by all concerned in order to render it ever more 'willable forward / again and

again and again'" (B xxx). Indeed, the insertion of the vernacular seems to

accomplish this and more. His bawn stands as a subtle, yet deliciously subver

sive means of recalling Spenser's travail at Kilcolman Castle, an edifice which

Heaney elsewhere calls "the tower of English conquest and the Anglicization of

Ireland, linguistically, culturally, and institutionally."2 Moreover, Heaney s inser

1. Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), p. xxx; hereafter

Cited parenthetically, thus: (B xxx). 2. Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1995)? p. i99? hereafter cited

parenthetically, thus: (?P199).

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, 1011 (SPRING / EARRACH, 2006), 79~99




tion of dialect into Beowulf memorializes and enacts the kind of linguistic and

cultural cross-fertilization that has characterized relations between Ireland and

England for more than eight hundred years.

Through such hybrid transformations of Beowulf, Heaney not only rewrites

a seminal Anglo-Saxon text?a text which has been used by various Old Eng lish scholars to further claims of cultural and linguistic superiority, particular

ly in discussions concerned with issues of national origin and the justification for colonialism?but he also adds another intriguing narrative strand to the

often vexed story of English-Irish relations.3 Specifically, Heaneys vernacular

ized revision of the poem transcreatively transforms it into a kind of looking

glass through which Irish cultural and sociopolitical experience might be seen?

sometimes darkly and sometimes vividly. At various points, for example, rather than using terms from the lexicon of

medieval Anglo-Saxon society to designate key social relations and positions,

Heaney deploys terms drawn from the Gaelic social structure that was first

drastically altered and ultimately decimated by the colonial schemes of Spenser and his successors. Thus, the Old English maga ("kinsmen") becomes clan

(B19:247), Unferths court tide dyle ("spokesman") is rendered with the Gael

ic brehon (B101:1457), and the Irish sept (B115:1674) replaces the Old English l?oda ("people" or "tribe").4 Terms descriptive of cultural behavior and topog

raphy also take on an Irish hue. Hildeburh sings a keen (B 77:1119), not a dirge or lament, and features of the landscape become decidedly Irish: windige n s

sas ("windy headlands") becomes "windswept crags" (B 95:1358) and fen-gel?d

("path over the fen") is rendered keshes (B 95:1359). Through such renderings

3. Conor McCarthy makes a similar point in "Language and History in Seamus Heaney's

Beowulf? The Journal of the English Association, 50,197 (Summer 2001), 149; hereafter cited paren

thetically, thus: (McCarthy 149). For an excellent introduction to this issue see Alan J. Frantzen,

Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rut

gers University Press, 1990), pp. 5,22-26. Citing the seminal role of Anglo-Saxon texts in the con

struction of British national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Frantzen notes

that the study of Beowulf, in particular, constituted a key discursive site of British nationalism and

imperialism.

4. Other critics have recently debated the merits of Heaney's decision to insert Irish words. In a

discussion of this matter, Conor McCarthy argues the terms descriptive of Gaelic society are "sug

gestive of a comparable social structure" and "perhaps of the historical links between Gaelic and

Scandinavian society" (McCarthy 153). Viewed in this light, the poem's thematic exploration of

vengeance and blood feuds could well be read as an extension of similar themes explored in

Heaney's bog poems. But given Heaney's abiding concern with a creating a re-presentational poet

ic, his insertion of Ulsterisms and the Irish language also seems to be aimed at rewriting the story of Beowulf (and indeed the story of the English and Irish languages and literary traditions) accord

ing to the type of radical history from below that occurs with his revival of the dinnseanchas tradi

tion early in his career.

8o



Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney's Beowulf

of the Old English source text, Heaney thus appropriates and alters this quin

tessentially English cultural treasure.

The question concerning Heaney's decision to recast Beowulf in an idiom

inflected by Hiberno-English and Gaelic diction has become the central point of debate in the half dozen or so extended critiques of the translation. Unfor

tunately, this narrow focus tells only part of the story of Heaney's translation.

Several Heaney critics deem his vernacular move an attempt to comment "his

torically" on old colonial divisions and antagonisms. Conor McCarthy sees

Heaney's Hibernicizations as a sort of linguistic archeology meant to produce

unspecified "historical suggestiveness" (LH 152). Joseph McGowan, who con

siders the mixed diction of the translation to be symptomatic of the poet's "love-hate of the English language," regards Heaney's lexical reliance on Hiber

no-English and Irish as a kind of necessary response to "nine centuries of Eng lish dominance over Irish affairs, life, and language."5

Not surprisingly, the most disparaging readings of Heaney's translation have

come from Anglo-Saxon experts. Nicholas Howe's critique highlights some of

the more rigidly monologic conceptions of language and textual transmission

still prevailing in certain circles of Anglo-Saxon studies today. At issue in Howe's

detailed and erudite essay is Heaney's so-called polemical use of "political dialect" Through what Howe somewhat inaccurately calls Heaney's "sparing" use

oFUlsterisms, the translation unhappily attempts to "to make an Irish poem" out

of Beowulf.6 The trouble with Heaney's rendering, Howe argues, is not simply that it exemplifies a case of an Irish writer trying "to graft himself onto the Eng lish literary tradition" (NR 36), but that it attempts to rewrite an inviolable cor

nerstone of English culture for political ends, a purpose which, by implication,

ultimately may serve to reify separatist ideology and Irish identitarianism.7 Howe

concludes that Heaney's uneven use of the vernacular establishes him "as a rein

ventor of the poem, [one] who turns Old English into Modern English to remake

the literary and cultural history of the British Isles" (NR 36).

5? Joseph McGowan, "Heaney, Caedmon, Beowulf? New Hibernia Review 6,2 (Summer, 2002), 39.

6. Nicholas Howe, "Scullionspeak" New Republic, February 28,2000,32-37; hereafter cited par

enthetically, thus: (NR 32). Significantly, no mention is made of Heaney's attempt to cast the voice

of the poem in an Ulster accent and the peculiar speech patterns of this version of Hiberno-Eng lish. Other reviewers similarly fail to treat this aspect of voicing in the poem.

7. In describing Heaney's use of dialect as counterproductive and "polemically" inspired, Howe

puts forth some rather obvious objections: "the original does not use words from one specific dialect

to make a larger political and poetic claim" {NR 35). But the real issue for Howe seems to be a con

cern with safeguarding the English language from the corrupting influence of dialect. Heaney's *Ulsterisms" simply do not belong in the text because they do not circulate widely "in the Standard

English of either England or North America" (NR 35).

8




Responding to Heaney's adversarial critics and the question of the transla

tion's adequacy necessitates considering the matter of appropriation and adul

teration by attending to the specific issues of prosodie adaptation and the fig ure of poetic voice. Examining these facets of poetic artifice that inform the

translation demonstrates that Heaney's attempt to recast Beowulf in an Irish

light is far more nuanced and suggestive than his recent critics admit. While

each of these critics cited above correctly identifies a certain anticolonial and

revisionist strain in Heaney's use of local diction, the full force of the transla

tion's vernacular mode emerges from more than just the dozen or so Hiberni

cisms commonly identified in the criticism. The local impact and vernacular

footing of Heaney's Beowulf ?nds its purchase in the development of a distinc

tive Northern Irish voice, a voice distinguished only in part by the use of

Ulsterisms and archaic native Irish words, but more so by the cadences, pacing,

rhythms, sounds and idiomatic idiosyncrasies of local Northern Irish dialect. In

short, Heaney effects his cunning appropriation and revision of the Old English poem not just by putting a bawn into Beowulf but also by recasting the poem in the voice of his own people. As a result, Heaney transforms the song of suf

fering that is Beowulf into a keen for his own people's troubles.

The local quality and import of the translation emerges from Heaney's

deployment of peculiarly Northern Irish speech patterns and ways of articulat

ing one's experience of violent reality. To this end, Heaney musters the force of

the vernacular through a combination of well placed, redolent Hiberno-English words and the deployment of the distinctive Ulster accent and voice. How

might the distinctiveness of Ulster speech be characterized? Borrowing from the

poet W. R. Rodgers's characterization of the Ulster voice in "The Character of

Ireland," Heaney has often noted that Ulster's habits of speech are distinguished

by a curt, energetic, angular, and hard-edged consonantal quality, as well as by an aversion to loquaciousness and overstatement?the "Whatever You Say Say

Nothing" factor.8 Given the forthright, no-nonsense delivery of the Beowulf

poet, or scop, and the alliterative, staccato quality of the split Old English line, the Ulster voice becomes a fitting medium for reviving the stark lyricism and

restrained tenor of the poem at numerous junctures, particularly in the "gnom ic" sections where various characters dispense their hard-won wisdom and sense of the precariousness of existence.

Elements of local Ulster speech become immediately apparent from the outset in Heaney's translation. In transforming the very first line of the poem?

Hwcet we G?r-Dena in ge?r-dagum?into a line deeply inflected by the Ulster

voice and idiom, Heaney reincarnates the Old English poetry in a living idiom

8. Seamus Heaney, "Feeling into Words," Preoccupations (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 45;

hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (P 45).

82




that is highly personal in its frame of reference but also relevant in terms of con

temporary discussions concerning the politics of language in Northern Ire

land. Specifically, he begins his translation with an Ulsterism that appears as a

one-word sentence: "So." Writing in his introduction, Heaney explains that this

"So" derives from a subspecies of his local dialect, a variation of Hiberno-Eng lish he calls "Scullion-speak." By settling on "Scullion-speak," a form of utter

ance which Heaney describes as "a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father's, people whom I had once described in a poem as 'big voiced Scullions'" (B xxvii), the poet-turned-translator returns to the voice and

plight of family members whose language for and experience of suffering

appears in such poems concerned with the Northern Irish "Troubles" as "Station

Island," "Casualty," and "The Strand at Lough Beg." Diverging as radically as it

does from other translators' lofty renderings of the poem's first word Hw t?

such as "Lo," "Hark," "Behold," "Indeed," and "Attend"?Heaney's "So" pro

vides a fitting overture to his vernacularized song of suffering, for the word "so"

in local speech not only serves as an "exclamation calling for immediate atten

tion," but it functions also as an "expression that obliterates all previous dis

course and narrative" {B xxvii). The word invites us to attend to the poem anew, from a Northern Irish perspective.9

While Heaney's opening "So" will certainly not obliterate all previous criti

cal conversations concerning Beowulf, it has set the stage for shifting and refo

cusing the discussion about the status of Beowulf as a sign and site of English

hegemony. Various scholars of Old English have taken exception to Heaney's

adoption of a vernacular voice and vocabulary for a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and political reasons, and the opening "so" stands at the heart of their criticism.

Objecting to this opening word on one hand because it demands to be read "as a connection back to [Heaney's] Ulster ancestry" and on the other because "it

has no fixed semantic meaning," Nicholas Howe complains that such Ulsterisms

will serve only to confuse readers "who use other varieties of English." Further

more, argues Howe, "'So' sounds too understated, too domestic for the start of a poem such as Beowulf (NR 34, emphasis mine). In short, Heaney's privileg

ing of the local and dialect renders the opening too homespun, too parochial, and this quality burdens the entire translation in Howe's view.

But a closer reading of the poem's opening lines suggests that Heaney's ver

nacularizations endow his translation with far more aesthetic and political

complexity than Howe detects. Consider the aesthetic and cultural valence of

9? Adding an Irish strand to the Beowulf narrative expands and complicates the interlace struc

ture of this poem, a text which, of course, is a composite of various oral and written narratives and

traditions. For a superb discussion of Anglo-Saxon interlace, see John Leyerle, "The Interlace Struc

ture of Beowulf University of Toronto Quarterly, 37 (1967), 1-17.

83




the lines just following the controversial "So." In lines 11-14, the point at which the Beowulf 'scop memorializes Shield Sheafson's son, Heaney writes:

Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield, A cub in the yard, a comfort sent

By God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed, The long times and troubles they'd come through ... (By. 11-14)

Heaney's diction is at once conspicuous and illustrious. While much could be made of Heaney's interpolation of the Latinate "nation" for the Anglo-Saxon fole (a word that occasionally gets translated as "folk" but more often as "people"), the two phrases immediately following this word are of particular significance.

When Heaney recalls how Shield's son "knew what they had tholed / The long times and troubles they'd come through," he no doubt creates a web of local ref erence.

Read with an eye toward the Northern Irish conflict, the word "troubles"

requires no gloss. This is perhaps why Howe and other critics skip over it. But

Howe elides the entire passage from his discussion, a passage that casts a reveal

ing light on Heaney's purported partisanship and the real significance of his

"polemical" revisionary project. In rendering line thirteen as "He knew what

they had tholed," a line which typically translates something like "He knew

how long and sorely the people had languished," Heaney continues to reject the

field of Standard English, the normative language and register of most modern

English translations. Instead, he transcreatively transforms the Beowulf scop's

language into a vernacular field of force.10 Instancing a language at once liter

ary and archaic, "thole" (from the Old English polian, "to suffer") is also root

ed in modern local speech. Indeed, Heaney recalls in his introduction that as a

young boy, he often heard his aunt say, when referring to others' misfortune,

"They'll just have to learn to thole" (B xxv). Once again then, in the poem's thir

teenth line, Heaney continues to reposition Beowulf as a song of his own peo

ple's suffering.

io. Here Heaney's method of translation resembles the translation theory and method Haroldo de

Campos calls Antropofagia or transcreative translation. As de Campos's excellent commentator Else

Viera notes, to transcreate, on one level, means to alter a source text from the dominant culture in

a way that derives "nourishment from local sources, nourishment that, at the same time, limits the

universality of the original and limits difference." In works like Metalinguagem e Outras Metas and

"De Razao Antropogagica," de Campos argues that the liberated and liberating translator does not

obsequiously bow down before the source text in an apish act of mimicry, but instead she or he rav

ishes and devours the original in order to derive necessary and invigorating nourishment from it.

See Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira's "Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antopofagia and Haroldo de Cam

pos' Poetics of Transcreation," in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Basnet,

Harish Trivedi (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 109-110.

84




Beyond referencing both the "Troubles" and local vocabulary used specifi

cally to describe the consequences of conflict, Heaney solidifies the Irish con

nection through the employment of Ulster speech patterns and inflections. In

the pacing and rhythmic intensity of lines 11-13, we hear not only the voice of

Heaney's relatives but also the sound of just about any common Ulsterman or

Ulsterwoman talking. This has as much to do with the colloquial feel of the

phrasing ("a cub in the yard," "they'd") as it does with Heaney's syllabic stress

es, which are modeled on the consonantal and staccato speech patterns of Ulster

dialect. Take, for example, the multiple "c" sounds ("comfort," "child," "cub"

"come") and the well-placed series of alliterating "t" and "d" sounds linking the

two halves of the transformed Anglo-Saxon lines: "yard / comfort, sent," "times,

troubles / they'd" and "that / what, tholed." Note also that, in Ireland, the "th"

in "tholed" falls closer to a "t" than to "th " thus sounding like "told." All of these

aural devices serve to reproduce the alliterative tendencies of the original?an achievement overlooked by critics of the translation. Moreover, these aural

effects nicely approximate the spirant and fricative quality produced by the

ubiquitous Old English "g" in the original's opening passage while at the same

time they mimic Ulster speech.11 In this regard, the Ulster voice of Heaney's translation instances what might

be called a vernacular-based representational poetic. Like many of Heaney's dialect poems, the translation's opening lines can be called representational in

one respect because they "attempt to capture in writing the apparently imme

diate representationalism of spoken language, especially local dialect" (empha sis added).12 Heaney's prosody may also be called representational insofar as the

distinctive qualities of Ulster speech create an aurally mimetic reproduction of

the action depicted on the page. One of the most persuasive and moving exam

ples of Heaney's ability to render local speech patterns cunningly and artfully occurs in his translation of the Finnsburg fragment. Deploying an impressive

array of sonic, rhythmic, and visual effects, Heaney re-enacts, at the level of

sound, the grim scene recounted before us, a scene in which Hrothgar's scop recalls how the Half-Dane queen Hildeburh "tholes" over the brutal, treacher ous murders of her closest male relations:

11. For a helpful note on the role of the alliterating "g" in the opening lines of the original, see

Beowulf: With the Finnsburg Fragment, ed. C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton, (Exeter: University of

Exeter Press, 1988), p. 97, note 2. Contrary to Howe s claim that Heaney's opening levels the diction

and flattens its claim on the audience, I would argue these lines have quite the opposite effect.

Indeed, when read aloud, as Heaney's translation ought to be read, even a British or North Amer

ican pronunciation will reproduce some of the elaborate sound system Heaney has erected here.

12. Bernard O'Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and The Language of Poetry (New York: Harvester/

Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 150. In his excellent formalist reading of Heaney's original verse, Bernard

O'Donoghue employs the phrase "representational" to describe the use of the vernacular in

Heaney's poetry. Such a representationalism is also at work in many of Heaney's other translations.

85




Then Hildeburh ordered her own

sons body

be burnt with Hnaefs,

the flesh on his bones to sputter and blaze

beside his uncle's.

The woman wailed

and sang keens

the warrior went up.

Carcass flame

swirled and fumed,

they stood round the burial mound and howled

as heads melted,

crusted gashes

spattered and ran

bloody matter.

The glutton element

flamed and consumed the dead on both sides.

(B 77:1115-1125)

Here, in lines that acknowledge that people on both sides of the conflict

endure terrible deaths, Heaney brings to bear the full force of his own poetic tal

ent, a talent enhanced by an ear keenly attuned to the sonic richness of Ulster

dialect. With the exception of the Irish word keen (caoine) the diction of this

dazzling prosodie display could be said to be drawn from plainspoken English that might be spoken anywhere in the world. When read aloud, the stressed

halves of each line?emphasized here through the particularly strong caesurae

created by the visual breaking of the line?reproduce the broken, strained

breathing of Queen Hildeburh. Most speakers of English would reproduce this

effect. But another quality of speech inherent in this sound system incorporates the distinctive qualities of the Ulster accent. Here we should recall that Heaney described this accent as "generally a staccato consonantal one. Our tongue strikes the tangent of the consonant rather more than it rolls the circle of the

vowel. ... It is energetic, angular, hard-edged" (P 45). This is, in fact, what

comes through as Heaney replicates the harshness of the original lines through a barrage of hard "c" and "t" sounds and the heavy sibilance created by the fre

quent hiss of the ubiquitous "s." Indeed, the sense of the sounds created here is

that of bodies being consumed by fire. Far from being "polemical" or even per

functory evocations of local speech, which add no significant poetic meaning to

86




the passage, Heaney's insertion of dialect speech patterns functions according to the logic of his representational aesthetic.

Heaney's cultivation of the Ulster voice might be called representational in yet another sense. In using diction and prosody steeped in the sounds, rhythms, and

linguistic "blemishes" of Ulster's demotic English, Heaney proves himself to be

the perfect mouthpiece for giving voice to the plight of people who have been

so blasted and calcined by various forms of violence they can no longer speak for themselves. It is precisely such Northern Irish victims of violence whose

story and song of suffering is mirrored in the Beowulf story. In another sense,

however, the translation might be said to belong to count?ess human beings who

have witnessed the scourge of overwhelming brutality and wanton destruc

tion. That Heaney hopes to give the song of Beowulf back to a universal audi

ence as well is made clear in his discussion of the scene at poem's end in which

the Geat woman laments the death of the fallen Beowulf, a scene he describes

as being "at once immemorial and oddly contemporary":

The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her

dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from

Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being

exposed to a comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament

and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy and dignity and unforgiving truth- (B xxxi)

By taking the poem back from necromancing philologists and "fact-finding historians" and making it once again readable and engaging for common folk,

Heaney has indeed, to some extent, de-Anglicized the epic and made it fit for a

new kind of global audience and new type of canon.

Insofar as representation involves giving voice to the voiceless victims of vio

lence and oppression, Heaney's translation may very well be said to be political. In a certain sense, Howe and others are correct to assign political significance to

Heaney's use of dialect. But what kind of politics are at work in this case? On one

hand, the term political applies because Heaney's privileging of the vernacular

voice undoubtedly represents a pointed response to the troubled postcolonial his

tory of language and literary tradition in Irish life that has involved, at various

historical stages, the imposition of Standard English as the linguistic norm in Ire

land, but also has frequently involved a prejudice in favor of English literature.13

13. On this point, see Clair Wills, "Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence " Oxford Liter

ary Review, 13,1-2 (1991), 29. For an expanded discussion concerning the emergence of English lan

87




As Tom Paulin reminds us, the relations between the English and Irish lan

guages and culture have been "a story of possession and dispossession, territo

rial struggle and the establishment or imposition of a culture."14 Heaney's rejec tion of Standard English as the predominant linguistic register of the poem, his

insertion of Hiberno-English and Gaelic diction, and his adoption of a demot

ic Ulster voice all serve as potent responses to this narrative.

The danger of assigning political intentions, however, is that some critics

might be too quick to equate Heaney's privileging of the vernacular with sectar

ian or narrow identitarian goals. Unfortunately, they may do this without fully

appreciating the complexities and nuances of language politics in contemporary Ireland. Does it follow that, by invoking such an Ulster voice, Heaney embraces

a kind of partisan and separatist politics? To answer this question, it is perhaps necessary to take a longer historical view of Heaney's evolving engagement with

the issue of dialect and its relation to broader issues of language and identity over

the past three decades. During this period, Heaney has spent a great deal of ink, in both his poetry and prose, on the related problems of dual linguistic inheri

tances, bifurcated literary allegiances, and split cultural traditions.

Many of the dialect poems that appear in the 1972 collection bear out

Heaney s complicated early attempts to stake out a viable position on the relat

ed problems of language, literary tradition, and identity.15 Characteristic of

this project, the opening lines of "Traditions," a poem written in the deliberately anti-iambic (that is, anti-English) artesian stanza,16 reveal Heaney s desire to

interrogate not only the historical tension between the English and Irish lan

guages, but also the conceptual terms in which discussions of language politics have long been framed in the Irish context:

Our guttural muse

was bulled long ago

by the alliterative tradition, her uvula grows

guage and literature as predominant modes of cultural discourse in nineteenth-century Ireland, see

also David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp.

25-31,43-49? and David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor-Literature (Berkeley: University of Califor

nia Press, 1988), p. 3.

14. Tom Paulin, "A New Look at the Language Question," in Ireland's Field Day (Notre Dame: Notre

Dame University Press, 1986), p. 10.

15. Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 16,26,27; hereafter cited

parenthetically, thus: (WO 16,26,27). 16. Blake Morrison uses the term "artesian stanza" to denote a narrow stanza that bores down the

middle of a page like an artesian well, and it is this stanza that dominates Heaney's poems that probe into Ireland's prehistoric and colonial past. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London: Methuen,

1982), pp. 44-62.

88




vestigial, forgotten like the coccyx or a Brigid's Cross

yellowing in some outhouse

while custom, that 'most

sovereign mistress',

beds us down into

the British isles. ( WO 31)

Heaney's communal speaker casts a cold eye here on the growing dominance

of the English tongue in modern Irish life. The fraught language of this section

indicates a desire to view the loss of the native Irish linguistic and cultural

inheritance as a kind of grand deception. In addition to portraying linguistic and cultural imperialism in terms of a dirty ruse, the choice of the verb "bulled"

may also suggest a "forced mating," a reading that likens the marriage of the

overpowering, "masculine" English tongue and the submissive, "feminine" Irish

tongue to a brutal act of rape rather than a consensual union.17 From this per

spective, the English language as spoken by the Irish becomes the bastard

stepchild of this unseemly colonial coupling. Thus, by playing off Arnoldian

ideas of English as a dominant masculine form, and Irish as a subservient fem

inine one, the combative voice of this section may be said to reinforce a typical nationalist argument that English colonialism all but destroyed the Irish nation

al character through a systematic program of violence and domination.

A key question raised by "Traditions" is whether we can identify the appar

ent?y combative voice that emerges in the first section of this poem?and in his

other dialect poems?as Heaney's own attitude.18 Given Heaney's propensity for

obliquely handling the vexed issues of language politics and cultural essentialism

in these poems, some critics have been perhaps too quick to read pieces like "Tra

ditions" or "A New Song" as personal pronouncements of postcolonial ressenti

ment and unqualified nationalist sympathy on Heaney's part. In his commentary on the dialect poems, David Lloyd, for example, chides Heaney for rehearsing a

recycled brand of romantic nationalism and linguistic essentialism. In Lloyd's

17. For this reading, I am indebted to Aisling Maguires explication of "Traditions" in Selected

Poems of Seamus Heaney (London: Longman York Press, 1986), p. 35. It is indeed correct to say that

many language historians and cultural critics contend that the often violent pressure exerted by colonialism on the Irish language was responsible for the loss of Irish as the first language of the

nation. On this point see Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context (Manchester: St.

Jerome, 1999), pp. 19-20,37. 18. Bernard O'Donoghue contends that "Traditions" is a humorous poem which has been taken

much too solemnly by Heaney's critics. O'Donoghue contends such readings exemplify a tenden

cy to collapse too completely Heaney's speakers's points of view with that of their creator.

8q




estimation, Heaney tips his essentialist hand through his strict adherence to a

"rigid, dualistic schematization... oral, feminine, unconscious image and emo

tion versus cultured, masculine, conscious will and intelligence."19 But the notion

that Heaney's poetry in the early 1970s conceives of the relation between cultural

identity and language in rigid essentialist and identitarian terms is complicat ed by various signals to the contrary suggesting that Heaney was acutely aware

of the dangers inherent in the exclusivist cultural politics of the day. Specifical

ly, the last section of "Traditions" strongly suggests that Heaney sought to chal

lenge and ultimately undercut the essentialist claims of the poem's first section:

MacMorris, gallivanting

around the Globe, whinged to courtier and groundling who had heard tell of us

as going very bare

of learning, as wild hares,

as anatomies of death:

"What ish my nation?"

And sensibly, though so much

later, the wandering Bloom

replied, "Ireland," said Bloom, " I was born here. Ireland." ( WO 32 )

Heaney concludes "Traditions" by quoting Leopold Bloom's retort to the

fervidly nationalist Citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses. Bloom's "sensible"

reply to the violent Citizen embraces a notion of "Irishness" derived not from the

purity of one's pedigree or language, but rather from a communal experience that transcends intractable linguistic and ethnic boundaries. In addition to

Bloom's telling riposte, Heaney challenges other tenets of essentialism in the lines

immediately preceding the Joyce allusion. Heaney's inclusion of MacMorris's

confused question "What ish my nation?" from Shakespeare's Henry Vdemon strates an incisive awareness of the counter-colonizing effects of linguistic and

cultural coupling. MacMorris's Hiberno-English "ish" not only shows the ver

nacular creeping into one of the most cherished cornerstones of English culture, but also reveals Heaney's awareness of the bidirectional nature of English-Irish

hybridization. Such an awareness, highlighted elsewhere in Heaney's dialect

19- David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p. 23; for further elucidation of this point see the chapter "'Pap for the Dispossessed': Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity," especially pp. 22-26.

90




poems, ultimately seems to belie the notion that Heaney is enslaved by binary or essentialist conceptions of language and culture.

Heaney s occasionally labyrinthine moves in such dialect poems as "Tradi

tions" exemplify the difficulties and potential pitfalls of employing poetry to

unravel the troubled intersection of language, politics, and identity. Similarly, the contentious critical response to Heaney's dialect poems further underscores

the challenge of successfully negotiating these charged issues in verse. Even a

brief reading of "Traditions" shows that critics of the dialect poems are correct

to continue debating the status of Heaney's complicated and often paradoxical

responses to the problems of language loss, cultural dispossession, and the deci

sion to write in the colonial master's language. These problems became partic

ularly vexing during the early phases of the "Troubles," and given the intensity of that conflict, it is not surprising that such concerns came to dominate a

number of Heaney's poetic and prose pieces during the 1970s.

These concerns had, in fact, been part of Heaney's consciousness for much of

his life. From a young age, Heaney was often confronted, as he tells us, with

dualistic conceptions of language and identity. Indeed, by his own admission

Heaney was, at least in his early youth, "bulled" into a kind of binary thinking

concerning his split linguistic and cultural inheritances. Writing in the intro

duction to Beowulf, Heaney notes the considerable pressure exerted on him in

his boyhood to resist the imposed language and culture in favor of his van

quished native inheritance:

Sprung from an Irish nationalist background and educated at a Northern Irish

Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language and lived within a cultural and

ideological frame that regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking, but I had been robbed of. (B xxvii)

At numerous other junctures, Heaney discusses his own youthful, Manichean

conception of the language problem. In the early essay "Belfast" (1972), for

instance, he describes how, as a child, he found himself torn between two dis

tinct and clearly antagonistic literary and linguistic traditions that bore the scars of a long colonial encounter marked by conquest, absorption, resistance, and antagonism:

Our farm was called Mossbawn. Moss, a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters, and bawn, the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farm

houses. Mossbawn, the planter's house on the bog. Yet, in spite of this Ordnance

Survey spelling, we pronounced it Moss bann, and ban is the Gaelic word for

white. So might the thing not mean the white moss, the moss of bog-cotton? In the

syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster. (P 35)

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Pulled between two traditions separated by history and hatred, Heaney like all

good nationalists was expected not to traverse the no-man's-land separating the two distinct halves of what John Montague has aptly called the "partitioned intellect" of Ulster.20

Quite often in the 1960s and early 1970s, Heaney's response to this classic

postcolonial quandary resembled that of James Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus, who ruefully refers to English as "acquired speech... his before mine ... so familiar and so foreign."21 A number of the poet's commentaries on his

ambivalence about using his "acquired" Standard English versus Hiberno-Eng lish and Irish point up this sentiment. Specifically, the tension between acquired and local speech manifests itself in several extended prose discussions of dialect

words. One such word is lachtar, an Ulsterism his aunt used to denote a flock of

chicks. Like the "bawn" of his Beowulf the distinctive Hiberno-English word lachtar appears in multiple Heaney works, and its history also serves as a kind of parable of the poet's evolving sense of language and identity. Describing the

"thrill" he felt upon discovering that lachtar was derived from the Irish lan

guage, rather than English as he had assumed, and that the word had its origin in his home county of Derry, Heaney writes:

here it [lachtar] was, surviving in my aunt's English speech generations after her forebears and mine had ceased to speak Irish. For a long time, therefore, the lit

tle word was?to borrow a simile from Joyce?like a rapier point of conscious

ness pricking me with an awareness of language-loss and cultural dispossession,

and tempting me into binary thinking about language. I tended to conceive of

English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than

both/ands, and this was an attitude which for a long time hampered the devel

opment of a more confident and creative way of dealing with whole vexed ques

tion?the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, his

tory and literary tradition in Ireland. (B xxiv)

If a single word like lachtar reveals how in childhood Heaney had been

sometimes bulled into a kind of essentialist thinking about language?the type of thinking still espoused by Sinn F?in and Ulster loyalists alike in their ongo

ing debates over the language question in Northern Ireland?Heaney's reflec

tions on other words taken from the Hiberno-English lexicon suggest that his

experience of the politics of language and violence in the 1970s made it imper ative for him to seek a Bloomian, an ti-essentialist way out of the debilitating

binary bind created by colonialism. Discussing the status and significance of

dialect in two seminal essays from the late 1970s and early 1980s, Heaney makes

20. See John Montague, "The Unpartitioned Intellect "

in The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1989), pp. 36-41. 21. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 189.

92




some of his most telling remarks about the relation between language and

identity in "The Interesting Case of John Alphonsus Mulrennan" (1978) and

"Among Schoolchildren": A John Mahne Memorial Lecture (1983). Specifically, he

uses his comments on Stephen Dedalus and the "tundish" episode in A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man to develop his evolving response to these issues. In

both essays, Heaney not only identifies local dialect as a point of intersection

between English and Irish, but also suggests that the vernacular might serve as

a kind of "line of escape" out of the English-Irish antithesis created by purists and separatists on both sides of the political and cultural divide.22

Seeing in Stephen a reflection of his own divisions and obsessions as a

young man, Heaney describes Dedalus as young Dublin artist and intellectual

who is keenly, even painfully, aware of the force of words and accents.23 Hyper sensitive to the linguistic and cultural differences separating him and the dean

of studies at University College, Dublin, Stephen engages with this Jesuit priest in a conversation which turns on the young artist's use of "tundish" to denote a

funnel. Since he has never heard the word before, the English Jesuit concludes

"tundish" must be Irish. As the episode concludes, Stephen casts himself as a dis

enfranchised slave?a kind of Hibernian verna?trapped in the master's prison house of language:

?How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I

cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His fonguage, so familiar

and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accept

ed its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.24

22. The phrase "line of escape" comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a

Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), especial

ly chapter 3. For Deleuze and Guattari, the notion of "deter ritorialization" seems to imply that expe rience and language are inextricably intertwined and always already political in nature. For a char

acter like Stephen, who like his maker Joyce, shows a deep suspicion of the Irish Revival, the issue

of language and identity often seems, in my view, to be more of an existential and aesthetic concern

rather than a purely political concern.

23. See Seamus Heaney, "The Interesting Case of John Alphonsus Mulrennan" Planet, 41 ( January,

97 )>35?

24. Joyce, pp. 188-189. In this essay, Heaney writes, "... Stephen feels excluded from the English tra

dition, which he senses as organic and other than his own. His own tradition is linguistically frac

tured. History, which has woven the fabric of English life and landscape and language into a seam

less garment, has rent the fabric of Irish life, has effected a breach between its past and its present, and an alienation between the speaker and his speech_Whether we wish to locate the breaking

point of Gaelic civilization at the Battle of Kinsale and the Flight of the Earls in the early seventeenth

century or whether we hold out hopefully until the Jacobite dream fades after the flight of the Wild

Geese, there is no doubt that the social, cultural and linguistic life of the country is radically altered,

and the alteration is felt by the majority of Irish people as a kind of loss, an exile from an original whole and good place or state."

93




Though Heaney never says as much, this conversation underscores not only the

gap between standard and local English usage, but also the fact that voice

becomes a powerful mark of difference in postcolonial discourse. Stephen's

recognition of such marks of difference only serves to heighten his sense of

alienation, indignation, and defiant pride in his role as a subaltern speaker. At

the novel's end, however, Stephen begins to effect his own liberation by explod

ing the priest's false assumptions concerning the purity of the English lan

guage. In his final diary entry, the upstart Irish artist exposes and contradicts the

monologic tendencies of dominant colonial culture:

13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his runnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!25

As Stephen notes, the Hiberno-English "tundish" has its origin in the tongue of

the colonial Other. The dean's effort to use the dialect as a site and sign of colo nial difference thus collapses upon itself. Such linguistic cross-fertilization

undermines the notion of cultural purity. Boundary-crossings, which fly in the

monologic face of colonialism, prove to be the lifeblood of the living, hybrid

language that is the postcolonial vernacular.

Heaney's reflections on the "tundish" episode acknowledge a limited range of appropriate responses to the dominant language and culture's pretensions to

transcendence and universalism. One response involves the attempt sustain native literary tradition, a tradition left fragmented and diminished as a result of the decline of Irish as a national language. Given that subaltern subjects like

Stephen feel excluded, in some ways, from both the Gaelic and English literary and linguistic traditions, Heaney notes that one solution to this conundrum lies in establishing "an Irish literary tradition in English."26 Opting to write pri

marily in English becomes a way, in some respects, for Stephen?and by exten

sion Joyce?to fly the nets of "language, religion, nation," but it must be remem

bered that in doing so Joyce does not abandon his Gaelic inheritance or "disdain the Gaelic resources." Rather, as Heaney puts it, Joyce "batten [ed] onto them ..

. as historical reality."27 Thus, preserving the Gaelic tradition became for Joyce another means of undercutting the dominant culture's univocal tendencies.

For Heaney, one of Joyce's greatest contributions in his negotiation of two

distinct literary and linguistic traditions is that he becomes a votary of the ver

nacular. The type of English Joyce turns to most often is not standard British

English, but rather local dialect, a vibrant fusion of English and Irish that more

25. Joyce, p. 227.

26. Heaney, "The Interesting Case ...35.

27. Heaney, "The Interesting Case..." 40.

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Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney $ Beowulf

authentically reflects the tensions, dualities, ironies, and ambiguities of the cul

tural in-betweenness that characterizes Irish life. Indeed, as Heaney reminds us,

"Joyce's great root was in an Irish city with its own demotic English." Joyce's

solution to the language bind was therefore to celebrate that which is local,

dialect, pidgin. Through his flight into what critics like Howe might label the

"lowly" vernacular, Joyce and his character Stephen find release from the bonds

that earlier had prevented their liberation:

What had seemed disabling and provincial is suddenly found to be corroborat

ing and fundamental and potentially universal. To belong to Ireland, to speak its

dialect, is not necessarily to be cut off from the worlds banquet because the ban

quet is eaten at the table of one's own life, savoured by the tongue one speaks.

Stephen now trusts what he calls "our own language." And in that trust he will

go to encounter what he calls the "reality of experience."28

Summing up the significance of Joyce's turn to the vernacular, Heaney writes: "His work took hold of the European rather than just the Irish heritage, and in the end it made the English language lie down in the rag-and-bone shop of its origins and influences-His achievement reminds us that English is by now not so much an imperial humiliation as a native weapon" (AS 39-40). Here

Heaney's assessment of Joyce's vernacular project is noteworthy for several rea

sons. Like other postcolonial writers and theorists who acknowledge the ver

nacular as a mode of counter-hegemony?Derek Walcott, Tom Paulin, Salman

Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, and Clair Wills, to name a few?Heaney understands

how nonstandard English can become a powerful weapon against dominant

culture. Joyce's masterful fusion of the English and Irish literary and linguistic traditions?a fusion made even more potent, Heaney argues, by Joyce's keen

awareness of the relation of these traditions to a larger European context?

serves, in Josaphat . Kubayanda's phrase, to "recontextualize" and "reframe" the

dominant language by undermining its "purity of grammar."27 In short, by

"polluting" the English language and literary tradition through his deployment of what can perhaps be best described (after Dante's phrase) as a kind of "illus

trious Irish vernacular," Joyce forces a rethinking of the notions of pure origins and fixed essences.

This is precisely the lesson Heaney derives from Joyce and later applies to his

vernacularized rewriting of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. It also serves as the basis

for many of his other translations and original poems. In unraveling the Gor

dian knot of language and identity, Heaney follows the kind of flight path to

28. Seamus Heaney, "Among Schoolchildren": A John Malone Memorial Lecture (Belfast: Queen's

University, 1983), pp. 10-11; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (AS 11).

29? Josaphat . Kubayanda, "Minority Discourse and The African Collective," Cultural Critique, 6

(1987), 116.

95




freedom taken by Stephen Dedalus and his creator. Or to use another metaphor, he follows the "line of escape" mapped and traveled by Joyce, the enslaved verna

who frees himself from the minatory prison-house of the master's language

through his own resourcefulness, cunning, and liberating creativity. As a means

of egress from the constraints of the split Ulster mind and violent sectarian pol itics of the day, Heaney forged a poetic dependent upon dialect. Accordingly,

Heaney's literary output from the 1970s onward has reflected an intense com

mitment to becoming adept at dialect. His increasing reliance on the vernacu

lar has gone hand in hand with an emphasis on translation as a means of resist

ing and reversing the baleful effects of colonial violence. In the course of

Northern Ireland's brutal thirty-year war, Heaney produced numerous hybrid transformations of time-honored cultural materials and canonical cornerstones

of the European, Irish, and English literary traditions. In translation after trans

lation, Heaney has deployed the vernacular as a means of releasing the English and Irish languages and peoples from what continued to be a history of con

quest, division, antagonism, and bloody resistance during the last three decades

of the twentieth century. His reworkings of numerous source texts?Dante's

Divine Comedy, the Middle Irish Buile Suibhne, Sophocles' Philoctetes, Beowulf, and, most recently, Antigone?all bear the distinct imprint of the "Troubles."30

They are also heavily informed by local dialect. Each of these translations, in its own way, thus serves as a representative moment of an on-going and increas

ingly sophisticated attempt by Heaney to leverage the vernacular as a construc

tive means of redistributing what the poet-translator calls "the whole field of

cultural and political force into a tolerable order" (RP189). Far from being a marginal aspect of his anticolonial critique, Heaney's ver

nacularized translations stand as a central feature of his postcolonial project.31 On one hand, his transformations of various source texts figure as key exten

30. As is the case with many of his finest lyrics and longer narrative poems, Heaney's translations

are typically shot through with images of brutality and atrocity, images which he then deftly engi neers to reference political and cultural violence in the Irish context.

31. Heaney's translations warrant far more critical consideration than they have heretofore

received. This little-studied aspect of Heaney's oeuvre warrants reconsideration because translation

in the Irish context can rarely be viewed as an innocuous, transparent activity; rather it must be seen

as involving various relationships of inequality between texts, authors, cultural traditions, and

social groups. Lawrence venuti, one of the deans of translation theory, argues in "Translation as Cul

tural Politics," Textual Practice, 7, 2 (Summer, 1993), p. 209, that "the violence of translation resides

in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values,

beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies

of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of

texts. Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader." For provocative theoretical

views on the so-called violence of translation, see Between Languages and Cultures: Translation

96




sions and instantiations of what Heaney, after Yeats's famous line in "Medita

tions in Time of Civil War," aptly called a search for "befitting emblems of

adversity." His translations thus provide a means of figuring the violence of Ire

land's postcolonial present by recovering and reproducing time-honored rep

resentations of past brutality. Additionally, his translations illustrate the dogged

consistency with which Heaney draws upon and merges a variety of formal, lin

guistic, and cultural traditions in an effort to resist the monologic and univo

cal tendencies of colonialism. By means of this project, Heaney succeeds in

lending a new voice to the contentious ongoing conversation about questions of

language, identity and canonicity in the English- and Irish-speaking world.

All of which leads back to the earlier question: Does it follow that that Heaney embraces a kind of partisan and separatist politics by invoking an Ulster voice

in his version of Beowulf. The answer, it seems, lies in what it means to speak with an Ulster voice. Since one of the unmistakable signs of being Irish is the

"degenerate" Irish accent?the differentiating voice of Irish men and women

which is characterized by "their (mis)use of the English language,"32 in Clair

Wills's phrase?then how does one tell an Ulster Protestant and Ulster Catholic

apart when each repeats a phrase like "He knew what they had tholed / The long times and troubles they'd come through"? Both speak with the same accent.

How does one tell them apart based on their pronunciation and intonation? The

Catholic docker and the Protestant longshoreman sound the same. The voices

of the IRA gunman and the Ulster Volunteers sound the same. No single iden

tity group or party can lay sole claim to the Ulster accent, just as no single party or group can claim a monopoly on the suffering and pain engendered by the

"Troubles." The Ulster voice is not an either-or proposition; it is a both-and

proposition. In other words, when Heaney adopts the vocabulary and speech

patterns endemic to the Hiberno-English spoken in Ulster, "he do," in Eliot's

words, the "Troubles" in the voice shared by the majority of people in Ulster,

people from each side of the sectarian and political divide.

This is a point so simple that it has been missed altogether by Howe and

other Old English specialists whose ears are attuned to the words, sounds, and

nuances of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. But this is a point that makes all the dif

ference when assigning "political" and "polemical" intentions to Heaney. By

recasting Beowulf 'in the vernacular, Heaney does not appropriate the poem for

Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Dingwaney, C. Maier (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and

the introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands:

Humanities Press, 1988).

32. Clair Wills, "Language Politics, Narrative, Political Violence " Oxford Literary Review, 13,1-2

(1991)? 21.

97




some kind of narrow nationalist or separatist agenda. Rather, vernacularization

of the poem addresses and perhaps even indicts all players who have been party to the Northern Irish war. Indeed, there is a kind of poetic and pan-political jus tice in Heaney's insertion of the Ulster voice into a poem that inherently con

cerns itself with a society in which "vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for

the living, [and] bloodshed begets further bloodshed" (B xiv). That Heaney should find in Beowulf a befitting emblem of his country's

adversity is not at all surprising. If Heaney's recasting of Beowulf in a quasi-Irish

light represents a kind of subaltern appropriation and adulteration of the source

text, it must also be noted that certain aspects of the poem inherently recom

mend themselves as mirrors of Ireland's colonial encounter, a kind of looking

glass in which the Irish and English, for that matter, might take one good look

at themselves. At its core, Beowulf is a brutal tale of conquest, colony, resistance,

absorption, murder, vengeance, dispossession, and long-standing hatreds. All of

which is to say, if Heaney's subtle, yet subversive insertion of Hiberno-English, native Irish words, and the distinctive Ulster voice helps draw parallels between

the Scandinavian society depicted in the poem and certain aspects of contem

porary Northern Irish history and social relations, then many moments in the

epic require little or no meddling to suggest this connection. His reworking of

Beowulf thus extends the project Heaney began with North where his "bog" poems draw connections between Scandinavian Iron Age sacrificial killings,

Viking invasions, and the often ritualistic postcolonial violence of the "Trou

bles." In this regard, Heaney's Beowulf represents what may well be the crown

ing statement of his critique of a pan-nationalistic Northern mythos based on

the notion of regenerative violence.

If Heaney's critics must persist in labeling his reworking of the Anglo Saxon poem a political polemic, so be it. By recasting Beowulf in the voice of

Ulster people, he does offer a radical new approach to the related issues of post colonial translation, the language question, and the problem of identity. In

these respects, Heaney's Beowulf represents an alternative political view.

Heaney's position is radical not in the sense of extremism, but in the sense that it steps back from conventional wisdom and separatist politics. In recent years,

Heaney has taken to arguing for such a politics in his essays. To this end,

Heaney is fond of quoting Roy Foster's call for a more productive way of look

ing at these matters:

"We need not give up our claims on Irishness in order to conceive of it as a flex

ible definition. And in an age of exclusivist jihads to east and west, the notion that

people can reconcile more than one cultural identity may have much to recom

mend it." (RP 202)

Coming as it does at the end of the essay "Frontiers of Writing," the closing essay

98




in The Redress of Poetry, Heaney stands by this radical view of Irishness. In fact, he closes the essay by charging all people of Northern Ireland to make an effort

at the kind of "two-mindedness" called for by Foster. As evidenced by the pre mium he places on the vernacular in his prose, poetry, and translations, Heaney

clearly suggests such two-mindedness is perhaps the only way finally to cure Ire

land's addiction to the politics of hatred and violence.

At the end of the day, Heaney's Beowulf offers a liberating postcolonial per

spective demonstrating how the Northern Irish might succeed in finding an

"escape route" out of the "split mind" of Ulster. The product of an imagination fired in the crucible of postcolonial conflict, Heaney's translation of Beowulf is

the site of a postcolonial split vision trying to go beyond the binary. In his trans

lation, Heaney demonstrates the transnational, multilingual, and transtemporal

tendencies of his still evolving anticolonial poetic. As such, all of Heaney's trans

lations move increasingly beyond the divisions and antagonisms at the heart of

the Northern Irish conflict. More frequently operating in the contact zone of

transcreative hybridity than in the combat zone of sectarian and strict national

ist politics, these works emerge from and, in turn, create a kind of demilitarized zone of the imagination and spirit. To claim this much for Heaney's translations

is not to say they effect a facile elision of real differences or seek to resolve all con

tradiction at the level of art. In fact, Heaney's translations sometimes operate within the binary by drawing attention to the Manichean divide by recalling a

complex history of colony and conquest in order to overcome that past. Ulti

mately, his translations find an escape route out of the "partitioned intellect" in

that they typically recommend more productive and confident ways of bridging divisions and respecting differences through the creation of a new language as

well as alternative historical and political perspectives. Within the sovereign space of his vernacularized representational poetic,

then, Heaney seems to create what Homi Bhabha calls the "Third Space." Oper

ating within such a space and carrying such a burden, Bbabha concludes, is ulti

mately what

makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the

'people'. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polar

ity and emerge as the others of our selves.33

That Heaney does this by singing the song of his own people s suffering within

the hallowed ground of a classic Anglo-Saxon text is a testimony and credit not

only to the power of Irish postcolonial poetry and translation, but also to his

achievement as a major voice of Irish decolonization.

?-* THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY

33- Horni Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 38-39.

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Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf"

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