Christopher Reid (editor), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber 2023)
– pages 390-598
Over the month since my first progress report on reading Seamus Heaney’s collected letters, he has aged from 53 in 1992 to 64 in 2003. Among other things, he has translated Beowulf, written a couple of translations/versions of ancient Greek plays, won the Nobel Prize, had a number of friends die, become much in demand as a public person, travelled a lot including to Tasmania in 1994, and still managed to produce a number of books of poetry. Increasingly his personal letters (as opposed to ‘correspondence’) have been written in planes and airports. He uses a laptop and a fax machine but has stayed away from email for fear that he’d ‘be inundated entirely with queries from grad students and indeed grade schoolers doing their essays’. And always there’s a yearning for moments of solitude and recollection.
I’m enjoying hugely my morning read of seven or eight pages. Apart from anything else it’s a joy to pay attention to someone other than the Attention-Seeker-in-Chief at Mar-a-Lago. I can’t add much in general to what I said in my first progress report (at this link). Here are some snippets.
Heaney writes to his translators, clarifying meanings for them – and giving us fascinating insights into the poetry and the art of translation. Most recently in my reading is an explanation handwritten at the bottom of a fax from Jerzy Illg. Illg’s fax asks for an explanation of the phrase ‘the Bushmills killed’ in the poem ‘The Bookcase’. Heaney writes (page 593, probably 23 May 2003):
‘To kill the bottle’ means to finish off all the drink. So it’s late in the evening and the Bushmills bottle is empty … You know how it is –
Best – Seamus
I’m sure I didn’t know what the phrase meant when I read the poem. So thank you, Jerzy Illg.
There’s a lot of verbal playfulness in many of Heaney’s letters. He’ll slip in a phrase from Wordsworth or Hopkins or a contemporary poet, and Christopher Reid the editor will usually add a helpful explanation of the reference. One that that I loved, that Reid didn’t explain: Heaney and his wife Marie are heading off for a brief holiday, and he describes it as a period of ‘silence, exile and sunning’ – a reference to a much quoted phrase from James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘silence, exile, and cunning’. I laughed out loud at Reid’s note at the end of a letter to fellow poet Derek Mahon in October 1997. Congratulating Mahon on a recently published book. The letter reads, in part:
I couldn’t place one [of your poems] above the other in my mind just now, just have this Baudelairean dusk-mood of gratitude. I see Milosz calls poetry a dividece from ourselves: high-yields, mon vieux.
After explaining the references, Reid writes: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass.”‘ Oh, I think, not everyone enjoys Heaney’s playfulness.
My pleasure in the third moment I’ll mention is less mean-spirited.
In January 2000 (page 519), in a letter to musician Liam O’Flynn, Heaney writes:
I’ve been fiddling with this Japanese form called the tanka – two lines longer than the haiku, and a development of it – consisting of five lines of five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables. It’s like a wee pastry cutter I nick into the ould dough inside the head, just to give it shape.
That is such a wonderful descritption of why I love the tight form of the Onegin stanza: it too is a ‘wee pastry cutter’ that can ‘nick into the ould dough inside the head, just to give it shape’.
I’m now reading letters Heaney wrote while working on books that I read soon after they were published, and evidently before I blogged about every book I read: Beowulf, Electric Light, District and Circle and Human Chain. I’m already sad that there are just 100 pages of the book, 10 years of letter-writing, and one month or reading to go.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation, as the sun rises later and tiny lizards bask while they can. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 