Seamus Heaney Kirsty Wark Talks To

Seamus Heaney is perhaps the best-known poet writing today.

Humane and accessible his writing celebrates the love,

integrity and sheer endurance that he's found in the people of his often troubled native Ireland.

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1995,

the judges praised him for his lyrical beauty and ethical depth,

for poems which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.

Now, Heaney has written a verse translation of Antigone for Dublin's Abbey Theatre.

Titled the Burial At Thebes,

it gives a sharp contemporary twist to Sophocles' classic text,

with echoes of the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay.

-Did you or did you not know the proclamation for battle?

-I did know.

How could I not.

Didn't everybody?

The play pits Antigone against her uncle, Creon, King of Thebes,

whose decree that the body of her brother, Polyneices, be left to rot as befits a traitor.

When she defies his order, the scene is set for a clash

between state authority and private conscience.

You dare to disobey the law.

I disobeyed because the law was not the law of Zeus.

Nor the law ordained by the justice among the guards of the dead.

What they decree is immemorial and binding for us all.

When you were asked by the abbey to create a version of Antigone,

how did you bring yourself to it, without kind of subverting or sidelining Sophocles?

The problem for me is saying, "How do you get the right to write?"

There has to be some excitement.

HE COUGHS

There was in recognising that there was a political moment in the world

with the Bush administration doing Creon,

forcing the rest of the world to not bury traitors.

Guantanamo Bay was about to occur and so on.

So, there's always enough political anxiety for Antigone.

-Will it be enough to see me executed?

-More than enough.

Why don't you do it quickly?

Anything I have to say to you or you to me only deepens the wound.

I never did a nobler thing than bury my brother, Polyneices.

If these men weren't so afraid to sound unpatriotic, they'd say it.

But you are king.

And because you are king, you won't be contradicted.

In your version, it's Antigone who reports to her sister

that Creon has said,

"Whoever isn't for us, is against us", in this absolutist position.

-George Bush practically said these words.

-I know, yes.

The pressure from the Bush administration was the reality.

CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

And the war on terror, the very words caused anxiety,

you know, because you can't have war on terror.

The images of the prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay arrivals,

people chained in foot irons, walking behind guards with guns,

it reminded me of, I have to say, a Roman triumph.

I've seen images in my old school Latin book of the Gauls,

or whoever being marched down by the legions

who are technically equipped as the American army is now,

being shown to the citizenry as a form of vindictive, triumphalist, callous treatment.

You decided to call your... It's not a translation, is it?

I mean a translation is too narrow.

It's your vision of Antigone.

You called it Burial At Thebes, why?

If you say the word burial,

it has a purchase on yourself as a member of the species.

Secularised as we are and dereligionised as we are,

the word burial just still has a faintest sense of solemnity.

And so it reawakens, I hope,

it stirs up something in the common, unconscious, the burial at Thebes.

It's also what the play is about.

Blake Morrison says, "In times of crisis, classics can reach us."

They reach us at any time but they reach us more at these times.

Do you think people need to try and make sense of the horror that's going on just now?

I keep quoting Robert Frost, very simple, over-quoted,

about a poem as, "a momentary stay against confusion."

Momentarily, it passes, but there is a satisfaction for the moment of this being clarified.

Antigone...

It doesn't solve, it ends in grief on both sides

but there is a stern, veteran note to the choristers

that appeals to me from the voice really of elders.

The country I grew up in was quite close to Iceland and Ancient Greece,

in that the elder had veteran knowledge, folk wisdom was spoken.

There is something of that Ulster country,

standing at the jam of the door, saying, "Listen, son, watch out."

There's some of that in the choruses.

Wise conduct is the key to happiness.

Finding resonance in ancient stories and ancient sites

is a trademark of Heaney's art.

His poetry traces an unbroken line of continuity between the present and the often distant past.

Since his early days as a poet,

he has excavated the myths of classical Greece, medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Britain.

In 1999, his version of the Dark Age epic, Beowulf, found a wide audience,

with its powerful evocation of a people exhausted by oppression but heroic in resistance.

The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf.

It started four square from the ground up

and hung helmets on it, as he had instructed,

surrounded it with war shields and shining male.

Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it, mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.

On a height they kindled the biggest ever funeral fire.

Fumes of wood smoke billowed darkly up.

The blaze roared and drowned out their weeping.

Wind died down and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone house burning it to the core.

For Heaney, the mythic and the everyday co-exist in the places and people around him.

You have drawn so much from, as it were, ancient material, for your writing,

not literally but just infusing the way you think about it.

Do you feel a connection with the distant past?

There are certain areas that come home to me.

It's not that I go to them, they come home here.

I take the example of my own father, who is a cattle dealer

and a very taciturn man, affectionate, but taciturn.

And he...always dressed - he wore a soft hat.

He went to the fairs as a cattle dealer and he carried a stick.

He was also, oddly enough, very animated.

He was a kind of an amateur undertaker,

he took charge and attended to things.

If in the extended family or among the neighbours there was a death,

he had some form of natural responsibility or authority in running that.

He didn't run it but he was present as someone who would adjudicate.

Hermes, the god of marketplaces,

carried a stick, had a hat, wore boots, my father always wore these yellow leather boots.

Hermes led the souls of the dead down there.

That's a very long answer to your question

but Hermes to me was a paradigm - there I go using a word like that -

he came home and I felt safe.

Heaney's sense of a traditional past

comes from his childhood on his parents' farm in County Derry.

One of his earliest poems, about his father working,

set out the path of his career as a poet.

Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound

As the spade sinks into gravelly ground.

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up 20 years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle,

Corked sloppily with paper

He straightened up to drink it

Then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

I guess the first place that I grew up...

We moved from it when I was about 13, 14,

and the image I sometimes have of the first life,

that stays on in the poetry as a memory bank,

is of the thing being hermetically sealed.

And then in my 20s, after ten years or so, it opened.

When you opened a hermetically sealed box of pipe tobacco

there was a little, "Kkkkrrr",

and there was a fragrance come up out of the slightly moist tobacco -

better than any smoking, really.

And I had this feeling that whatever happened to me in my 20s,

when I started to go back into that place, was like opening the seal

and the fragrance and the trustworthiness of it was there.

I still feel safe, imaginatively, if I'm on that ground.

Another poem, written much later,

remembers moments of intimacy with his mother.

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And let fall again. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

As a young man, Heaney met the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.

It was to be a turning point in his career as a writer.

He taught you the difference between parochialism and provincialism.

Provincialism was just not in your radar, but parochialism was.

That was a very good distinction he made.

He said, "All great civilisations are based on the parish."

And he said the provincial is always looking over its shoulder

to see what the metropolis is saying, sucking up to the thing out there.

I was very lucky to have Kavanagh, because he...

Without Kavanagh, the provincial thing would have been stronger.

Nobody lives in the parish entirely.

Everybody lives in many, many places.

But if you're writing, you live in the genre, in the medium.

I wasn't unaware of London,

but I was sure of Northern Ireland.

Robert Lowell said the poet is the conscious of a society.

You had to deal with the divide of a society.

How did you find your voice?

The voice was given to you by the division.

It was a stealthy voice, it spoke in codes.

It was good training for verse or for poetry,

because words, they're depth charges,

just in vocabulary that elsewhere would be common and nondescript, like...

I think of the word "parish", for example.

In Northern Ireland,

Catholics talk about the parish.

Terrible language, this! Protestants wouldn't use it!

The ear, the voice, the posture within the speech community

and the whole community

was highly self-conscious and highly developed.

I think that is a kind of training

for the obliquity and stealth of literary utterance, in a way.

But we were very afraid of exploiting it.

We were afraid of exacerbating the division which produced the thing,

because we understood the fury and the devotion

to what was causing the bother on both sides -

Loyalist and Republican ideology, or the myth of belonging.

It was a way of trying to be just and true about the whole thing.

In the mid-60s, Heaney published Requiem For The Croppies,

which celebrated the Irish rebellion of 1798.

But as the Troubles began to tear Ulster apart,

Heaney found the meaning of the poem slipping beyond his control.

In the Ulster of the 1966,

that was making space for a set of just aspirations.

Now,

things change when that poem that I wrote about a historical moment

began to be used by, you know, basically Provo singing groups,

along with other rebel songs.

It became propaganda for the IRA.

And I stopped reading the poem.

I wasn't mealy-mouthed about it. The context changed.

It was perfectly in order to have a disposition

but not a propagandist's position.

It was extremely complicated, the whole thing,

and, er...

you were asking yourself, "Was this integrity or cowardice?"

Heaney wrote requiems for ordinary people caught up in the Troubles

or more subtle and indirect work, as in a remarkable series of poems

inspired by the discovery of corpses in the bogs of Jutland.

Here, Heaney found a mythic echo of sectarian murder and blood sacrifice.

Nobody's quite sure what happened to them,

but PV Glob, the archaeologist,

says he thinks they're fertility sacrifices.

They'd been in the peat so long they'd been transformed chemically,

but also... I mustn't change their genre or their species!

..They'd moved on from being a human trace to being an image of a human.

I found them entrancing.

As if he had been poured in tar, He lies on a pillow of turf

And seems to weep the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists is like bog oak,

The ball of his heel like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

Cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel.

His spine, an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts.

The chin is a visor, raised above the vent of his slashed throat

That has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound opens inwards to a dark, elderberry place.

I may, to tell you the truth, have interpreted them too much.

The poems too much afterwards.

You can do odd poems, and you know they're odd, but you can trust them.

But then you're asked about them in an interview

and you begin to shoehorn them in with other discourse.

And I began to talk about the relationship of the fertility sacrifice culture

to the culture of republicanism, of territorial religion,

whether it's Loyalist territory or Republican.

All that did was operative at the back of the head but I didn't mean them to be allegorical.

But they did link into Ireland in so far as there's plenty of bog, plenty of sorrow, plenty of corpse.

It was a way in all right.

But Heaney was happy to be swept up in the optimism of 1995,

when Bill Clinton visited Ireland and quoted from Heaney's version of "The Cure At Troy."

"What's left to say?

"Suspect too much sweet talk.

"But never close your mind.

"It was a fortunate wind that blew me here.

"I leave half ready to believe

"that a crippled trust might walk.

"And the half true rhyme is love."

Thank you and God bless you all.

How did you feel about it?

I felt grand about it. Clinton did great work in the peace process.

He was in there. He wasn't just swank appearance.

He was ringing Stormont. He knew the people both sides of the house.

He also is capable of speaking poetry and, you know...

Somebody in charge of the world who can know a work of imagination from the inside,

apply it to the outside, do it freely, spontaneously.

We can think of a successor who has some difficulty in doing that.

In an increasingly secular age, do you think people turn to poetry when they can't go to Church,

because Church has no meaning for them?

Well...I-I think that...I do think that the word poet, and poetry,

still retains a certain archaic aura.

That's not self-deception just because I'm involved in it myself.

The people whom my mother would have called the common five-eighths,

if they hear the word "poetry", there's still a sense of stand back.

"Not for us."

There's that question, but I would say first of all it's almost a primal sense of difference.

-But then there is indeed a second

-socioeconomic, educational thing.

A shyness in the face of it.

"It's not for us." And I have been poised myself between those two worlds forever.

And as a teacher and as a creature of the poetry world,

I've always tried to nego...mediate between the shy and the sublime.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that same year,

Heaney used the occasion to hint at a new optimism.

You received the Nobel Laureate.

You said you wanted to make space for the marvellous as well as the murderers.

Do you think you have?

It's very difficult, VERY difficult, to, at this stage in our evolution as a species

and whatever's happening in the world, to give vent to gratitude.

One of the things about poetry, to put it this way,

is that you know poetry's happening if you have an element of celebration

that doesn't betray the facts.

That isn't loony, candyfloss blather.

That says, "This much we can celebrate. Given everything else, we can get through this far."

Do you feel a shift in the tectonic plates then in Ireland?

Is it emerging as a different kind of country now?

It certainly is a different kind of country now.

Whether it can stay that kind of country is another matter.

The difference has been quick. It's been brought on by happy economic circumstances.

It's been brought on by happy developments,

gradually happy developments in the Northern Ireland situation.

But, you know, supposing 350 corporate firms pull out,

supposing the American corporate Republican sector

so Ireland is not disaffected politically from the US.

Supposing TV showed protests against George Bush when he comes to Ireland.

These things are very fickle nowadays and it could go back to certainly a less prosperous society.

You'd not go back to the religious society that we had.

You'd not go back to the place where the individual conscience was...

was taken charge of by...by the teaching church.

You won't go back to the grief and terror, and benediction it has to be said, of the confessional.

That's all gone.

It is...I guess it is a new Ireland but I'm partly in the old one still.

-Do you think so?

-Definitely.

The person I am was formed there. I went to a school run by priests.

I examined my conscience. I had a notion of sin.

Uh...all those traces are in me still.

I mean, just as people who were on rationing during in the war

can't quite believe in a basket of fruit, you know?

When you see the freedoms and you see the pleasures being enjoyed,

that's a very good thing, but, um...

I also like an odd mixture of fear.

I belong to the old Ireland also in the sense that if I go out to the west or to Donegal

or to Kerry and see an empty space on the mountainside,

I sort of feel at home.

And some time make the time

To drive out west into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore

In September or October, when the wind and the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter,

And inland among stones, the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightening of flock of swans.

Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly.

You are neither here nor there.

A hurry through which known and strange things pass,

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast - 2004

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