2020.08 西默斯-希尼的黑暗之旅

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Seamus Heaney’s Journey Into Darkness
In the deepest reaches of history, the poet found a voice for the troubled present.

By James Parker
JULY/AUGUST 2020 ISSUE
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photo illustration of Seamus Heaney
Illustration by Oliver Munday; Eamonn McCabe / Popperfoto / Getty
In a lecture called “Frontiers of Writing,” Seamus Heaney remembered an evening he spent as the guest of an Oxford college in May 1981. A “quintessentially Oxford event,” he called it: He attended chapel alongside a former lord chancellor of the U.K., went to a big dinner, slept in a room belonging to a Conservative cabinet minister. Heaney would not have been ill at ease in these environs. True, he was a long way from the farmhouse in Derry, in the north of Ireland, where he had been born in 1939, but by that time he was famous (for a poet) and even cosmopolitan. Awards and acclaim had been a constant since the publication of his first book, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966; a wistful post-agrarian sensibility in combination, or collision, with a crunching exactitude of language made his poetry irresistible.

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That evening in Oxford, however, his thoughts were elsewhere. Earlier that day, in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, Francis Hughes had died. Hughes, after Bobby Sands, was the second IRA hunger striker to starve himself to death in protest of the British government’s refusal to classify Republican internees as political prisoners. Heaney, a Catholic, knew Hughes’s family. “My mind kept turning towards that corpse house in Co. Derry,” he wrote. “Even as I circulated with my glass of sherry, I could imagine the press of a very different crowd outside and inside the house in mid-Ulster, the movement of people from one room to the next, the protocols of sympathy, the hush as members of the bereaved family passed, and so on.”

On Seamus HeaneyR. F. FOSTER,PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
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County Derry, glass of sherry. In the Heaney poem that this moment somehow didn’t become, that would have been a perfect, perfectly pressurized, rhyme. And the Norse-sounding corpse house would have been in there too, one of his kennings or bardic throwbacks. The poet, although an honored guest, is deep in enemy territory; his imagination and his language are called back home, to the old and urgent place, to be with the mourners and the dead.

From the November 1997 issue: Seamus Heaney on W. B. Yeats

This long, downward-and-backwards pull is one of the sensations of Heaney’s poetry. It’s right there, prophetically, in the title poem of Death of a Naturalist, still one of his best-known pieces: the biological darkness with its reptile protectorate, the frogs that sit by the clogged water with “their blunt heads farting.” And the poet hanging back: “The great slime kings / Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.” I hadn’t understood, however, until I read R. F. Foster’s excellent new study, On Seamus Heaney, the extent of his negotiation with the pull of history, and the redemptive power of his creativity.

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Heaney, writes Foster, “grew up among the nods, winks, and repressions of a deeply divided society, and saw those half-concealed fissures break open into violence.” This bloody breaking-open, the beginning of the Troubles, happened with the marches for Catholic civil rights in 1968 and 1969. Life was different afterward; poetry was different. Heaney’s “Requiem for the Croppies,” for example, was a defiant if faintly orotund homage to the rebels of the 1798 Rising, rural Irishmen taking on the English army: “Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon. / The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.” Now the poem became dangerous. “After 1969,” Foster writes, “with the British Army on the streets of Belfast and the birth of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, this could look like an invocation of blood sacrifice … Heaney was acutely conscious of this—so much so that he stopped reading it in public performances.”

“Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia,” said the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. I am myself and my circumstances. Wilfred Owen was a war poet because he was a poet in a war. Heaney was a poet in Belfast. How to address actuality? How to write about occupation, sectarian killings, the contagion of fear? Heaney’s path was backwards and downward. He described the writing of “Bogland,” from 1969’s Door Into the Dark, as “like opening a gate.” The poem enacts a sinking, sucking, center-of-the-Earth draw into the chthonic mulch: ancestral cruelty, the unconscious, the self, the roots of words, whatever’s down there. It ends like a horror movie: “The wet centre is bottomless.”

Read: Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary generosity

“The Tollund Man” anticipated the grim forensics of Heaney’s legendary collection North. A pre-Christian murder, a bog burial, an exhumed preserved corpse: Tollund Man, whose body was dug from the embalming peat of the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. Presumed by archaeologists to be a sacrificial victim, for Heaney he becomes an offering to the bog goddess, to that same insatiable horror-spirit of “Bogland.” “She tightened her torc on him / And opened her fen.” And in these black depths, where the victims are hidden, the poet finds his link, connects to the atrocities of his own time: “The scattered, ambushed / Flesh of labourers, / Stockinged corpses / Laid out in the farmyards.” Heaney felt himself to be “crossing a line really” with this poem: “My whole being was involved.”

Heaney left Belfast in 1972, warily decamping south to a cottage in too-quiet County Wicklow. “How did I end up like this?” he asked in “Exposure.” “Escaped from the massacre / Taking protective colouring / From bole and bark, feeling / Every wind that blows.” Four years after North came Field Work, in which—as if enabled by the plunging-down, the bog-bargaining, of the previous volume—he achieved a series of extraordinarily direct poetic confrontations with the situation in the North: the British armored cars encountered in “The Toome Road,” “warbling along on powerful tyres”; the abduction and murder of his second cousin Colum McCartney in “The Strand at Lough Beg.” “What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block? / The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling / Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?” (McCartney’s ghost would return, in the long title poem of his next collection, Station Island, to reproach Heaney for being too poetical: “The Protestant who shot me through the head / I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / … for the way you whitewashed ugliness.”)


Read: Seamus Heaney’s plainspoken power

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Mire and violence and clubbing syllables; that was one Heaney. There were others. He incorporated within himself—it was part of his greatness, perhaps—several brilliant minor operators, each with his own specialty and stylistic angle. There was the love poet, and the journalist-in-verse, and the lyrical chronicler of potato-peeling or ploughing or ironing or just driving in the west of Ireland, where “big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” And then there was my favorite, the Heaney of his Beowulf translation, and his own recorded reading of it. I listened to this recording night after night when I was working as a baker, thumping in the back of the oven with a long-handled broom, dragging out flour-soot while Heaney’s warm and wry and somehow motherly voice went on: “There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes / A wrecker of mead benches, rampaging among foes.”

But there she is again, nesting in the action-packed heart of Beowulf: the bog goddess. Beowulf tracks the monster Grendel’s mother to the edge of a tarn, a black pond, what Heaney calls in his introduction an “infested underwater current.” Down there she guards the corpse of her son. Hear Heaney’s voice: “He dived into the heaving / depths of the lake. It was the best part of a day / before he could see the solid bottom.” Beowulf battles in the murk, killing the mother, decapitating the son, and finally breaking the surface before his astonished kinsmen, bearing Grendel’s head. Could there be a starker, surer metaphor for Heaney’s poetic endeavor, for the move on which his later achievement depended? You have to dive, you have to find what’s down there, be it ever so monstrous; you have to recover it and bring it back to the light of day.

This article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “‘How Did I End Up Like This?’”

On Seamus HeaneyR. F. FOSTER, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
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James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



西默斯-希尼的黑暗之旅
在历史的最深处，这位诗人为动荡的现在找到了一种声音。

作者：詹姆斯-帕克
2020年7月/8月号

西默斯-希尼的照片插图
插图：Oliver Munday; Eamonn McCabe / Popperfoto / Getty
在一次名为 "写作前沿 "的演讲中，西默斯-希尼回忆了他在1981年5月作为牛津大学的客人所度过的一个夜晚。他说这是一次 "典型的牛津事件"。他和英国前首相一起参加了礼拜，参加了一场盛大的晚宴，睡在一个属于保守党内阁部长的房间里。希尼在这些环境中不会感到不自在。的确，他离他1939年出生的爱尔兰北部德里的农舍很远，但那时他已经很有名了（对一个诗人来说），甚至是世界性的。自1966年他的第一本书《一个自然主义者的死亡》出版以来，获奖和赞誉一直不断；一种怀旧的后农业时代的感性与语言的精确性相结合，或相碰撞，使他的诗歌无法抗拒。

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然而，在牛津的那个晚上，他的思绪却在其他地方。那天早些时候，在北爱尔兰的Maze监狱，弗朗西斯-休斯已经去世。继博比-桑兹之后，休斯是第二位为抗议英国政府拒绝将共和党被拘留者列为政治犯而饿死的爱尔兰共和军绝食者。希尼是一名天主教徒，认识休斯的家人。"我的思绪一直在转向德里郡的那所尸体屋。他写道。"甚至在我端着雪利酒杯转悠的时候，我都能想象到在乌尔斯特中部的那所房子里外的不同人群的按捺，人们从一个房间到另一个房间的移动，同情的礼节，丧家成员经过时的嘘声，等等。"

关于西默斯-希尼R. F. 福斯特，普林斯顿大学出版社
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德里郡，一杯雪利酒。在希尼的诗中，这一刻不知为何没有成为，这将是一个完美的，完美的压韵。挪威语发音的尸体屋也会出现在那里，这是他的Kennings或吟游诗人的回文之一。诗人虽然是尊贵的客人，但却深陷于敌人的领地；他的想象力和语言被召唤回家，回到古老而紧迫的地方，与哀悼者和死者在一起。

来自1997年11月号。西默斯-希尼谈W-B-叶芝

这种漫长的、向下和向后的拉扯是希尼诗歌的感觉之一。它就在那里，预言性地出现在《一个博物学家之死》的标题诗中，这仍然是他最著名的作品之一：生物的黑暗与它的爬行动物保护者，坐在堵塞的水边的青蛙，"它们的钝头在放屁"。而诗人则挂在后面。"伟大的粘液之王/聚集在那里复仇，我知道/如果我用手蘸一下，卵子就会攥住它。" 然而，直到我读了R.F.Foster出色的新研究报告《论西默斯-希尼》，我才明白，他与历史的牵引力交涉的程度，以及他创造力的救赎力量。

你如何写关于占领、宗派杀戮、恐惧传染的诗歌？
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福斯特写道，希尼 "在一个严重分裂的社会的点头、眨眼和压抑中长大，并看到那些半遮半掩的裂缝裂开成暴力"。这种血腥的破裂，即麻烦的开始，发生在1968年和1969年的天主教民权游行中。之后的生活是不同的；诗歌也是不同的。例如，希尼的《庄稼人的安魂曲》是对1798年起义的叛乱者的蔑视，甚至是淡淡的敬意，农村的爱尔兰人与英国军队对抗。"成千上万的人死去，对着大炮挥舞着镰刀。/ 山坡红了脸，浸泡在我们破碎的波浪中。" 现在，这首诗变得危险了。"1969年后，"福斯特写道，"随着贝尔法斯特街头的英军和爱尔兰临时共和军的诞生，这看起来像是对血腥牺牲的召唤......希尼敏锐地意识到了这一点--以至于他不再在公开演出中读这首诗。"

"西班牙哲学家José Ortega y Gasset说："Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia。我就是我自己和我的环境。威尔弗雷德-欧文是一位战争诗人，因为他是一位战争中的诗人。希尼是贝尔法斯特的一位诗人。如何处理实际情况？如何写占领、宗派杀戮、恐惧的传染？希尼的道路是倒退和下降的。他把1969年《进入黑暗之门》中的《沼泽地》的写作描述为 "像打开一扇门"。这首诗制定了一个下沉、吸吮、地球中心的牵引，进入窒息的泥土：祖先的残酷、无意识、自我、词语的根源，不管下面有什么。它的结局就像一部恐怖电影。"湿润的中心是无底的。"

阅读：西默斯-希尼的非凡慷慨

"Tollund人 "预示着希尼的传奇性文集《北方》的严峻法证。一件前基督教的谋杀案，一个沼泽地的埋葬，一具被挖掘出来的保存的尸体。托尔伦人，他的尸体是从丹麦日德兰半岛的防腐泥炭中挖出来的。考古学家认为他是一个牺牲品，对希尼来说，他成了沼泽女神的祭品，也是 "沼泽地 "那个贪得无厌的恐怖精灵的祭品。"她收紧了对他的拷问/并打开了她的沼泽"。而在这些隐藏着受害者的黑色深处，诗人找到了他的联系，与他自己时代的暴行相联系。"散落的、埋伏的/劳动者的肉体，/带着袜子的尸体/躺在农田里"。希尼觉得自己在这首诗中 "真的跨越了一条线"。"我的整个人都被卷入其中"。

1972年，希尼离开贝尔法斯特，战战兢兢地南下，来到威克洛郡太过安静的一个小屋里。"他在《曝光》中问道："我怎么会变成这样？" "从大屠杀中逃出来/从树干和树皮上取下保护色/感受/每一阵风吹来的感觉。" 在《北方》之后的四年，《野外工作》问世了，在这本书中--仿佛是由于前一卷的骤降，沼泽地的讨价还价，他实现了与北方局势的一系列特别直接的诗意对抗：在《托姆路》中遇到的英国装甲车，"在强大的轮胎上摇晃"；在《拉夫贝格的街道》中他的二表哥科勒姆-麦卡特尼被绑架和谋杀。"什么东西在你的前面闪耀？一个假的路障？/红灯摆动，突然的刹车和停滞/发动机，声音，头戴头套和冷鼻枪？" (麦卡特尼的鬼魂会回来，在他的下一本诗集《车站岛》的长标题诗中，责备希尼太过诗意："向我脑袋开枪的新教徒/我直接指责，但间接指责你/......因为你粉饰丑陋的方式。"）


阅读：西默斯-希尼的直言不讳的力量

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泥潭、暴力和棍棒式的音节；那是一个希尼。还有其他的。他在自己身上融入了--这也许是他伟大的一部分--几个出色的次要操作者，每个人都有自己的专长和风格角度。他是爱情诗人，也是诗中记者，还是剥土豆、犁地、熨衣服或只是在爱尔兰西部开车的抒情记录者，在那里 "巨大的柔软的冲击力从侧面向汽车袭来/让人的心猝不及防地炸开。" 然后是我的最爱，希尼的《贝奥武夫》译本，以及他自己录制的朗读。当我在做面包师的时候，我夜夜听着这段录音，用长柄扫帚在烤箱后面敲打，拖出面粉脚，而希尼温暖、狡黠、不知为何充满母性的声音在继续。"有一个叫Sheafson的人，他是许多部落的祸害/一个破坏蜂蜜酒长椅的人，在敌人中横冲直撞"。

但她又出现了，在贝奥武夫充满行动力的心中筑起了巢穴：沼泽女神。贝奥武夫追踪怪物格伦德尔的母亲到了塔恩的边缘，一个黑色的池塘，希尼在他的介绍中称之为 "出没的水下水流"。在那里，她守护着她儿子的尸体。听听希尼的声音："他潜入高耸的/湖的深处。过了一天的时间，他才看到坚实的湖底"。贝奥武夫在黑暗中战斗，杀死了母亲，斩断了儿子的头颅，最后在他惊讶的亲属面前打破水面，拿着格伦德尔的头。对于希尼的诗歌创作，对于他后来的成就所依赖的行动，还能有更鲜明、更明确的比喻吗？你必须潜水，你必须找到下面的东西，不管它是多么的可怕；你必须把它找出来，让它重见天日。

本文出现在2020年7月/8月的印刷版上，标题为"'我怎么会落得如此下场？

论西默斯-希尼R. F. 福斯特，普林斯顿大学出版社
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詹姆斯-帕克是《大西洋月刊》的一名工作人员。