Introduction by Lorna Hardwick (2016)

The interview transcript published here is taken from an interview that I recorded with Seamus Heaney in September 2007. The initial aim of the interview was to provide study material for Open University students who were studying Heaney’s play Burial at Thebes as part of their first level introduction to the Arts and Humanities. However, over and above that the interview provided an opportunity to capture the ‘living voice’, the oral testimony of a poet who was at the height of his career and could look back and reflect on the relationship between his life experiences, those of his community, and the literary and cultural traditions in which his work was rooted (and against which it sometimes struggled).

At the time and in terms of the immediate purpose of the interview, I was struck by Seamus Heaney’s continuing interest in the Open University, which had awarded him an Honorary Degree, and his commitment to its ideals. He had taken considerable trouble to think about the issues I had raised with him in advance of our meeting. I have rarely interviewed anyone who was so well prepared in understanding how the students would study. He was also generous with his time after the recording was completed and continued to discuss points I had raised and to add others. Some of the material on Virgil and on the Antaeus poems was not included in the recording circulated to students but is reproduced here in full from the original transcript.

Subsequently, several aspects of the interview took on additional importance. Heaney continued to work on Virgil. The interview provides evidence of the importance that Latin pastoral and epic poetry had for him and suggests how the Latin language, which had both poetic and religious associations for him, acted as an interlocutor with his poetic voice. This part of the discussion anticipates his posthumously published translation of Aeneid VI and explains the urgency of his ongoing commitment to exploring the poetic resonances of Virgil’s treatment of the katabasis (descent to the underworld). For Heaney the katabasis trope of the ancient poems (mediated through Dante’s Divine Comedy) and the spirituality derived from his Christian upbringing went together.

However, just as Heaney rejected a narrowly dogmatic religiosity (‘I have done my best to secularise myself’), so he also rejected political didacticism. The interview brought out very clearly how he did not want to be bogged down in revisiting ‘the Irish question’, which had been a prominent inspiration in his play The Cure at Troy, but which he now considered was ‘imaginatively exhausted’.  Instead, he determined to move on in Burial at Thebes to the compelling resonances of the Antigone narrative with contemporary events on the global stage. In this play his poetic voice is primarily in dialogue with the broader sweep of Irish history and literature, including both the oral tradition of poetry in Irish and the more recent influences of J. M. Synge (1871-1909) and, especially, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). With the advantage of hindsight, however, it might be said that the contemporary allusions to the Iraq war and to the language used by President George W. Bush have themselves had a limited life in the poetic imagination. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that a subsequent production of Burial at Thebes (Nottingham, 2005, directed by Lucy Pitman-Wallace) gave the play an indeterminate temporally neutral setting and was more successful in integrating stage aesthetic and the poetic text than was the Dublin production of 2004 to which Heaney alludes somewhat critically in the interview.

Literary influences on Heaney also embrace translations. Recent work in Translation Studies has reassessed the definitions of translation, its boundaries and overlaps and has reappraised its role in new works as well as in transmission and interpretation of source texts (Bassnett 2014). For those aspects of literary and cultural sensibilities too, Heaney’s work and reflections provide insights and examples of practice that resist easy categorisation, whether in terms of ‘closeness’ to the ante-text or in terms of the trajectories of creative adaptation and innovation.

Above all, the transcript provides a starting point for future research into Seamus Heaney’s engagement with Greek and Roman literature. A conference on this topic was held in Oxford in July 2015 and an edited collection of essays is in preparation.

Lorna Hardwick, April 2016

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