Heaney's Henryson

Ezra Pound once recommended those unable to read Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin to read it in Gavin Douglas’ translation instead. Douglas wrote in Scots and published his translation (Eneados) in 1513. Was this an example of Pound’s quirkiness or was it a tongue-in-cheek remark? Personally I have a liking for writing in Scots, finding it sinewy and engaged, and for medieval literature too. I cannot pretend to have read the whole of Douglas’ Aeneid. But I have dipped into it with much pleasure.

So it was with a little diffidence that I decided to buy a copy of Seamus Heaney’s recent translation of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables to take with me on holiday. Why do I need Heaney to translate Henryson? I don’t. But I do value the process of translation and it will be interesting to see what Heaney does with these texts. And easy to compare them too as this is a parallel text edition with the Scots facing the modern English. I may well be reporting my thoughts when I resume this blog in August. In the meantime, here’s a sample from an initial browse, which fits well enough with my holiday plans:

In Middis of June, that sweit seasoun,
Quhen that fair Phebus with his bemis bricht
Had dryit up the dew fra daill and doun,
And all the land maid with his lemis licht,
In ane mornynge betuix mid day and nicht
I rais and put all sleuth and sleip aside,
And to ane wod I went alone but gyde.

It was in that Sweet Season, middle June,
When Phoebus with his fair beams shining bright
Had dried the dew off every dale and down
And clad the land in raiment made of light:
One morning as the Sun climbed to its height
I rose and cast all sloth and sleep aside
And wandered on my own out to a wood.

The Centre and the Periphery

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh is said to have had a revelation one day in his native County Monaghan in Ireland when he realised that where he was, as remote from the ‘world’ as it seemed, was as much the centre of things as anywhere else. This led to the following poem:

EPIC

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A localrow. Gods make their own importance.

If, indeed, ‘gods make their own importance’ we may ask where the centre is and where the periphery? The pastoral convention of retreat from a corrupt, too busy or inward-looking centre, however much it values the place of retreat, nevertheless implicitly recognises the centre as the focus of attention and often carries many of the values and sophistication of the centre away with it. Kavanagh’s title of ‘Epic’ here therefore does more than refer to Homer’s Iliad; it make the claim for the peripheral place itself as centre, a locus of epic grandeur. This is presumably one reason why the sonnet form was chosen to formalise the statement in an ordered way.

Kavanagh was critical of many of the gestures of the Irish literary revival which sentimentalised a Gaelic-speaking peasantry in the far west, reinforcing the pastoral conventions of the marginalised place. He asserted that Synge’s portraits of the inhabitants of the Aran Islands “provided Irish Protestants who are worried about being ‘Irish’ with an artificial country.” His focus is, rather, on the reality of living in a ‘centre’ which is economically and spiritually impoverished. He saw neither the idealised Ireland of the Revival nor the Catholic Church as it was constituted as being able to supply a spiritual direction. What about a post-Revival poet? The closing stanza of ‘Shancoduff’ bears witness to his own sense of his place in the landcape:

The sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff
While the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush
Look up and say: "Who owns them hungry hills
That the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?
A poet? Then by heavens he must be poor."
I hear, and is my heart not badly shaken?

So can this centre hold? Only, it seems, by redefining what is important. From the pained social conscience of his long poem ‘The Great Hunger’ and subsequently in ‘Lough Derg’ Kavanagh turns inward, stating in later life that “What seems of public importance is never of any importance ….. the things that matter are casual, insignificant little things”. This was the insight of ‘Epic’and it also supplied a renewed faith that his enclosed space was also his everywhere:

Innocence

They laughed at one I loved -
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love's doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms;
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks -
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

JULY

In Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender for July there is a conversation between two shepherds about the relative merits of prominence and obscurity. Thomalin says:”He that strives to touch the starres, oft stumbles at a strawe”, while Morrell is of the view that Thomalin should climb his hill:

What ho, thou jollye shepheardes swayne
come up the hyll to me:
Better is, than the lowly playne
als for thy flocke and thee.

The hill is allegorically conjectured as a place of importance. But Thomalin will have none of it, fearing the consequences of such presumption. Hills are dangerous places. As the gloss puts it, he “takes occasion to prayse the mean and the lowly state as that wherein is safetye”. Morrel’s reply is that “perfect felicitie dwelleth in supremacie”. The relative merits of hill and dale are thus discussed in the guise of rustic conversation which is also an allegorical vehicle for observations on religious enthusiasms as opposed to worldly pragmatism.

There is also a statement about poetic diction and style here. In the June entry Colin Clout (alias Spenser) had said “I never lyst presume to Parnasse hyll”. The pastoral conventions of retreat and the quiet life also reflect a commitment to native literary style (a conscious return to Chaucer) and avoidance of fancy literary language in favour of simpler, more homely (though archaic) diction. If this also reflected the contemporary conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism , it only shows how difficult it is to separate art from politics, culture from the exercise of power. Spenser later became involved in the exercise of power in Ireland. As with Virgil, his own progression from pastoral to epic also reflects – if not allegorically at least figuratively – a progression from the politics of retreat to those of engagement.

His ploughshare must become a sword; his shepherd’s crook a sophisticated pen. And so the hill is climbed and “perfect felicitie” achieved. Or perhaps not. Returned from his Irish campaigns he died in London in the words of Ben Jonson,“for lack of bread”. Posterity was kinder to him and he has a tomb next to Chaucer’s in Westminster Abbey. So between Thomalin’s In medio virtus and Morrell’s In summo felictitas, we might conclude, as a modern poet did of Virgil, that

They gave him for his faith a happy lot:
The waving of the meadows in his song
And the spontaneous laurel at his tomb.
(Oliver St John Gogarty)

Or, nearer his own time, the words of Dekker:

“Grave Spenser was no sooner entered into this chapell of Apollo but these elders, Fathers of the divine Furie, gave him a Laurer and sung his welcome … closing their lippes in silence and turning all their eares for attention, to heare him sing out the rest of his Faerie Queene’s praises.”