Three Encounters with the late Seamus Heaney

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                          

I heard Seamus Heaney three times over three decades. In each case, we briefly spoke afterwards. The first was in about 1972, when he came to the University of Minnesota to give a well-attended reading. He was in his early thirties and had recently become a poet full-time. He seemed modest and a little amazed at his reception on the American poetry reading circuit. I was a graduate student then, not so much younger than he, and we spoke only briefly in a relaxed moment at the reception afterwards. It was already clear then that he had a marvelous ear and a remarkable facility. 

Young Seamus Heaney

The second encounter was about six years later, at a college in upstate New York, where I was teaching. By this time he was far more famous as a poet and more polished, really elegant, as a public speaker. He had also begun to lecture on famous predecessors. The one I heard compared Yeats and Eliot, focusing on how they described the process of writing poetry. The gist of it was that while Eliot seemed more academic and even added footnotes in some poems, he nevertheless seemed to experience the act of creation as a flow that was always temporary. These outpourings might be reworked, of course, but the initial surge of creativity was crucial. In contrast, Heaney argued, Yeats described writing poetry as hard work, like getting down on your marrow bones to scrub floors or like breaking stones. For him, evidently, writing was a craft and a struggle.

I recall this lecture not least because it showed how deeply Heaney was interested in two of the greatest poets of the first half of the twentieth century. In the talk he made no immodest comparisons between himself and either of the poets he was discussing. Nor on that occasion did he wish to be drawn out on his own methods of composition. My sense then was that his own experience of writing was more like Eliot's. This was later confirmed by something he said later in life: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself." 

We spoke for a few minutes. I did not expect him to remember me, but he fondly recalled Chester Anderson, who had invited him to Minneapolis, and who was one of the leading scholars on James Joyce and modern Irish literature. (I could tell him that all was well with Professor Anderson, who had held the reception for Heaney where I first met him.)

The third and last time I heard him was in Copenhagen, when I was on the faculty at the university there. He was friends with one of my older colleagues, a man who had memorized thousands of lines of poetry. He has passed away since then, and he cannot present whatever might be his version of this story. Therefore I will not give his name.

I came early to the poetry reading, and ran into my older colleague and Heaney in a nook below stairs. They had an open wine bottle, and I was immediately pressed to take a plastic cup and help myself. I did so, and listened to their conversation, which was a mix of memories of various people and appropriate lines of poetry that they called to mind. It was not showing off in the least, but playful, occasionally a little competitive, and quite funny. But after twenty years I cannot recall the details.

As the time for the reading drew near, I went up the stairs to the hall, in order to get a decent seat. Heaney had not yet won the Nobel Prize, but it seemed obvious that he was a very plausible candidate. I was in time to secure a good spot and then waited. Eventually, Heaney arrived, alone. He  sat down and waited. The clock moved well beyond the appointed hour. As my colleague did not come, he finally went up to the podium, looked out at the crowd and said, "Well I suppose you all know who I am and that this is a poetry reading, so I may as well begin. No introduction is needed, surely."  He then began to read. After two or three poems, my colleague rushed in, a bit red in the face.

"Seamus. What are you doing? I have to give my introduction." The crowd tittered and had to restrain itself from laughing.

"Oh, sit down," Heaney said jovially, waving him toward a seat, "I am well started now."

"What about the introduction?"

"You can give it afterwards." Which is what he did. It was a bit incoherent (for the wine had taken full effect!) and totally unnecessary. But Seamus seemed to enjoy it all the more for that. When the "introduction" was over, they went off to dinner.

In all three of these encounters. I found Seamus Heaney to be an unpretentious, warm man. He was brilliant, of course, and far more able than most poets at presenting his work to readers. His passing is a loss to the literature of the world, and also (as sometimes is not the case) a great human loss. I wish I had heard him more often.

Review: Donald Hall, Unpacking the Boxes

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                          

I have just finished reading Donald Hall's fine memoir, Unpacking the Boxes (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). It is a fitting conclusion to the autobiographical vein in his work that began with his first book, String too Short to be Saved (1961).  That book was about his summers on the New Hampshire farm where he helped his maternal grandparents. This one begins outside of New Haven, where his father worked as an accountant for a milk company owned by his grandfather. As often happens, his two parents came from quite different worlds. In New Haven his mother drank cocktails and sought to emulate the middle class of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In New Hampshire, however, his mother felt at home, and soon her son found that he preferred it as well.

Unpacking the Boxes was written from that same New Hampshire farm, which Hall inherited and moved back to in the 1970s. There he literally unpacked the boxes that contain mementos of his early life. This awakened memories of early childhood and his awakening to poetry. Even before he reached high school, Hall was passionately interested in words and writing, and his descriptions of his early embrace of the Muse is entwined with his equally passionate pursuit of girls. He admits that one of the attractions of being a poet when young was that young ladies found it quite appealing.

Hall proved a seriously productive writer, with, by my count, 15 books of poetry, two biographies, three plays, a dozen children's books, two collections of short stories, and six autobiographical works.

Hall spent two years at Exeter Academy, where his father sent him, determined that his only son should have any career he liked, and not waste another life entombed in the family dairy business. Young Hall was a prodigious worker, who already knew he wanted to be a poet. At Exeter, he steadily rose from almost failing grades in Latin and several other subjects to very high marks, winning a place at Harvard, where he also excelled. From there he had an enviable string of fellowships, with two years at Oxford, a year at Stanford, and then three more years at Harvard. In these student years he met many of the major poets of the generation ahead of him, such as Richard Wilbur and John Ciardi. Already by the time he reached Oxford he was something of a personage, taking on an editorial role as well as writing. He became a close friend of George Plimpton and at a young age was editor of poetry for his Paris Review. (The major poets whom he got to know at this time, notably Robert Frost, are the subject of another Hall memoir, Remembering Poets that I highly recommend.)

Hall might have said more about the confrontation between the Beat poets and the more classical or traditional poets, among whom Hall was a leader. Their differences were more poetical than political. Hall was Left leaning all through his career, and he admired the work of Walt Whitman, even if initially far more drawn to the great English Romantics such as Keats and the metaphysical poets. He belonged to that generation who felt it necessary to have read all the predecessors. At Harvard, for each weekly tutorial with Harry Levin he was to have read ALL the poetry by one person, William Blake for example, and be ready to discuss it intensely for an hour alone with the professor.

Hall's own work did change after his encounter with the Beat Generation, even if he remained closer to the classical tradition. I did not know that Hall became close friends with Robert Bly at Harvard, or that their friendship endured through life. I should have realized, because I did know that each of them went to Harvard, but somehow I never made the connection. Likewise, Hall was close to Galway Kinnell. These writers were closer in sensibility to the Beats, and their connection to him rightly suggests that Hall was not doctrinaire in his aesthetics. He knew and loved quality, and long before they were famous befriended the important emerging writers in the British Isles such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, as well.

In its first half, this is primarily an intellectual autobiography about a poet's coming of age. Then it divides in c. 1970, when his first marriage fell apart. Yet another of Hall's books has already treated this middle period of his life in detail so he skips through it rather schematically, covering his arrival in Ann Arbor (where he taught for the better part of a decade) in far more detail than the decision to leave academia. He liked teaching but he longed to be a writer full time and managed to do it. In good part it was possible because he was so fortunate as to inherit the New Hampshire house and because he had a steady income from a good deal of prose writing. Notably, he wrote a fine book that I used myself in teaching writing, back in the early 1970s. Appropriately titled Writing Well, it remains one of the best introductory texts one can find.

The last half of the book is much darker than the first, colored by the long illness and death of his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who passed away in 1995. She was 19 years younger than he, and Hall was devastated by the loss. The book is not light reading, as it describes how he remains in the house surrounded by constant reminders of her. He visited the grave every day for more than a year, and could speak of little else. At the same time, his own health was failing. Born in 1928, he was 70 by the time he had even begun to recover a normal life. He soon began to suffer frailties, and it was apparently a trial for him to complete the memoir at all.

In part this is because just as Hall reached what he called "The Planet of Antiquity" he received the great, but also greatly demanding, honor of being named Poet Laureate of the United States. This entails many exhausting public appearances and interviews. The gratification of attention was almost outweighed by the demands it made on a man who could not walk without a cane and fell many times when attempting stairs. But he survived the glorious ordeal and this book saw the light.

There is much more in Unpacking the Boxes, which ideally should be read after String too Short to Be Saved. The title of that first book also came from something found in an attic, a box of snippets of string, with a label on the box that read, "String too short to be saved." It is from such detritus that Hall has made this presumably final memoir, and the title might almost have been recycled. Fine as the work is, there will still be something for the eventual biographers, as Hall has not written much in these memoirs about the actual poems he published. This has the "virtue" that one can enjoy Unpacking the Boxes without knowing anything of Hall's poetry, which then awaits as a further literary adventure.

Santa's Calling

After the American Century

Santa's Calling

It's the week before Christmas but Santa's depressed.

His sack is still empty, he's terribly stressed.

And with global warming now melting the poles

His house and his workshop are afloat in a shoal.

Poor Mrs. Claus suffers light deprivation

And winters in Spain, a six month vacation.

His disgruntled workers are no longer "Elves",

"Vertically Challenged" they now style themselves.

His second-hand pipe smoke has them quite frightened.

And his fur-trimmed red suit is at best "Unenlightened."

Four reindeer escaped, without much propriety,

Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.

And affirmative action had made it quite clear

That Santa could no longer have just reindeer.

So instead of Donner and Dancer, Comet and Cupid,

He has three pigs and a moose, and that sure looks stupid!

And the steel runners were removed from his sleigh

Because they cut up the tundra. It was a bad day.

On Christmas Eve some parents called up the cops

When Santa clattered across their solar roof-tops.

Worse yet, he'd lost famous Rudolf, who suddenly chose

To sell Hollywood all the rights to his nose.

That reindeer told Oprah and the entire nation,

He wanted millions in over-due compensation.

And as for gifts, Santa had not a notion

That presents could cause such a commotion.

Nothing of leather, and nothing of fur,

Nothing gendered for him, nor sexy for her.

No arrows to aim, and no guns to shoot.

No motors, no sprays, for they do pollute.

No pink for the girls, or blue for the boys.

No dangerous fireworks that make lots of noise.

No candy, no sweets...they are bad for the tooth.

No campaign books, for they embellish the truth.

And fairy tales, while not yet forbidden,

Are, like Barbie and Ken, better off hidden.

No baseball, no football (the kids might get hurt);

Besides, such sports exposed them to dirt.

Dolls are so sexist, and now are passe;

And online games rot the young brain away.

So Santa just stood there, fed up and perplexed;

He no longer knew what he could do next.

His sack, quite empty, hung limp to the ground;

It seemed no acceptable gifts could be found.

Something special was needed, a gift that one might

Give to all on the Left, or to all on the Right.

A gift for the Red States, a gift for the Blue,

A gift for the entire political zoo.

A gift that none would feel was taboo

For Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu

Every ethnicity, all possible hues,

Everyone, everywhere, and that means you, too.

What is that gift? A smart phone of great worth,

Distracting us all, it brings peace to the earth.

Who has time for discord, once that screen's lit?

Why go into the street, if you can just sit?

Santa saw in a flash that his freedom had come.

He shouted, he danced, he forgot he'd been glum.

Never again would he race the world round,

Nor respond to kids' letters from each little town,

No more presents to haul, nor chimneys to down.

No more stockings to stuff, no more cookies to eat,

No red suit to wear or black boots on his feet,

No freezing up North, nor working all year,

He'd no longer feed those ungrateful reindeer.

Santa turned on his Ipad. He'd sell that old sleigh,

And Fed-Ex phones to all, to come Christmas Day. 

© 2007 David E. Nye [revised 29-12-22]

100 Danish Poems, From the Medieval Period to the Present Day - Bilingual Edition

After the American Century

This is the 300th entry in this blog, and a book came to hand that serves nicely to celebrate this milestone. 

100 Danish Poems: From the Medieval Period to the Present Day  are not just any 100 poems but a careful selection of the best in Danish literature. They present a complex translation problem, as it simply would not do to have all the poems sound as if they were written in 2011, nor would it be a good idea to write in a modern idiom and then sprinkle in a few old words here and there from the appropriate time periods. 

Fortunately, John Irons, who is British, has more than 25 years experience as a translator. He has lived in Scandinavia for more than 40 years, and frequently translates from Norwegian into English as well. He holds a PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University and is a published poet himself. Irons is sensitive to the language and the rhythms of the poems and to the changes in literature that occurred from the medieval period onwards. In addition, he was able to work closely with both the Danish poet Klaus Høeck and the editors of the volume, Thomas Bredsdorff and Professor Anne-Marie Mai, who selected and edited the poems. She has also written a 43 page introduction that provides the historical and literary context many English readers will require. The poems themselves are presented without headnotes or footnotes that might distract.

Readers who know both Danish and English can decide for themselves whether they like the translations in this beautifully produced, bilingual edition. The original and the translation face each other on every page. Here is a sample, from pages 182-183, the first lines from a poem by Hans Christian Andersen:

Det gamle Træ, o lad det staa

Det gamle Træ, o lad det staa
Indtil det døer af Ælde;
Saamange Ting det husker paa.
Hvad kan det ikke melde.


Irons renders these lines as:

That ancient tree, don't let it fall
Until old age is knelling;
So many things it can recall
What tales it could be telling.

Note that he has retained not only the sense of these lines but also their rhyme and rhythm. He makes it look easy, but it is not.

Here is a second example, the lovely last verse of Jeppe Aakjær's "Maynat" (May Night), 1916 (pp. 200-201).

Saa ensomt bræger det spæde Lam
paa Bakken langt i det fjærne,
og Frøerne kvækker fra Pyt og Dam,
som sang det fra Stjærne til Stjærne.

The lonely young lamb on the hill beyond
can be heard with its plaintive small baa,
and the frogs all croak from puddle and pond,
as if star now were singing to star.


My third and final example, is the opening four lines of a work by Tove Ditlevsen,  from 1947  (pp. 250-251).

Blinkende Lygter

I Barndommens lange og dunkle Nat
brænder smaa blinkende Lygter
som Spor, af Erindringen efterladt,
mens Hjertet fryser og flugter.

In childhood's long night, both dim and dark
there are small twinkling lights that burn bright
like traces memory's left there as sparks
while the heart freezes so and takes flight.

The reader may be tempted to try revising this example, but in doing so will find how difficult it is to preserve simultaneously the rhyme, the meaning, and the rhythm. John Irons retains the rhyme and the meaning, but to do so must sacrifice the original rhythm. I spent some time trying to improve it, but found I could not. Yet the effort helped me to see the Danish original more clearly, which is one of the pleasures of a book that presents both the original and the translation on facing pages.

The book is available in both Denmark (from Museum Tusculanum Press) and the United States (from the University of Washington Press).

This posting is #300 on After the American Century