Seamus Heaney Visits Harvard; 'Talks Shop,' Offers Recent Poetry, Translation of 'Beowolf'

One of the famous "bog poems" by Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winning poet and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet, agonizes over the problems of place and the mixed emotions of homecoming. Often compared by critics to noted expatriates (and fellow Nobel Laureates) Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, Heaney frequently writes about returning as an outsider to his homeland in Ireland. There he finds a rich heritage of language and myth, subjugated by the fear-driven assimilation of British culture forced upon Ireland with the onset of "The Troubles."

A very different reception awaited Heaney a few weeks ago when he returned to Harvard and Cambridge, his home-away-from-home. Excited is perhaps too weak a word to describe the elation felt by the University and by Cantabridgians-at-large at Heaney's return to Boston since his departure in 1995.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Swedish Academy of Letters praised as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." He is the fourth Irish writer to have won the prize, joining the ranks of William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969). He is one of the most popular poets of all time (his collections, particularly North, have outsold nearly all other poetic collections in recent memory) and the author of a collection of 18 books of poetry, prose and drama, some original work, some collaborative, some anthologies.

Coming from a culturally rich but economically poor Roman Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland, a world that would pervade his early works and continues to haunt his writing, Heaney attended Queen's University, Belfast and taught at several other universities before ending up at Harvard, where he taught a poetry workshop every spring semester until he won the Nobel Prize.

Heaney once said that of all the cities he had visited in America, Boston was the one that most reminded him of his beloved Dublin (where he moved in 1972). Perhaps that explains why Heaney chose Cambridge, his home-away-from-home, as the place where he would personally unveil his two most recent works --Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996) and a translation-in-its-final-stages of Beowulf. The former work is a comprehensive anthology containing a large selection of poems from Heaney's previous books (up to and including 1996's The Spirit Level), several excerpts from his translation work and his Nobel acceptance speech on "Crediting Poetry." The latter promises to be an amazing and innovative translation of the oft-interpreted Anglo-Saxon epic, due to be published over a thousand years after the epic's initial creation at the end of the first millenium--a worthy task for a poet so critically and popularly beloved.

While in town, Heaney also fulfilled his duties as Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet by giving several lectures about, and readings from, Opened Ground and Beowulf. Heaney is known for his humorous, warm and gentle spirit, a spirit than infuses even the most violent and political of his poems, and also for his tendency to avoid the "celebrity poet" spotlight. (In fact, he was in the Greek islands when the Nobel Prize announcement was made.) This came across in Heaney's three lectures and three "talking shop" sessions (informal talk-cum-question-and-answer sessions), in which the always-congenial poet delivered a friendly mix of jokes, poems, literary commentary and anecdotes about his travels, and even political outrage in his lush and intoxicating Irish brogue.

Indeed, it became obvious through the course of his lectures why someone with a voice like Heaney's is so obsessed with the beauty of words and their sound. A large portion of Heaney's lectures focused on his translation of Beowulf and the problems of translation and language in general. Language in all its personal, social and political uses is the main focus of almost all Heaney's poetry. Thus, his political posturing was and still is expressed through the subtleties of language (although the works from his most recent work, The Spirit Level, are infused with a political fire heretofore only hinted at in earlier works).

The central linguistic motif of some of his political poems became of use to him, as he noted in his lectures, when he approached the translation of Beowulf. A motif of his political poems is the conflict between the rich vowel sounds of the Irish language and the consonant-heavy word-clumps of the Anglo-Saxon. In approaching the Beowulf translation, Heaney faced a different problem--cramming what he called the "giant ingots" of the Anglo-Saxon tongue into the "itty bitty tiny" parameters of moden English, parameters Heaney has broken through with consummate skill in much of his own poetry. His main means of combating this problem was to reject the use of the heraldic language so often used for Beowulf in translation, choosing instead to cast the poem in the pre-chivalric voice of relatives he remembers from childhood as "big-voiced scullions." Thus, in the end, Heaney comes back to the memories of his childhood that so fascinated him in his early works.

The experience of listening to Seamus Heaney talk about his mastery of the balancing act that is poetry--maneuvering between the private and the public, past and present, political and personal--is matched only by listening to him read his poetry that so wonderfully orchestrates these various forces. At every appearance Heaney read some portion of his work, be it excerpts from or complete versions of poems, portions of his translation of Beowulf or an impromptu reading of probably his most famous poem, "Digging," meeting with thunderous applause. Perhaps Irish consul general Conor O'Riordan said it best when he said, "Seamus Heaney has spoken eloquently about a time in the future when poetry and history, rhyme and peace becomes a reality."