Translation and Mythopoetics: Seamus Heaney''s Irish Pilgrimage

• Main Authors: Chia-Hsuan Kao, 高家萱
• Other Authors: Patricia Haseltine
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12184624089018323767

博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 93 === Abstract:This dissertation studies Seamus Heaney’s poetic art in Station Island (1984). Known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Station Island in Lough Derg, Northern Ireland is a geographical and textual site for Heaney’s three-day literary and cultural pilgrimage, starting from his “looking back.” In the title poem of “Station Island” from this collection, Heaney interrelates his pilgrim voice with the voices of his literary masters and his Ulster neighbors, both the living and the dead, to reinscribe a cultural location; such a device makes his pilgrimage not only the poet’s devotional practice but provides a textual site for the medieval to become modern, the diachronic to become synchronic, and most importantly, the provincial to become apocalyptic. The poetic “pilgrimage” as word and traditional genre forms a textual unity constituted of transforming and transmitting moments that mythopoetically liminalize and hybridize cultural and literary “others.” Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of novelistic language, I demonstrate how Heaney, through his intertextual dialogue with non-Irish literary souls on Ulster ground practices kenoticism and carnivalization of inherited literary and religious values--Catholic, Dantean, medieval and druidic—to revaluate the social and cultural conflicts known as the Northern Ireland “troubles.” Making his articulation distinct from that of modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and even W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney derives the technique of hybridized narrative from his understanding of translation as part of literary creation. Through two significant translations into modern English, the Celtic medieval Buile Suibhne as Sweeney Astray in 1984 and the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf in 1999, Heaney challenges the conservative concept of translation. Making translation as an aspect of his poetics into a “voice right” implicates cultural hybridization and re-contextualizes historical social conflicts, repositioning them as textual dialogues. Chapter One introduces Heaney’s insight on epic as a creative genre, his view on Catholic pilgrimage as part of Celtic experience, his translations of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf epic as his own Irish “voice right,” the adoption of the legendary Sweeney figure as a poetic persona, and Heaney’s motivations for having literary dialogues with Dante, Joyce and Yeats. Chapter Two studies the theme of pilgrimage in the translation Sweeney Astray and heteroglossia in the transgressive translation of Beowulf. Chapter Three is concerned with how Heaney structures his Ulster pilgrimage in the title poem “Station Island” as a hybridized narrative of Celtic dinnseaschans and of modernist kunstlerroman. Here Bakhtin''s concept of speech genre and Edward Said''s concept of cultural affiliation are used to clarify Heaney''s literary transmigration. Chapter Four uses Bakhtin''s kenoticism and Said''s contrapuntal readership to understand Heaney''s mythopoetic dialogues with other literary figures. In the last chapter, I conclude with a translation-as-creation to his translation as cultural hybridization. To Seamus Heaney, pilgrimage is a purgatorial fire of filiation and affiliation, forging hybridic forms that textualize his native Northern Ireland. The Irishized English "Station Island" is hybridic articulation in extremis: the most innovative with the most traditional, the most Celtic with the most Catholic. Heaney''s literary pieties reconstruct local identity in religious seriousness.