Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn: Intertextuality in the Work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian

262 Pages·2013·0.798 MB·English

by  Stephanie Schwerter (auth.)

Northern Irish Poetry and
the Russian Turn
Intertextuality in the Work of
Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and
Medbh McGuckian
Stephanie Schwerter
Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn
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Northern Irish Poetry and
the Russian Turn
Intertextuality in the Work of
Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and
Medbh McGuckian
Stephanie Schwerter
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
© Stephanie Schwerter 2013
Foreword © John Goodby 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-27171-6
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
Foreword by John Goodby vi
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: ‘And Every Evening Surprised that
I Was Still Alive I Repeated Verses’ 1
1 No Vodka, Aquavit or Uisquebaugh: The Russian Connection
in the Work of Seamus Heaney 10
2 ‘Punching Holes in History’: Tom Paulin’s
Interest in Russia 71
3 The Russian Dimension in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian:
‘My Words are Traps through which you Pick your Way’ 130
Conclusion 202
Notes 208
Bibliography 240
Index 249
v
Foreword
At the other geographical extreme of Europe from Ireland, Russia has often
exerted an uncanny force upon Irish writers. Despite the innumerable
differences between them, the two countries have been seen as linked by
their sheer exceptionalism with respect to the norms for other European
nations; Ireland’s long suffering as an internal colony on the one hand
matched, if that is the right word, by Russia’s bitter experience of autocracy
on the other. To Western Europeans, both are temperamentally similar;
hence the truism, so redolent of English disdain, that to understand Russia
one must imagine Ireland with an empire. Well before the 1970s, when
Stephanie Schwerter’s splendid study begins, the connection had been
made, in anything but such a complacent spirit, by Irish poets. In the 1840s,
for example, James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Siberia’ figured the Famine in terms
of Russia’s inhospitable frozen wastes, while the drafts for W. B. Yeats’ ‘The
Second Coming’ show that it was provoked by the Russian Revolution as
well as the brutalities of the Anglo-Irish War. Numerous parallels also suggest
themselves between the dark, parabolic procedures of Samuel Beckett and
Louis MacNeice and those of writers in Stalinist Russia. Even so, it would be
fair to say that, by the 1960s, Irish poets, North and South, regarded Russia
much as did others in the West – that is, they were opposed (but not usually
in a Cold War warrior spirit) to its totalitarianism, in awe and slightly envi-
ous of the moral grandeur and social significance state repression bestowed
on its artists, and felt that they existed under much more ambiguous cir-
cumstances: relative c omfort, tolerated dissidence and cultural marginality.
With the outbreak of the Northern Troubles, however, this changed.
Ireland, the North in particular, became one of those rare places in the West
where political discourse was so polarised, so charged with violence, that what
writers said mattered. Poets were suddenly expected to speak for ‘their’ com-
munities, to crystallise a historical plight. Suddenly, the Russia of s amizdat,
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov became a legitimate lens through which to read
Ireland. Of course, Irish poets realised that any direct ‘r eflection’ of com-
munal experience would be disastrous for their art. One very early example
of how the agonising situation could be registered, meaningfully but glanc-
ingly, was a powerful version of Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Elegy for John Donne’ by
W. J. McCormack, a Protestant poet from the Republic, which appeared in
the short-lived journal Atlantis. Its oppressive, lulling repetitions of ‘sleep’,
‘darkness’ and ‘death’ hinted unmistakably at the fog of war into which the
island, on both sides of the border, was then descending. For over 20 years,
the ‘Russian mode’, as we might call it, would be used to explore the twists
and turns of the Irish situation. Two of the best collections to be published
vi
Foreword vii
in the Republic in the 1980s, Michael O’Loughlin’s Stalingrad: The Street
Dictionary (1980) and Paul Durcan’s Going Home to Russia (1990), showed
the wide variety of ways in which this could be done, one a working-class
Dubliner’s take on the failures of Independence, haunted by East Berlin hous-
ing estates and Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, the other using the g lasnost-era
Soviet Union to critique Haughey-era corruption and hypocrisy.
Yet it is Northern Irish poets, of course, who drew on Russia most exten-
sively, in attempting to figure, and figure out, the moral ambiguities gener-
ated by the Troubles, and it is on them that this study is rightly focused.
For many, the potential of Russia was first signalled by Seamus Heaney’s
use of the term ‘inner émigré’ and ‘tristia’ (the title of a collection by Osip
Mandelstam) in ‘Exposure’ – appropriately, a poem which meditates on
Heaney’s leaving Belfast to live in the Republic. It was the concluding poem
in his most famous and influential c ollection, North (1975), and by adding
Mandelstam to his list of literary exemplars Heaney significantly extended
the Northern predilection for dealing with sectarianism and violence in an
oblique manner. Henceforth, Russia was a potent imaginary Irish space, a
crucial emblem and s ounding board for Northern Irish poets.
One of my favourite examples comes in ‘Yggdrasil’, a lyric written by Paul
Muldoon in the wake of the Hunger Strikes of 1980–81, which concludes:
the lichened
tree trunk will taper
to a point where one scrap of paper
is spiked, and my people yearn
for a legend:
It may not be today
or tomorrow, but sooner or later
the Russians will water
their horses on the shores of Lough Erne
and Lough Neagh.
This is pretty much opaque, I think, unless we have read A Jail Journal, the
autobiography of the Young Irelander John Mitchel. In it, Mitchel tells of
how he escaped a British penal colony in Australia and made his way to the
USA. There, when the Crimean War broke out in 1851, he visited Russia’s
ambassador, Baron Stockl, in Washington, and proposed that the Tsarist
government mount an invasion of Ireland, attacking Britain on its flank,
and offering himself as its leader. Mitchel’s book was also the source of Yeats’
line ‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’ in ‘Under Ben Bulben’. Since Yeats was
dubiously extolling the cathartic virtues of violence, and Muldoon is using
the italicised voice he gives to a hunger striker elsewhere in Quoof – a figure
who is also, it should be noted, at one level Muldoon himself – the levels
viii Foreword
of dis/engagement with politics produced by this juxtaposition of Don
Cossacks and South Ulster are exceedingly complex. Rarely, indeed, have
the possibilities and pitfalls of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ been so
enigmatically sounded.
Muldoon’s instance of the Russian mode, isolated in his work, neverthe-
less hints at its value in the work of the two poets who, with Heaney, avail
themselves of it most often and most effectively: Tom Paulin and Medbh
McGuckian. It is to this troika of poets that Stephanie Schwerter devotes
individual chapters. In a series of exemplary close readings, she explores
their use of Russia as a theme, as an encouragement to translation and as a
source of texts to plunder for their own poems. Students of Irish poetry will
find new insights on every page of her book as, armed with a knowledge of
the Russian originals, Dr Schwerter reveals the unsuspected importance of
relatively neglected poems, and draws on Russian originals to see how faith-
ful translations are (and why they might be unfaithful). In the process, she
fascinatingly h ighlights the blurring of distinctions between ‘authoring’ and
‘translating’, and draws on Bakhtin’s dialogism and Lawrence Venuti’s con-
cepts of the ‘d omesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ to provide us with a strikingly
new sense of Paulin’s poetic development and McGuckian’s alleged ‘theft’.
As she does so, she sheds much illumination on the evolution of Northern
Irish poetry more generally, hinting at the differences between Heaney’s
tentative invocations of Russian parallels and the bolder ones of Paulin
and McGuckian, a difference matching the shift from a mainstream British
poetic mode to a more modernist-influenced and risky one in Northern
Irish poetry of the 1980s. At the same time, it is a strength of this book that
Stephanie Schwerter is alert to the fact that Irish problems ultimately belong
in a Western context; when she thinks the poets use the comparison in an
exaggerated or self-aggrandising way she is not afraid to point this out.
The importance of Northern Irish poetry of the last half century is beyond
dispute. One of the things that made this small area such a forcing-house
for the lyric was its sense of being embattled. Here again, a parallel with
Russia asks to be drawn. But in the long run isolation is a weakness. In an
emerging world of axial and transnational cultural forms, lack of purchase
against other poetries means repetition and tedium. In this sense, the wan-
ing of energy and originality in Northern Irish poetry since the early 1990s
may be one of the least intended consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Troubles; nothing has replaced the urgency and brilliance
with which the two interacted. Moreover, it is a perennial problem of Irish
critics that they tend to be insufficiently curious about elsewhere. This book
is timely, therefore, because in addition to its many other virtues it is a rare
example of Irish comparative literary studies. So few, and yet there are so
many questions that cry out for answers. Why are mainstream Irish poets
so enamoured of French Symbolism, but not the modernism it gave rise to?
How might Venuti’s two kinds of translation shed light on, say, the different
Foreword ix
translations of the Buile Suibhne by Seamus Heaney and Trevor Joyce? How
does the Northern Irish poets’ use of Russian material compare, say, with
that of English poets, or a US poet such as Lyn Hejinian, in her Leningrad
and Oxota? In paving the way for studies of this kind, Stephanie Schwerter
has not only expanded our knowledge of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and
Medbh McGuckian, but issued an exemplary challenge to Irish literary stud-
ies by revealing a direction which it must, sooner or later, take.
John Goodby
Swansea, July 2012