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Reading and Writing (In-)Between Languages in the English-Speaking World

“Transportation” between contradictory worlds in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Lightenings viii” and its translation into French1

Elizabeth PEARCE

Résumés

Lors de sa dernière conférence à Oxford, Seamus Heaney écrit que « There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds » (The Redress of Poetry 202). Il continue en affirmant que :
[…] we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; […] that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.
(203)
Le poème de Heaney « Lightenings viii » (Seeing Things 62) oscille entre deux mondes nettement incompatibles, celui des moines du monastère de Clonmacnoise, et celui d'un navire naviguant au-dessus d'eux dans les airs, le temps mythique et le temps présent vacillant. Dans ce poème, Heaney défie les dualités irréductibles telles que celle entre l'irlandais et l'anglais, s'éloignant de ce que John Montague appelait « the partitioned intellect » pour se diriger vers ce que Heaney décrit comme « an entry into further language » (Beowulf xxv). Cet article examine tout d'abord comment l'approche narrative adoptée par Heaney dans « Lightenings viii » crée le sens d'entre-deux du poème, amplifié par l'influence subtile de « l'hétéroglossie ponctuelle » selon les termes de P. L. Paddington (2013). Deuxièmement, nous examinerons les stratégies créatives utilisées en conséquence par Patrick Hersant dans sa traduction « Illuminations viii » (La lucarne 129). Comment cet entre-deux, ce sens de l'hétéroglossie, pourrait-il être traduit en français ?

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  • 1 A first version of this article on Seamus Heaney’s “Lightenings viii” and its translation was given (...)

Photo: Clonmacnoise monastery ruins, County Offaly, Ireland

Source: Heritage Ireland (permission granted)

1. Overview

1As Seamus Heaney reveals in the introduction to his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf,

I [Heaney] tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was an attitude that hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question – the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland. (xxiv)

2Heaney goes on to say that:

The Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed and […] a gleam of recognition flashed through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential […]. (xxiv)

3This article explores Heaney’s “elsewhere of potential,” the in-betweenness implicit in his poem “Lightenings viii,” published in his volume Seeing Things in 1991 (62) and its translation into French by Patrick Hersant in La lucarne, 2005 (129). “Lightenings viii” embodies Heaney’s attempt to escape from the “Irish/English duality,” the “Celtic/Saxon antithesis” that he confronted in his translation of Beowulf. This poem is about transportation, and transformation, across thresholds, between worlds. Helen Vendler argues that here “[…] the transcendent and the real become defined as the obverse and reverse of a single perception” (136). She maintains that these two realms of the poem, the transcendent and the real, represent, in Heaney’s words, the “two orders of knowledge we might call the practical and the poetic” (qt. in Vendler, Seamus Heaney 137). The two worlds described in the poem may well be parallel universes, with no apparent point of connection. However, these two strongly tangible worlds, that of the monks praying in the oratory, and a ship sailing through air with its crew, seem to collide in the poem. Heaney’s achievement is the co-existence of these seemingly contradictory worlds, revealing their unlikely compatibility, the reader suspending dis-belief in order to at least consider such unexpected “logic.” In his article “Inbetweenness and Ambivalence,” sociologist Bernhard Giesen maintains that the space between opposites “transcends the successful ordering and splitting of the world into neat binaries,” and that “this in-betweenness is essential for the construction of culture” (789). “Lightenings viii” is suffused by a sense of in-betweenness, in a clear rejection of the dualities described by Heaney.

1.1 In-betweenness and single word heteroglossia

  • 2 “Clonmacnoise” is the commonly used English name of the ruined monastery in Ireland; in Irish this (...)

4As Helen Gibson affirms, “Bakhtin attests that ‘all languages of heteroglossia […] are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualising the world in words’” (Bakhtin, 1981 291, as cited in Gibson, 149). While heteroglossia might suggest a diversity of languages within a single language, there is only one overtly “Irish” word in Heaney’s “Lightenings viii,” the toponym “Clonmacnoise”2 in the first line. In P. L. Paddington’s terms it may be described as an example of “single word heteroglossia,” “l'hétéroglossie ponctuelle.” Paddington argues that “Single word heteroglossia is the sign of the presence within the text of another textual space and time” (2013). He further contends that “l’hétéroglossie n’implique pas seulement l’espace de l’autre langue, de l’autre culture mais aussi […] le temps de l’autre culture” (69). In combination with the poem’s sense of in-betweenness, it is this “other textual space and time” of the monastery at Clonmacnoise that enables the reader to experience being between two mythological worlds, that of the monks in the oratory, and a ship sailing through air above.

5In “Lightenings viii,” published in 1991, we recognise the embodiment of what Heaney later articulated in his introduction to his translation of Beowulf as:

[…] an escape route from what John Montague has called ‘the partitioned intellect,’ a way into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one’s language would not be simply a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language. (Beowulf xxv)

6It is through this sense of in-betweenness, combined with the presence of single word heteroglossia in the word “Clonmacnoise,” that Heaney creates a way out of “the partitioned intellect,” transcending binaries.

7This article firstly explores the approach taken by Heaney in “Lightenings viii” in order to create the poem’s layered in-betweenness, magnified by the presence of a subtle but pervading sense of heteroglossia, combining to create an echo of a distant Irish language, Irish culture, and mythical sense of time. Secondly, we consider the creative strategies used by Patrick Hersant in his translation, “Illuminations viii.” How might this in-betweenness and subtle sense of heteroglossia be translated into French?

1.2 Henri Meschonnic

8This study is informed by Henri Meschonnic’s theories on rhythm, poetry and translation, including his contention that:

Le rythme est l’ensemble synthétique de tous les éléments qui y contribuent, organisation de toutes les unités petites et grandes […] avec toutes leurs figures. (Critique du rythme 216)

9Meschonnic further argues that “Contre la réduction courante du ‘sens’ au lexical, la signifiance est de tout le discours, elle est dans chaque consonne, dans chaque voyelle qui […] dégage des séries” (216). Andrew Eastman confirms Meschonnic’s approach to rhythm and literary translation in the following:

‘Translating rhythm’ might be understood to suggest that rhythm is one problem among others faced by the translator, an aspect of language to be taken account of […]. Essential to Meschonnic’s approach to rhythm and to translation is the sense that rhythm and “prosody” are not separate and separable “levels” of language; rather they are what transforms the givens of the language, syntax and lexicon, they are what a subject “does” to language and reader—and thus, likewise, what a translation must “do.” (“Cries and Cracks” 64)

10Moreover, Meschonnic argues that “Le mot poétique n’est pas un beau mot […]. C’est un mot comme tout mot” (Pour la poétique I 60). He goes on to clarify the nature of “la parole poétique” proper to each individual poet: “La parole poétique opère dans un espace propre à chaque poète, à reconnaître, et n’est pas une parure jetée sur les mots ordinaires. Ce sont ces mêmes mots, changés par leur organisation […]” (68). Meschonnic’s recognition of the centrality of the poet’s unique voice, combined with his insistence that each element of language, “organisation de toutes les unités petites et grandes” contributes to a poem’s rhythm and its meaning, reinforces the notion here that single word heteroglossia may have an influence on Heaney’s poem “Lightenings viii,” and its translation. So too does it inform the exploration of the approach taken by Heaney in the creation of his poem, and of that used by the translator Patrick Hersant.

2. Background to the poem “Lightenings viii,” Seamus Heaney

11This 12-line poem, “Lightenings viii,” is a story about “the monks at Clonmacnoise,” where “The Annals of Clonmacnoise” were said to be housed. The Annals draw on materials compiled at the monastery at Clonmacnoise, situated in central Ireland, where the ruins of the monastery remain. The Annals of Clonmacnoise survives in an English translation made in 1627 by Irish scholar Conall MaGeoghegan. The original Gaelic Irish manuscript is lost, as is the original manuscript of MaGeoghegan’s translation, but several copies of the translated text survive, including one in Trinity College Dublin, and another in the British Museum, London. The Annals of Clonmacnoise records events in Ireland from pre-history to 1408, including this story, according to Heaney, that on which “Lightenings viii” is based.

12However, it appears that there is actually no such story in The Annals of Clonmacnoise as found in “Lightenings viii;” rather, mention of this ancient Irish legend can be found in The Annals with reference to the year 744:

744. —There was snow this yeare of wonderfull Greatness that there was in no man’s memory such seen. […] There were shipes seen in the skyes with their men this yeare. (The Annals of Clonmacnoise digitised version 118; emphasis added)

  • 3 The footnote in Carey’s article, referring to the poem “Lightenings viii” in Heaney’s Seeing Things(...)

13John Carey in his article “Aerial ships and underwater monasteries: the evolution of a monastic marvel” (1992) explores varied references to air ships in early Irish written sources, including versions of the Clonmacnoise story referred to in “Lightenings viii.” In reference to Heaney’s volume Seeing Things (1991), Carey notes that Heaney had first learned of the Clonmacnoise story from an article of Andrew Foley’s in 1983, “in which he paraphrased Mac Cana’s retelling” (28).3 Further, Heaney in his later interview with Dennis O’Driscoll (Stepping Stones 321) refers to the origins of this story as being in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures (178), describing the ending of the translated story “The Air Ship” in this way: “The narrative rises and sets, the magic casement opens for a moment only and the marvellous occurs in a sequence that sounds entirely like a matter of fact” (Jackson 322). The author of this translated story is unknown, presumed by Jackson to be from the “fourteenth or fifteenth century” (179). While it opens with “the monks of Clonmacnoise” (178) the story does not reference directly the Annals of Clonmacnoise. It seems that for Heaney, the word “Clonmacnoise” may now stand for “the Annals of Clonmacnoise” in a form of synecdoche, the part representing the whole.

14Regardless of the shifting enigmas of its source as legend, the story of the ship sailing through the oratory at Clonmacnoise monastery is clearly emblematic of Heaney’s thinking about poetry, as evidenced by his reciting of the poem after his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature in Dublin. The video recording of that recitation (1995) is called “The Annals Say,” rather than its formal title, “Lightenings viii,” and during the recording Heaney states without apparent irony that the story is from the Annals of Clonmacnoise. He introduced the recitation with the following words:

I want to end on the point of an unforgettable event that is recorded in the Annals of Clonmacnoise, an event that had all the dream truth, all the imaginative promise, all the reliable feel, of the things that have been done here tonight. (1995)

15In “Lightenings viii,” Heaney is enacting his defiance of the Irish/English duality, and the dualities of politics and poetry, recognising in his final Oxford poetry lecture that:

[…] we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; […] that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing. All of which is implicit in this short poem that formed part of a sequence called “Lightenings” and appeared in my book Seeing Things in 1991. (The Redress of Poetry 203)

16After this conclusion he finishes the lecture with “Lightenings viii.” Heaney has created a powerful re-writing of the many-faceted legend; the ephemeral layers of in-betweenness and “dream truth” accrue, encompassing the poet as well as the poem.

3. The poem “Lightenings viii,” Seamus Heaney

Lightenings viii

1 The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
2 Were all at prayers inside the oratory
3 A ship appeared above them in the air.

4 The anchor dragged along behind so deep
5 It hooked itself into the altar rails
6 And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

7 A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
8 And struggled to release it. But in vain.
9 ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

10 The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
11 They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
12 Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

17The toponym “Clonmacnoise” pervades the poem, its effect resonating throughout. Combined with the opening words, “The annals say,” the word “Clonmacnoise” establishes a mythical, mystical sense of past Ireland, as place. Time, from a setting in pre-history, unexpectedly leaps into the present, past and present vacillating as the poem progresses, as if the reader were witnessing these events directly. In Paddington’s terms, “l’hétéroglossie ponctuelle nous fait quitter le temps ‘naturel’ du texte” (68). What Heaney does to achieve this vacillating between two worlds, “two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic,” will be explored - the “practical,” that could be described here as the literal, the actual monastery at Clonmacnoise; and the “poetic,” that could be described as the transcendent, the ship in the air and its crew.

18Regarding the poem’s title, “Lightenings” is the title too of a sequence of twelve 12-line poems, itself a sequence of the longer section “Squarings.” The volume’s title, Seeing Things (1991), indicates a duality between the figural and literal: the poem “Lightenings viii” (62) also encompasses “seeing things,” and being “en-lightened.” The word “lightening” in English is often used to denote “lightening the load,” being unburdened. It is not generally used as a plural noun, as here, disrupting the reader’s expectations. The word “lightening” in the singular, however, occurs in the final poem of the 12-poem sequence, “Lightenings xii” (66). In this last poem, an additional layer of meaning is added to the title in stanza 2, along with those already recognised by Heaney in its opening lines as “alleviation” and “illumination”: what he describes in an interview as “a flaring of the spirit at the moment before death” (O’Driscoll 321). The very title thus contributes to the poem’s sense of hovering between the earthly and the spiritual.

4. Heaney’s “story-telling” approach

19Largely through his story-telling or myth-telling approach, Heaney develops an implicit sense of in-betweenness in “Lightenings viii,” which infuses the poem. In keeping with the Irish oral tradition of story-telling, it is almost a “fairy-tale” style, with the poem set in a distant past, where things may be mythical, mystical, where “normal” rules of logic may not apply, and where the threshold between two worlds, the real and the transcendent, the spiritual, may waver. Further, this story-telling could be described as a form of parable, the Biblical undertone in “The annals say” combined with the religious authority of place being asserted in the very first line.

  • 4 As described by Roman Jakobson, “In a sequence where similarity is imposed on contiguity, two simil (...)

20The key interconnected tools or strategies used by Heaney in “Lightenings viii” are founded in this story-telling approach, and include controlling the poem’s momentum; “signposting” or flagging, marking the action; and creating strings or chains of paronomasia in Jakobson’s terms, where “Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” (“Closing Statement” 371).4 Firstly, controlling the momentum, accelerating or decelerating the forward movement, especially through punctuation, phrasing and enjambment, has the effect of increasing anticipation while reducing time for reflection on the part of the reader. Secondly, signposting the action, grounding the language, through the sustained use of verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, has the effect of reinforcing the tangibility, the reality of both worlds, that of the oratory on the ground, and the ship in the air. Thirdly, creating strings of paronomasia, linking chains of sound especially through assonance and consonance, alliterative effects that connect and emphasise certain key aspects of the poem, reinforces the two worlds and the crossover between them – including through the word “Clonmacnoise.” As Paddington argues, “L’hétéroglossie ponctuelle introduit donc une coprésence […] entre deux espaces linguistiques et culturels” (64). These story-telling qualities are interlinked across the poem, the reader shifting rapidly between doubt and belief, with little time for reflection.

4.1 Controlling momentum

21Heaney’s control of momentum is largely through punctuation and phrasing, whereby irregular pauses as well as unexpected enjambments are generated, adding to the narrative’s sense of anticipation, and reproducing the irregular movement of the ship, as can be seen here:

22At the beginning of stanza 1, the historical authority of “The annals” is reinforced by the physical slowing, the weighty pause provided by the colon coming immediately after the verb, increasing gravitas. The present tense of “The annals say” implies truth, and resonates with the traditional “The Bible says,” adding further weight. The forward movement generated by enjambment at the end of lines 1 and 2 allows no room for denial, and the full stop at stanza end increases the credibility of the mythical event, “A ship appeared above them in the air”–declaring the ship’s tangible presence, and its undeniability.

23Stanza 2 builds the pace with no punctuation until line 6, allowing little time for reflection on the fantastical story unfolding. The commas here serve to increase the mounting anticipation. In stanza 3, the sense of speed and urgency is further increased by the crewman’s apparent headlong actions, until a full stop occurs midway through line 8, reinforcing the inherent gravity. The two full stops in line 8, in close proximity, enact and emphasise the ship’s rocking to a halt. The sense of defeat is thus intensified, reinforced by the short second sentence, “But in vain.” Here seems definitive defeat, confirmed by the echoing monosyllabic structure “and will drown” in the next line. Again at stanza end, the comma creates a pause, increasing the sense of anticipation while slowing the forward movement, indicating too that the story-telling continues unabated.

24In the final stanza, the effect is one of increasing agitation, as the drama builds to a climax. In line 10, the full stop occurring unexpectedly just before line end increases the dramatic effect. The sense of speed is then accelerated by the density of action enacting both the drama, and the jerking irregularity of the ship’s movement in the air: “So / They did;” “the freed ship sailed;” and finally in line 11, the ship’s unimpeded progress across line end, unimpeded by punctuation: “the man climbed back / Out of the marvellous as he had known it.”

4.2 Signposting the action

25Helen Vendler in The Breaking of Style observes that she was “deeply struck by the apparent bareness and simplicity” of some of Heaney’s poems in Seeing Things (41). She goes on to say that “When I was looking into that bareness, I realised that in some instances it sprang from a poem’s concentration on a single grammatical element” (The Breaking of Style 41). She refers to “Heaney’s gift for conferring on different poems radically different grammatical textures, each of them enacting a coherent ensemble of feeling and thought” (67). In the case of “Lightenings viii,” we locate a combination of grammatical elements within the poem that contribute to its “grammatical texture”: namely, verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Together, these signpost the poem’s action.

26The poem convinces with its solidity: it is ultimately too physical, too grounded to admit of “visions.” The ship, its anchor and the crewman exist to the reader, as do the abbot and the monks. In considering the verbs used by Heaney, each stanza begins with a clear and active subject followed by a decisive verb: “The annals say;” “The anchor dragged;” “The crewman shinned;” “The abbot said.” The abundance of verbs of action adds to this physicality, including “a ship appeared;” the anchor “dragged” and “hooked itself;” the crewman “shinned,” “grappled” and “struggled”:

1 The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
2
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
3 A ship
appeared above them in the air.

4 The anchor dragged along behind so deep
5 It hooked itself into the altar rails
6 And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

7 A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
8 And struggled to release it. But in vain.
9 ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

10 The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
11 They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
12 Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

27So too does the profusion of prepositions increase the physicality, including “inside”, “above,” “into.” The prepositions situating the action accrue, as can be seen here:

28Combined with the series of active verbs, this notable occurrence of prepositions appearing throughout the poem draws attention to an undeniable sense of place, solid and tangible. As the poem evolves, the reader suspends disbelief and accepts that the threshold between the “real” and the “unreal” has been breached. The two worlds co-exist. The poem’s concise and increasingly rapid sequence of actions consolidates this co-existence.

29In addition, a series of signposting conjunctions contributes to marking a logical movement through the poem, further reinforcing the tangibility, the reality of both worlds. The presence of conjunctions increases with each stanza, including “when” in stanza 1; “And then, as […]” in stanza 2; “And,” “But,” “and” in stanza 3; and in the final stanza, “unless,” “So” (used here to mark a consequence, “as a result”), “and,” “as”:

30The down-to-earth nature of the layered signposting created by the combined grammatical elements described counters the poem’s swiftly developing sense of un-reality: the almost geographic positioning created by the prepositions, reinforced by the conjunctions, marks a clear movement through the verbs, especially those of action. The result is that the oratory is experienced as solid, a place of normalcy, not of ephemeral apparitions. Within this context, the ship too is shown to be solid, from where “the big hull rocked to a standstill”: as a result, the two elemental worlds can be seen to co-exist.

4.3 Creating strings of paronomasia

  • 5 Andrew Eastman here cites Fitzroy Pyle (1968 54) regarding the term “alliterative prominence.”

31In “Lightenings viii,” consonance reverberates throughout, creating a striking effect of paronomasia, in Jakobson’s terms the resemblance of sound bringing together words unconnected in meaning. Andrew Eastman refers to the impact of “phonemic echo” or “alliterative prominence” in highlighting key aspects of a poem (“Breaking the pentameter” 165).5 The sense of religious authority of place, Clonmacnoise, is reinforced throughout by layers of consonance. Consonance not only with [k] but with [n] and [l] is particularly strong, linking “Clonmacnoise” in the first line with action right across the poem: “The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise […]” links with “The anchor […] hooked” and “the big hull rocked to a standstill;” “A crewman shinned;” and in the final stanza, the relief of “the man climbed back”:

32The consonance with [n] further links each stage of the poem’s action, firstly with geographical position: “Clonmacnoise” is reinforced by prepositions of place appearing in the first half of the poem as discussed, including “inside,” “in,” “behind,” “into.” Secondly, this consonance also links the two worlds: the “monks of Clonmacnoise” (line 1) links with the ship at a “standstill” (line 6), and the “crewman” who “shinned […] down” the rope, but “in vain”: and who “will drown” (lines 7, 8, 9 consecutively). The final stanza then shifts to include “unless we help him,” and “as he had known it” (lines 10 and 12). In addition, consonance with [d] reinforces this physical world, with “dragged,” “behind,” “deep,” “down,” “drown” building increasing apprehension in the reader, but being followed by release in line 11 by the simple statement “So / They did,” and then, “the freed ship sailed.”

33Finally, consonance with [p] also links across “Lightenings viii,” further linking the two worlds physically: “A ship appeared” links with “prayers,” with “deep,” “grappled” and “rope,” with “help him,” as well as with the repetition of “ship” in stanza 4, “the freed ship sailed.” The “monks” link closely too with “man” and “crewman,” connecting the world of the oratory with that of the ship, and with the “marvellous” that the two linked worlds ultimately share.

34As observed by Jonathan Allison in A Companion to Magical Realism, in “Lightenings viii” Heaney questions traditional dichotomies between the real and the “magical” by stressing that:

[…] for the sailor, the monks are themselves marvellous and otherworldly. Everybody, including marvellous creatures, has the capacity to come up against a bewildering otherness which might challenge their fundamental axioms. (qt. in Allison 236)

35For a brief time, the two worlds are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually dependent, and co-existing. The threshold between these worlds is opened; the normal barriers between the elements of air and water become irrelevant. “The freed ship sailed.” “The man climbed back.” With Heaney, it is the ambiguity that enables the resolution. It is not insisted upon, but rather vacillates on the verge of possibility, where “the marvellous” exists, unexpectedly not only in the sky, but on earth. Here we see “an elsewhere of potential” between two co-existing worlds, confirming a sense of in-betweenness across the poem.

5. The translation “Illuminations viii”, Patrick Hersant

  • 6 Patrick Hersant is a widely published translator, writer and academic based at Université Paris 8. (...)

36Patrick Hersant’s translation of Heaney’s Seeing Things was published as a bilingual volume by Gallimard in 2005, with the title La lucarne. Hersant’s translation of “Lightenings viii” is titled “Illuminations viii” (La lucarne 129)6. Having considered Heaney’s story-telling approach and the interconnected tools and strategies he uses to create a sense of in-betweenness in his poem, combined with the effect of single word heteroglossia in the form of the word “Clonmacnoise,” the creative strategies used by Hersant in his translation “Illuminations viii” will be explored. Might a pervading heteroglossia combine with and strengthen a sense of in-betweenness in the translation, enabling the reader to experience being between two mythological worlds, that of the monks in the oratory, and a ship sailing through the air above, as in Heaney’s poem?

Illuminations viii

On lit dans les annales : à Clonmacnoise,
À l’heure où tous les moines priaient dans l’oratoire,
Un bateau apparut dans les airs.

L’ancre derrière lui traînait si près du sol
Qu’elle se prit aux grilles de l’autel.
Puis, l’immense coque ayant fini de tanguer,

Un matelot dégringola et agrippa la corde
Pour lui faire lâcher prise. En vain.
« Cet homme ne supporterait pas notre vie d’ici. Il se noiera »,

Dit l’abbé, « si nous ne l’aidons pas. » Ainsi
Fut fait, le bateau libéré repartit, et l’homme remonta
Hors du merveilleux tel qu’il l’avait connu.

37In Hersant’s title, “Illuminations viii,” the dual connotations of to cast light, and to cast meaning co-exist, incorporating much of the ambiguity of Heaney’s title “Lightenings viii.” We will explore to what extent Heaney’s story-telling strategies are correspondingly used by Hersant in his translation - that is, controlling the momentum; signposting the action through grammatical choices; and creating paronomasia, drawing aspects of the translation together through reverberating, echoing sound.

5.1 Controlling momentum–translation

38We consider the control of momentum in the translation, through punctuation, phrasing and enjambment. In Hersant’s stanza 1, the undeniability of “les annales” and their historic credibility is also immediately established in the first line, supported by the serious pause of the colon mid-line. The following highlights Heaney’s punctuation in yellow, and Hersant’s additions in blue:

39The extra comma inserted at the end of lines 1 and 2 slows the sense of anticipation and forward movement experienced in Heaney’s poem, allowing time in the translation for the reader to reflect on the ship’s incongruity in this setting; reducing too the indisputable nature of the contents of “the annals,” reinforced by Heaney through enjambment. The additional full stop at the end of line 5 slows the pace here, separating the stages of action, rather than increasing the mounting sense of anticipation as in Heaney’s poem, in line with its story-telling style. The full stop does on the other hand enact the ship’s stopping, reinforcing too the consonance in [l] between “sol” and “autel,” linking the boat with both the ground and the altar of the monastery.

40As in Heaney’s stanza 3, the punctuation in line 8 intensifies the sense of defeat, which is also strengthened by the prominent short “sentence,” “En vain.” While omitting the conjunction “But in vain,” and its signposting function, the brevity does increase the shock experienced by the reader, as well as disrupt the forward movement. Before the end of line 9, Hersant again slows the pace by inserting an additional full stop. While this creates a parallel short sentence with Hersant’s previous line, adding to the impact, Heaney’s single sentence here accentuates the danger and possible calamity, contributing considerably to the sense of expectancy and to the story-telling pace.

41In stanza 4, Heaney’s word order and punctuation are followed by Hersant, the strong pause of the unexpected position of the full stop before the end of line 10 correspondingly increasing the drama. The intensity of the actions that follow is also made prominent by their brevity. The increased use of punctuation by Hersant has a “normalising” effect in French, however, reducing to some extent the sense of urgency and anticipation, a key feature of Heaney’s story-telling style, and the impact of the unexpected co-existence of the two contradictory worlds.

5.2 Signposting the action–translation

42As with “Lightenings viii,” Hersant’s translation “Illuminations viii” convinces the reader with its solidity of place, built also on an architecture of verbs, shaped by a sustained array of prepositions and conjunctions, creating a series of clear signposts that mark the action. These verbs in translation similarly create a sense of movement followed eventually by release in the final stanza, participating strongly in the translation’s story-telling directness: “un bateau apparut;” “l’ancre traînait;” “Un matelot dégringola et agrippa la corde”:

On lit dans les annales : à Clonmacnoise,
À l’heure où tous les moines priaient dans l’oratoire,
Un bateau apparut dans les airs.

L’ancre derrière lui traînait si près du sol
Qu’elle se prit aux grilles de l’autel.
Puis, l’immense coque ayant fini de tanguer,

Un matelot dégringola et agrippa la corde
Pour lui faire lâcher prise. En vain.
« Cet homme ne supporterait pas notre vie d’ici. Il se noiera »,

Dit l’abbé, « si nous ne l’aidons pas. » Ainsi
Fut fait, le bateau libéré repartit, et l’homme remonta
Hors du merveilleux tel qu’il l’avait connu.

43Heaney’s first line “The annals say” is irrefutable, direct; while “On lit dans les annales” is one step removed, reported, indirect. This change of subject in the translation, and of verb, lessens to some extent the line’s impact, reducing the agency of “les annales.” As a result, the subtle influence of heteroglossia created by the word “Clonmacnoise” is reduced here in the translation, as is the sense of in-betweenness. Further, the use of the conditional rather than the present tense in line 9, “ne supporterait pas notre vie d’ici,” compared with Heaney’s “can’t bear our life here,” makes the abbot’s observation hypothetical rather than certain. This again decreases the sense of urgency and headlong movement of the two incompatible worlds of monks and crew towards the poem’s resolution - a space of co-existence.

44Heaney’s marked use of a range of prepositions grounding the monks and the ship in the oratory in stanza 1 is approached differently by Hersant, as seen here:

45The repetition of the same preposition in stanza 1, “dans,” creating three parallel structures, emphasises the geographical positioning of the ship and the oratory: “dans les annales;” “dans l’oratoire;” “dans les airs.” This recurrence links “the annals” both with the monks in the oratory, and the crewmen in the air; that is, with the physical and the ephemeral, consolidating the possibility of the “real” and the “un-real” co-existing. “Hors du merveilleux” allows the unexpected nature of the final line to be realised.

46Hersant has omitted certain conjunctions, with the effect that the signposting giving shape to the rapid story-telling here in Heaney’s poem is less clearly defined in the translation:

47In lines 5 to 6 of the translation, and lines 8 to 9, the omission of a conjunction and the addition of punctuation are linked. Hersant uses fewer sign-posting conjunctions than Heaney, lessening the sense of an oral tradition of story-telling encapsulated in such short phrases as “And then,” “But in vain,” with the result that the logical steps marked by the conjunctions are less clearly defined.

5.3 Creating strings of paronomasia–translation

48In his translation, Hersant prioritises assonance and consonance, creating strings of paronomasia linking the two worlds of the poem, creating considerable alliterative prominence in Eastman’s terms. It can be seen immediately that the title itself, “Illuminations viii,” links consonance in [l] across the first two stanzas in particular, with “les annales” and “Clonmacnoise,” and with “du sol” and “de l’autel,” as noted earlier. This array of consonance in [l] further grounds the action in a specific, unmistakable place:

49In addition, the [i] of “Illuminations,” “on lit” and “priaient” is a key example of assonance, appearing right across the translation, again accentuating the physical connections joining the real and the transcendent, as seen in stanza 2 in “se prit aux grilles de l’autel. / Puis, l’immense coque ayant fini de tanguer […].”

50In stanza 3, the alliteration in “Un matelot dégringola et agrippa la corde” reinforces the crewman’s speed of movement and physicality, increasing the poem’s forward movement and sense of anticipation here. Further, the consonance in [k], having linked “Clonmacnoise” with the physicality of “l’ancre” and “l’immense coque” in stanza 2, connects with “la corde” from the ship in stanza 3. The first line of the poem then joins with its very last line through “tel qu’il l’avait connu.” As in Heaney’s poem, the physical place connects directly with a knowing of it. The effect of heteroglossia through the word “Clonmacnoise” resonates throughout the translated poem.

51Finally, the brief co-existence of the two contradictory worlds at the end of “Illuminations viii” is further confirmed by consonance in [m]. Again the place name “Clonmacnoise,” having linked with “l’immense coque” of line 6, now connects the place and the ship with the translation’s three versions of “man”: “les moines”, “un matelot”, and “l’homme”. The shared humanity of the two separate groups, “les moines” and the “matelot[s],” is revealed in the transformation from sailor into “l’homme” in line 11: “L’homme remonta / Hors du merveilleux […].” As in “Lightenings viii,” by the end of the translation, the two worlds are not separate, but co-existing.

  • 7 This is in regard to Hersant’s translation of a Heaney poem, “Damson,” from Heaney’s 1996 volume Th (...)

52Writing about himself as translator, Patrick Hersant in “Le traducteur, poète en abyme” (27)7 agrees with Clive Scott’s view that:

  • 8 Scott is no doubt indirectly referencing Meschonnic’s “principle of correspondence” here (Meschonni (...)

To translate alliteration by alliteration, or assonance by assonance, usually entails two second-bests: (a) one does not alliterate the same sounds […]; (b) one cannot alliterate in quite the same textual location. (Scott 127)8

53However, we see that alliteration, assonance and consonance may be used effectively to translate a poem, while not occurring in the same sounds, nor in the same places, as demonstrated by Hersant’s translation “Illuminations viii.”

6. Conclusion

54In Helen Gibson’s discussion of Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, she argues that any subversion of the English language “as part of a wider defiance of the hegemony of Standard English” is subtle (Gibson 159); she contends that “Subversion, here, comes in the form of revealing English to be inherently plural” (180). In “Lightenings viii,” Heaney’s use of English is also revealed to be “inherently plural,” an escape from “the partitioned intellect” of the Irish/English duality, “an entry into further language” where “the practical and the poetic” may be reconciled, and where “the frontier between them is there for the crossing.” The “entry into further language” encompasses also Paddington’s contention that single word heteroglossia implies the space of the other language, its culture, and its time: in Heaney’s poem, the single word “Clonmacnoise” subtly embodies the language and history of Ireland, its monastic culture, as well as its wavering sense of time reverberating unexpectedly between past and present. This complex space of the poem is enabled by Heaney’s story-telling approach, embodying “all the dream truth, all the imaginative promise, all the reliable feel” with which Heaney freights the poem. By the end, the reader accepts the vacillating in-betweenness of this “unpartitioned” linguistic space, where apparently incompatible worlds may co-exist.

55As we have seen, the story-telling qualities recognised in Heaney’s “Lightenings viii” are inherent too in Hersant’s translation “Illuminations viii,” grounding the action, reinforcing the tangibility of both worlds, vacillating between the transcendent and the real. While the strength of certain story-telling features is reduced in the translation, it is Hersant’s prioritising of assonance and consonance that most strongly links the two worlds of the poem. This internal connecting and echoing is reinforced by the sharp clarity of Hersant’s short, concise phrases, as seen particularly in the last three lines of the translation; these create their own stark effect in French, an effect reminiscent of Heaney’s own voice:

[…] Ainsi
Fut fait, le bateau libéré repartit, et l’homme remonta
Hors du merveilleux tel qu’il l’avait connu.

56The translation’s final stanza resonates with the vacillating reality of the two initially mutually exclusive worlds now co-existing in a shared space, that of the oratory at Clonmacnoise. As in Heaney’s poem, the place of “the marvellous” has shifted surprisingly: Hersant’s last line emphasises too the direction of the crewman’s move, which was not back “into” the marvellous of the floating ship, as may be expected, but “out” of the marvellous of the earthly oratory. Each group, the monks and the crewmen, is freed from its limitations; “unpartitioned.” The threshold between them wavers. The reader suspends disbelief. The man climbs back - “Hors du merveilleux tel qu’il avait connu.”

Inside the remains of the Oratory, Clonmacnoise, facing the altar

Source: Author, 11 July 2023

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 A first version of this article on Seamus Heaney’s “Lightenings viii” and its translation was given at the international conference LÉEL 2023 – Lire et écrire entre les langues : littérature, enseignement, traduction at Aix-Marseille University on 14 June 2023.

2 “Clonmacnoise” is the commonly used English name of the ruined monastery in Ireland; in Irish this is “Cluain Mhic Nóis.”

3 The footnote in Carey’s article, referring to the poem “Lightenings viii” in Heaney’s Seeing Things (62):
“30.
Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London and Boston, 1991), especially 62. I [John Carey] am grateful to Jerry Hunter for calling this poem to my attention; and to Andrew Foley (personal communication, 9 April 1992) for informing me that Heaney first learned of this story from an article of his own in which he paraphrased Mac Cana’s retelling (“Shadows from the Celtic past among the Irish in America”, Monastic Studies 14 (1983) 285-304: 303-4).”

4 As described by Roman Jakobson, “In a sequence where similarity is imposed on contiguity, two similar phonemic sequences near to each other are prone to assume a paronomastic function. Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning” (“Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” 1960 371; emphasis added). Jakobson also refers to “a chain of paronomasia” in a poem, and argues that “The alliterations […] build a paronomastic string […]” (371).

5 Andrew Eastman here cites Fitzroy Pyle (1968 54) regarding the term “alliterative prominence.”

6 Patrick Hersant is a widely published translator, writer and academic based at Université Paris 8. His translation La lucarne (2005) was re-published by Gallimard in 2018 as La lucarne suivi de L'étrange et le connu (Heaney’s Seeing Things followed by The Spirit Level).

7 This is in regard to Hersant’s translation of a Heaney poem, “Damson,” from Heaney’s 1996 volume The Spirit Level, located in Hersant’s bilingual translation L'étrange et le connu, 2005.

8 Scott is no doubt indirectly referencing Meschonnic’s “principle of correspondence” here (Meschonnic 315).

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Référence électronique

Elizabeth PEARCE, « “Transportation” between contradictory worlds in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Lightenings viii” and its translation into French »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20081 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qy

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Auteur

Elizabeth PEARCE

University of Melbourne
Elizabeth Pearce is an independent researcher in literary translation at the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include contemporary Irish poetry in English and its translation into French, in particular that of twentieth-century Irish poets Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice and John Montague. She is currently exploring the work of English poet Alice Oswald in translation. She is a member of the Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations (ISFAR), the research group La Société ETC (Écrire, Traduire, Créer), and convenes the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) biennial Translation Awards.
Elizabeth Pearce est chercheuse indépendante en traduction littéraire à l'École des langues et de linguistique de l'Université de Melbourne. Elle s'intéresse à la poésie irlandaise contemporaine en anglais et à sa traduction en français, y compris celle des poètes irlandais du vingtième siècle Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice et John Montague. Elle étudie actuellement la poésie de l'écrivaine anglaise Alice Oswald en traduction. Elle est membre de the Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations’(ISFAR), du groupe de recherche La Société ETC (Écrire, Traduire, Créer), et elle organise Le Prix de Traduction de the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA).

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