From a Dark Wood to the Light of Heaven: Translation as Po-Ethics in Seamus Heaney

Deeply aware of his identity as an Irish poet, facing both the personal and collective troubles of the political and cultural divisions of his native country, Seamus Heaney spent much of his early career questioning his vocation as a poet. He felt confronted with the apparent impossibility of reconciling a belief in the autonomy and independence of the poetic process with a concern for the poet’s responsibility—i.e., the ability to respond—to history, and he knew too well the dangers of any over-simplistic conflation of the poetic and the political (O’Brien 2019). And yet he saw poetry and politics as indissolubly linked via the intrinsic ethics of the poetic act, to the extent that he used the term “po-ethics” (Heaney 2001, p. 55) to voice this long-standing concern, adopting a neologism that articulates the ethical nature of poetry. This deep awareness of the intrinsic ethical value of poetry is constantly nourished throughout Heaney’s career by the example of other poets, which in turn stimulates a fervent activity as a translator. Thus Seamus Heaney’s approach to translation is a form of po-ethics that foregrounds the poet's moral responsibility in engaging with texts across languages, histories, and cultural divides. For him, translation is not just a matter of fidelity to the original text but an act of appropriation aimed at making the text relevant to his own context and dilemmas, which is especially evident in his translations from Dante’s Commedia.