1.
In ‘The Conway Stewart’, a poem from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), Seamus Heaney puts letter-writing at the centre of his writing life. The poem describes his parents’ gifting him a fountain pen when they arrive for the first time to boarding school in Derry: the Conway Stewart pen’s ‘pump-action lever’ nods to the pen, ‘snug as a gun’, in another ‘inaugural’ poem, ‘Digging’; then, there’s a play on his distinctive sound-palette as he describes refilling the pen: ‘Guttery, snottery, / Letting it rest then at an angle / To ingest’; finally, the poem recounts the advent of one part of his writing life – as a boarder posting letters home, ‘my longhand / ‘Dear’ / to them next day’. These letters home will, though, be a way of keeping the lines of communication open rather than a place where the stricken child will confess how he feels. What he cannot say in letters will, decades later, be the subject of the poems themselves, including other heartsore memories in ‘Album’, a defining sequence in Human Chain.

Letter-writing remained part of Heaney’s daily practice, connected to and – to borrow a word he liked to use – corroborating the poems. And in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Christopher Reid, ed., Faber, £40), we see, to its editor’s credit, that the poems are at the centre of the letters. Even more than in his proxy autobiography Stepping Stones, we see the force fields he encountered, and entered, and which he was both shaped by and sometimes shaped to his own ends as a poet. It is, as well as his own story, a compelling if partial account of the life of poets and poetry in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century, a time when the academy, the state and the publishing and print culture shared an interest in poetry, with Heaney’s poems and poetics making their own case for and offering some resistance to the uses of the art.


2.
‘The Conway Stewart’ is the last of a set of poems in which the poet as correspondent surfaces: he appears too in Field Work (‘A Postcard’, 1979), in The Haw Lantern (‘Two quick notes’, ‘A Postcard from Iceland’, 1988) and The Spirit Level (‘St Brigid’s Girdle’, 1997), but Heaney had first explored the letter as a poetic form in North (1975), in two episodic poems, which act almost as reports on ‘the situation’ he saw around him. ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ and ‘The Ministry of Fear’ are, immediately, more ‘unbuttoned’ poems (Heaney’s adjective for them, in Stepping Stones) than anything he had previously published. Conversational and contemporary, these letter-poems present a different aspect to the lyricist of his first three books, as if the form affords access for the poems to the kind of intelligence and politics which defined his freelance work as reviewer, journalist and writer for TV and radio – and as letter-writer.

‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ began life, we discover, as one of the verse epistles which are scattered through the book, this one to Thomas Flanagan, the Irish-American lecturer Heaney befriended during his spell at Berkeley in 1971, and who was a vital influence in the development of Heaney’s poetics and political imagination. The ‘book’ version of the poem, written when Heaney was back in Northern Ireland, abbreviates the letter, but knowing its transatlantic addressee explains the poem’s freer use of sectarian language and its more discursive scene-setting. And we learn from an earlier letter that another influence on the poem is Heaney’s awareness of the ‘verse dialogue’ which Michael Longley had initiated with their friend Derek Mahon. In a letter to Longley in June 1971, Heaney praised their exchange’s ‘great pace, great style, great energy […] you both could hit a rabbit punch with it – in the world of action as well as the world of poetry’.

But the Letters also benefit from being just one among many perspectives on Heaney’s much-discussed work. In this instance, Heather Clark’s The Ulster Renaissance charts a more complicated wide-angle backstory to Longley and Mahon’s verse letters, recording Mahon’s letter to the editor of the New Statesman, in December 1971, which objected to being co-opted into Longley’s lines about ‘The Catholics we scarcely loved’ and ‘Two poetic conservatives’, while also chastising Longley in a personal letter: ‘Seamus, here last week, put it like this: by dedicating a poem to someone you make him in a sense co-author of the poem’.

Other verse letters collected by Reid are likewise enlivened by our understanding of their epistolary context. When he rebukes Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison for including him in the Penguin Book of British Verse, he is careful to write in advance to Morrison about how uncomfortable he feels about doing so – ‘I don’t want it to be a sectarian anti-Brit tract: so I’m relying on tone and our friendship to carry the day’ – a note which complements the poem’s ambivalent mixture of knockabout and high allusion. The verse letter itself is, like others collected here, a rough and ready delight, as in this passage whose rhymes and quotations jar so effectively:

‘The pang of ravishment.’ Now guess
The author of that sweet hurt phrase.
          Rebecca West?
No way, my friends. In fact it was
That lyric, Baptist,

Vigilant, anti-cavalier,
Anti-pornographic, fear
-some scourge of diction that’s impure,
          That Royal Navy
Poet of water-nymph and shire:
          Donald Davie.

The pattern of the patriot
Is Davie’s theme: all polyglot
Newspeak conference flies he’d swot
          Who lhude sing
Foucault, Foucault. But that is not,
          Just now, my thing.

It was the risk he took to say
That patria is maidenly
(Is ‘pang of ravishment’ not lovely?)
          That touched me most
Who long felt my identity
          So rudely forc’d.

In the background to this address, we might also hear Davie’s own thorny but appreciative verse letter to Heaney, ‘Summer Lightning’ – ‘None of us would steal / From your tin scoop plunged in a tub of meal / Its pre-Dantesque Homeric virtue’ – which nicely adapts Ronsard, and will, like Mahon and Longley’s exchanges, have shaped his verse letter’s adaptation of the Burns stanza. Although Reid does not say so, these public exchanges about a poet’s different allegiances were consequential, inaugurating the ‘British and Irish’ nomenclature which would define the coming ‘prize culture’ and its openness to both British and Irish and, subsequently, American poets published in either country.

Here, and elsewhere, the letters embed the poems in particular moments without diminishing or over-determining them, a notable effect which scatters light even on well-known poems – who otherwise would have detected the title of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’ in the wings of Heaney’s ‘Requiem for the Croppies’? Or understood that ‘The Loaning’ arises from and responds to a dismissive NYRB review of Field Work? That John Montague’s Sweeney, and Flann O’Brien’s parody, but not the earlier Austin Clarke ‘Frenzy of Suibhne’, were a spur to his own? Or the roundabout route to North as book of poems – the initial plan being for more of a prose scrapbook…? A little less clearly, we can make out how the collapse of Field Day facilitated and possibly instigated his shift to Old English, Scots and Latin translation.


3.
Anyone who already knows the poems will find illumination and insight and challenge in the range of letters collected by Reid. Heaney’s eminence and the extent of his networks – in Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland; in Dublin; in London and Scotland; in the great and small universities of the US; with translators of his work across Europe – rears up a great tower of Babel of the various Anglophone poetries in which he played a part, alongside his more focused Irish relationships with arts other than poetry, primarily theatre and painting. There are threads running though the book: the fraternal Derry schoolboy coterie, or masonry – chief members, Brother Friel and Brother Deane; the increasingly anxious relationship with Michael and Edna Longley; the more avuncular connection to Paul Muldoon; the wary, exasperated but eventually sturdy relationship with John Montague; the Boston confraternity which included his Nobel fellowship with Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky; his loving, often thunderstruck correspondence with Ted Hughes and, to a lesser extent, Czesław Miłosz; the couples’ friendships he and his wife Marie shared with Thomas Flanagan, Bernard McCabe and their families.

Reid’s selection touches on many of the worlds in which Heaney was a temporary resident. He was, as almost everyone who knew him says, and as these letters show, kind, generous, alert to nuance, an encourager of the young who was also responsible about the household gods, someone whose influence extended through his proxies too, by recommending readers to festival organisers, checking in with others if he thought there might have been offence taken, relaying jokes and remarks he treasured, writing professional references for poets and scholars, responding to translators. Especially from the time after his election as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and then turbo-charged by his Nobel Prize, the spinning plates of Heaney’s world are on display: sitting side-by-side we read letters to colleagues, old schoolfriends, in-laws, strangers, young poets, Heaney specialists, publishers and editors, neighbours. If the first decade or so of letters includes both drafty, good-humoured and colourful reports and updates with formal letters to editors in London, a kind of default mode emerges: while he sets their compass to each individual addressee, the letters do often follow a sort of formula, an opening apology for the letter’s lateness, a memory of a previous meeting, relating (usually) how busy he is, responding to their poems or, when addressing Heaney scholars, their work on his poems, reaching most often for kind, approving descriptiveness, praising how the world is brought into the work, admiring what, borrowing a term from Frost, he sees as ‘supply’.

Writing to Ted Hughes in August 1984, he begins with the familiar preface. ‘Somehow, when I get into the rhythm of the term over there, scuttling between students and readings and visit poets and visiting Irish, running between hospitalities and unsolicited manuscripts, maintaining some sense of the residual self by resentment and exhaustion, I never get around to doing the thing that I thought I would most enjoy doing – writing from a distance to friends one takes too much for granted at closer quarters.’ But even in this letter, to a poet he admired above most others, there is a sense of obligation. It turns out he is responding to a new Hughes book he has been sent, What is the Truth (‘I was lightheaded with wonder at the supply and invention and easy rumbustious capacity of it all’). Even in his closest literary relationships, the currency of books and reviews and institutional positions drives the frequency of the correspondence.

Sometimes, his sense that all his activity is pulling in the same direction is challenged. It is revelatory to cross-check the 1987 letters, say, against his contemporary publications and to discover that he is celebrating Friel’s latest play, reviewing proofs of The Haw Lantern, writing to Miłosz and Dennis O’Driscoll among others about ‘Eastern European Poetry’, all of which can be seen as feeding into his appreciation of W.H. Auden, ‘Sounding Auden’, delivered as a lecture at the University of Kent in 1986 and revised for publication that year in the LRB. But, increasingly, there are moments when he defends his territory against invasive voices. In summer 1988 his patience even with well-wishers who would ‘co-opt’ him into their projects has been sorely tested: he sends letters to John Carey, Michael Parker and Seamus Deane about what he sees, to a varying degree, as their impositions in relation to, respectively, a Sunday Times award, a proposed biographical study, and the timings of an essay on Yeats for the Field Day anthology. Not so peremptory, but still a-bristle, are subsequent letters to John McGahern grousing about his role as ‘mascot’ at various summer schools and a note to Ann Saddlemyer about his rental arrangements which, Reid tells us, marks his eventual purchase of the house in Glanmore he had used as both home and writing retreat for decades.

The terse ‘Two Quick Notes’, an almost unnoticed poem from The Haw Lantern, communicates a similarly thrawn, put-upon tone: ‘My old hard friend, how you sought / Occasions of justified anger’, it begins, addressing someone (possibly Donald Davie? or does the kicked bucket imply this is an elegy?), ‘who wanted the soul to ring true / And plain as a galvanized bucket / And would kick to test it?’ The closing address, with its proleptic nod to the ‘prie-dieu’ he will use as a prop in his Nobel Lecture, is as tough: ‘O upright self-wounding prie-dieu / In shattered freefall: / Hail and farewell.’

Soon after that book was published, news of the Oxford Professorship was reported in the Irish press as a national success: we see how immediately he was elevated, at home, to the kind of non-literary fame which had previously been the preserve of poet-contemporaries Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan. The letters show Heaney adapting to a profile which took him out of Irish Studies and poetry contexts, though another recent book, Edward J. O’Shea’s Seamus Heaney in America (Routledge, £35) which draws on audio recordings as well as the letters and interviews, catches better the pace and extent of his stateside professional commitments, and how that pace began to impose itself on his Irish life too: ‘after he was awarded the Poetry Chair at Oxford, Heaney tells this story on himself: A woman completely unknown to him crossed in front of his car and gave him the thumbs up. Such instant recognition was constant.’

O’Shea’s book, incidentally, also includes a 1981 letter to Heaney’s US agent Selma W. Warner, which should have made its way into Reid’s book, reflecting as it does acutely on Heaney’s scepticism and resistance to such fame:

I would also like to clarify and confirm something about fees. I know you thought that the fee should be raised and I remember demurring about this.
I do not wish to be a $1000 speaker. Apart from my moral scruples about whether any speaker or reader is worth anything like that, I do not wish to become a freak among my poet friends, or to press the budgets of departments of literature at a time when the money for education is drying up in the United States. And as well as all this, I prefer to think that I could go on being a guest at various campuses in the years to come for a smaller fee than just to exhaust the budgets in one or two seasons of gluttony. This is something I feel has to be definitely settled: it has been worrying me for some time and involved not only money but principles and my reputation as an artist. Much as I enjoy the rewards of reading, the first basis of enterprise is artistic and not financial. I know that your impulse to raise the fee was a generous one but I hope you won’t mind my telling you what I feel about the idea.

With his time to himself shrinking, he worried more about every part of his professional life. His commitment to teaching, like the po-business exposure, also gave him pause. Writing to Sonja Landweer in 2002, he reflects on his working life in the academy:

I didn’t want the mystique of ‘the poet’ to be a union ticket. I wanted, in a proud, puritanical sort of way, to ‘pay my way’, not to be beholden, to be as good or better at the job than my ‘non-creative’ colleagues. I think the impulse was right. The hauteur was right. And much of what I did was truly helpful to me: a clearing of the head, a declaration of loyalties to certain masters, a standing up for the art, a teacherly duty, a service of sorts… But now I fear it may have become an alibi. I desperately need rehabilitation with the muse.

As the book powers on, his sense of control over his own time comes under increasing threat. Ill-health and mortality, his own and others’, begin to recur, and Heaney writes to old friends and mentors about loss and about remembering. These letters share the tone and characteristically episodic ‘tempus-fugit’ shape of ‘A Brigid’s Girdle’, the poem he wrote in the mid-nineties on hearing of the illness of the Irish Studies scholar Adele Dalsimer, who had co-founded Boston College’s Irish Studies programme: ‘Last time I wrote I wrote from a rustic table / Under magnolias in South Carolina […] Now it’s St Brigid’s Day and the first snowdrop in County Wicklow, and this a Brigid’s Girdle / I’m plaiting for you’.

Heaney befriended and remained close to a set of older men who acted as mentors and, as his great, international contemporaries died, the circle of his correspondents shrank: we can trace the arc of his last books in the letters. A poem like ‘The Flight Path’, although shorn of two sections written for its first 1992 and 1993 PN Review and Threepenny Review publications, is part of his ‘global’ middle period as it tries to bring together Glanmore, California, Harvard, Europe, Belfast and London. Later on, as he beds into his long exchanges with Dennis O’Driscoll, and as a stroke and then depression confine him to quarters, the great poems of his last two books hunker down in ‘first things’ and more local occasions and starting points.

Even then, it is still the case that Heaney is travelling widely for engagements: one correspondent, Donald Fanger, remembers lunch in 2006 with Heaney and the novelist Carlos Fuentes, and Heaney’s ‘[breaking] the ice by telling about the Mexican who asked an Irishman whether his people had a word in their language like the Spanish mañana. “Yes,” the Irishman answered, “but with us it doesn’t carry the same sense of urgency.”’ The joke is a long way from Heaney’s own work ethic, and the care he took in responding to and aiding others. Across this book’s compelling, often wonderfully-written passages, insights are scattered to various correspondents, very often on the subject of being pulled in different directions, and away from his real poetic work. Overwhelmingly, Reid’s selection manages an almost impossible task in covering this range across so many active decades, while offering a sort of collaged life-in-letters as it does so.


4.
That sense of this Letters as a life is, however, not always convincing, and it is worth attending to the limits of this kind of book, drawn from the very recent phenomenon of almost contemporary ‘modern literary archives’ of which Heaney’s (like Larkin’s and Bishop’s and Hughes’s and Gunn’s) is a notable example. This century, these kinds of books have become far more curated, and while Reid draws on the collections deposited by Heaney in the National Library in Dublin and the Emory Archives in Atlanta, to which he has had more access than anyone, he still writes that ‘selection from an output as vast as Heaney’s has inevitably involved both rewards and regrets’.

A few years ago, similarly, Heather Clark lamented that ‘the majority of the Heaney correspondence is restricted’ – something another scholar, Taura Napier, observed as far back as 2002, when she published a revealing essay about the Emory archive. This essay quotes letters between the Longleys, as well as between Michael Longley and Eavan Boland and Derek Mahon, but she was moved to write of Heaney’s place in that setting: ‘As I looked for the familiarly witty and often irreverent letters that Heaney wrote to the Longleys in the late 1960s and early 1970s from the south of France and Berkeley, California, I noticed that the collection contained official-looking inserts that read “letter removed for reasons of privacy”’. Since 2016, that archive is accessible again, and Reid has availed of his privileged access and includes these early, punchy, colourful, engaging letters, but he is clear that he too is offering a partial picture.

For all the authoritativeness of the design and the presentation, this book is an interim, selective selection from a still-limited pool. As Heaney’s bibliographer Rand Brandes put it in a recent Éire-Ireland essay, parts of the original archives were marked ‘pull’, while all correspondence with family members was excluded from the archival deposits. The proliferation of ‘[…]’ in many of the letters suggests another context for publishing letters when so many of those mentioned are still in earshot. Publishing a selection of letters just one decade after its protagonist’s death means that there are many – family, friends, occasional acquaintances – whose watchful eye will affect any critic or editor’s work. But there are other choices here which, as with any such book, readers might wish different, when its biographical impetus is at the mercy of what is preserved and what can be put on the record. In this book, for example, the almost lifelong relationship with Seamus Deane swims in and out of focus.


5.
The second letter-like poem in North, ‘The Ministry of Fear’, is addressed to Deane, Heaney’s schoolfriend who had, in the mid-1960s, like Flanagan, the addressee of North’s other verse letter, lectured in Berkeley. In Stepping Stones, Heaney mentions that this poem to Deane predates the book’s more famous bog poems and signals the two Seamuses’ re-establishment of their friendship, after a break when their working lives had taken them in separate directions. By the early 1970s, Deane was living in Dublin (aside from a short return to Berkeley) and was also a summertime companion of Heaney’s in what the latter called in Stepping Stones the ‘West Donegal Summer School’ (‘raking over all matters of current concern, literary and political’). As well as offering an exercise in shared autobiography, a communal voice, the poem to Deane also shows the political context for even the most personal writing at that time: ‘They once read my letters at a roadblock / And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics, / “Svelte dictions” in a very florid hand.’

Readers might expect more detail from these letters on this poem and on the two friends’ relationship. However, for whatever reason, there is no letter reprinted here from Heaney to Deane between 1970 and 1977, a time when Heaney had followed in Deane’s footsteps to Berkeley, and when Deane, alongside Edna Longley the most influential Irish critic of the period, had seen Heaney’s poetry, especially North, reimagine the relationship between violence and community. There is then little or nothing here from this period about either man’s involvement with new enterprises, for example their evolution with another St Columb’s alum, Brian Friel, of Field Day as a national initiative. The Letters do not have to be an index of their society, but it feels like a missed opportunity, in the years when he published two of his finest and most influential books, to skimp his critical relation to the changing institutional and social environment he now lived in (we learn by the way that he had a poem included in an anthology prepared for Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit and, from a 2006 letter to Henri Cole, that he chose, a few years later, not to take communion at his mother’s funeral).

His closeness to Friel, likewise, is touched on in Reid’s selection, but the thread of their enduring friendship and collegiality emerges in familiar asides to others as much as in the few letters selected from their correspondence. In those letters, Reid demurs from annotating much of the detail, so that the growth, success and then collapse of Field Day is a missing backdrop. The three-volume Field Day Anthology recovered and pieced together a national literature, but omitted women writers ‘hubristically’, Heaney writes of Deane. Assailed in the Irish Studies Departments and Irish newspaper columns which had welcomed him for twenty years, this was a consequential, upsetting event for Heaney, but Reid includes no correspondence concerning or addressed to, say, Eavan Boland, or other parties to this dispute he would have known during this time. But if there is a gap in the correspondence here, the Letters are not silent on the matter.

Heaney’s response is framed instead by Reid in relation to the poems. Writing to Ted Hughes about his feeling of being at sea at that time, Heaney says, ‘The historical tide is running against almost every anchor
I can throw towards what I took to be hiding places’, and encloses the poem ‘Keeping Going’, one of his very best later poems, which retreats and defends the routine work life he always had in mind as a model. To others, he encloses his version of The Midnight Court, Brian Merriman’s Irish-language vision of a man being judged by a court of women, which he published with Gallery. However, it still seems as if the book may miss key letters, and key correspondents: like Deane, Derek Mahon is obviously a lifelong correspondent but is only spottily represented here, with Reid somewhat unfairly (given that he seems happy to omit Heaney’s aspersions for the most part) drawing attention to Mahon’s graffiti-like annotations of Heaney’s letters to him without providing much sense of the usual tenor of their exchanges, which I’m guessing would also have been frank; Peter Fallon, who worked extensively with Heaney, declined to share his letters for this book; there is no word to some of the other artists with whom Heaney worked, Felim Egan, say, and Colin Middleton and Colin Davidson; in the UK, nothing to a contemporary such as Tony Harrison or Carol Ann Duffy, the one UK Laureate not mentioned here; no letters to Eavan Boland and Mary Robinson, to whose campaigning Heaney on occasion contributed. In this book, then, some of whose gaps are to be regretted, we are reminded that the poetry must do the talking, and Reid’s selection frequently points us towards the individual poems in this way.


6.
If letters were a feature of Heaney’s poetic practice, so too were translations an integral part of his books. The Translations of Seamus Heaney (Marco Sonzogni, ed., 2022, £35) brings together his well-known book-length projects, alongside one-off poems which he used in the books (Baudelaire, Dante, Horace, Virgil, Rilke, Cavafy), more occasional work and poems never previously published: doubling the number of Heaney’s translations in book form, it de facto reveals a more various picture of the poet’s translation practice and its evolution, which maps onto the trajectory of the collections and the letters’ biographical context.

His initial translations from Irish, Latin and French, and Dante’s Italian, are rooted in his original culture, in the Catholic schooling he received in Derry, but soon the commissioning powers of the 1980s and 1990s meant that he lent his name to other enterprises, translating Romanian, say, and Irish-language poets. It is clear from the book that his fellow feeling for Irish-language contemporaries lent lustre to translation projects without affecting his own aesthetic, or without producing one-off poems which hit a new note. There is no encounter here in this middle period which suggests that the translations of contemporaries affected his work in the way that Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s work transformed Paul Muldoon’s poetry, or in the way that Muldoon’s version of Michael Davitt’s ‘The Mirror’ offered a foil to Muldoon’s own elegiac poems for his father.

Later, responding to Polish and Greek colleagues, he turned his hand to co-authoring works which they had brought to his attention with literal translations or ‘cribs’: this led to the full collection of Jan Kochanowski’s Laments and, as he says in a letter, he was tempted to pursue Cavafy further too, before selecting just a couple of poems for book publication.

Occasionally opportunistic, Heaney’s choices bring versions from other languages into his own poems and books where they strike a particular note, or extend a line of imagery, to deepen his own poems. Examples of this include the ‘Ugolino’ episode in Field Work, the late Giovanni Pascoli and Eugène Guillevic versions in Human Chain, and, particularly, his Horace translation, ‘Anything Can Happen’, which illuminates this side of his translation poetics. Although Horace is not a stranger to Heaney’s poems – a key line in ‘The Flight Path’ quotes one of the epistles, ‘skies change, not cares for those who cross the sea’ – this translation is significantly extracted and added to, so that Heaney’s version of the ode redirects it to his own post-9/11 Gulf War moment; from Horace the poem takes on a Roman authority and offers an enlivening classical perspective on the idea of permanent war which, in a return to the fatalism of North, he had taken as the throughline of District and Circle’s looser arrangement of poems.

In the selected letters, Heaney does not write often about translation, but he is good on the continuum of activity entailed by poets’ translations, with a preference, as with the Horace poem, for the more creative, Lowell end of that spectrum. Writing to Tom Paulin in 2004, about his The Road to Inver, he quotes Ted Hughes and celebrates how Paulin’s translations ‘open the channels utterly between what’s in you and what’s in the original poems. And the starting angels go through as the man said.’ In a letter to Dennis O’Driscoll in March 2005 (quoting another letter he had just written on this subject to a scholar working on Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill), he is more sceptical about the quid pro quo of such opportunistic, Lowellian translations:

The ideal situation would be to come at the poems without mediation, but that’s an ideal that’s rarely lived up to. I know Latin and French, for example, well enough to think for myself about what might be equivalents, but I’d still go hunting for other people’s translations, not to rip them off, just for some kind of reassurance that I’d got the sense right. And then, of course, once you see that other version, your instinct is to make your own translation more your own, as it were, make it diverge so that it doesn’t look like a copy. (Same thing happens with a good crib...)

Come to think of it, that is the problem with cribwork – you’re dropping your bucket into the well of meaning all right, but it doesn’t go down all the way to the bottom. The haulage work, which is part of the joy of poetry, is lighter than it should be. You may get beneath the surface, but not very far.

Commissions, which involved cribs, played a role in his translation of plays and a libretto; those longer texts have proved to have a more significant afterlife as excerpted poems than they have in performance. The three major achievements of his translation are, of course, not just ‘cribwork’, and he worked from the original texts as well as cribs in his versions of Beowulf, Book VI of the Aeneid and the Sweeney poems.

Reid’s letters are mostly silent on the complex development of the Norton Beowulf, but O’Shea’s book casts light on the project’s demands ‘coming into conflict’, as he writes in May 1999 to his Norton editor, Al David, ‘with the freer/more “disobedient” writerly needs I wanted to satisfy by taking on the translation’. O’Shea also cites his use of non-Norton experts, including his friend at UCD, Professor Mary Clayton, in finalizing the text. In the letters, Reid focuses our attention instead on Heaney’s careful response in February 2000 to a broadsheet news story which ‘cast a slur on the integrity of the work done’. To defend the translation’s ‘originality’, Heaney reproduced some of his exchanges with Norton, showing the attention to detail of his version, and how some of the lines have a ‘simple clear sense’, such as a phrase the Observer columnist had queried, ‘the kindest of his people’. In the wake of the book’s success, reviewers did pick up on Heaney’s ‘opening up of channels’ between his own linguistic world and the poem’s, and his ‘voice-right’ to the material. The productive tensions between those elements are themselves brilliantly conjured in his preface to that book. His imprint on the text was in fact so successful that his translation was itself translated. As he writes in 2002 to Massimo Bacigalupo, ‘the word-hoard of the Anglo-Saxons will now be a lovely Tuscan terracotta instead of a glum wet Wessex wattle’.

A couple of years later, flagging the distinction between his Beowulf and the more distant relation he had to his Sophocles versions, he writes to Lorraine Pintal that he is hesitant about a French translation of his version of Antigone, The Burial at Thebes: ‘I have very strong doubts […] It would surely be better for Marie-Claire to do her own version directly’, although, in spite of his hesitations, Antigone, de Sophocle, text francais… d’apres la traduction de Seamus Heaney and indeed La Sepoltura a Tebes were subsequently published.

Alongside the sterling work in bringing Beowulf to twenty-first century readers, the Collected Translations reminds us of his longstanding attachment to Virgil, noting six previous translations of extracts from Book VI before he attempted the whole book for a Dutch fine-press edition. Sonzogni notes that the translation would likely have been further revised, but that Heaney’s amendments to a working typescript are incorporated in the edition published posthumously by Faber and FSG. The translation’s relation to the ‘Route 110’ sequence makes it an indispensable part of Heaney’s work, as well as a fitting reminder of how his poetry grew from ‘a local habitation’ but comprehended poetry’s historical and universal patterns.

If Beowulf and Book VI speak both for and to their source texts, it is his earliest book-length work which is the high point of this collection of translations. Heaney relied on existing scholarly translations to draft his Medieval Irish Buile Suibhne, but the result, Sweeney Astray, is a freer and riskier book. The protagonist, escaped from the North and on the run, is made over as Heaney’s alter ego. In a television interview at the time, Heaney spoke of relishing translations which ‘pounded’ their subjects into new shapes or, going further with Ezra than his admirers might expect, as ‘impounding’ the original in a new form. Sweeney’s ‘letters from exile’, in this extract from a Wicklow hideaway that is not dissimilar to Heaney’s Glanmore, establish the distance needed for correspondence:

And then Glen Bolcain was my lair,
my earth and den;
I’ve scaled and strained against those slopes
by star and moon.

I wouldn’t swop a lonely hut
in that dear glen
for a world of moorland acres
on a russet mountain.

Its water flashing like wet grass,
its wind so keen,
its tall brooklime, its watercress
the greenest green.

I love the ancient ivy tree,
the pale-leafed sallow,
the birch’s sibilant melody,
the solemn yew.

*

Tom Paulin wrote that the appearance of Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters was ‘a bit like discovering a new planet or watching a bustling continent emerge, glossy and triumphant, from the black ocean’. These new books cannot have the same effect for a poet whose planetary range is already well established. However, The Letters and The Translations are like discovering two great satellites or moons, the Phobos and Deimos, maybe, to the Mars-like scale of Heaney’s imminent The Poems (Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan, eds), which will collect an additional 200 poems alongside the final text of his twelve collections. As was the case with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, these Faber editions equip us with a set of books that will overcome both confirmation biases and angles of dissent. Their editors do a valuable service in enabling new and old readers to join conversations about Seamus Heaney’s art which, among other things, makes its own case for the poem as a kind of redress, articulates a relationship between poetry, politics and identity, and, in its evidence of a writer at work, ‘keeping going’, in environments not always forgiving or congenial, offers heartening example to its readers.