‘His Nibs’: Self-Reflexivity and the Significance of Translation in Seamus Heaney's Human Chain

Drawing on rare archive material, this essay begins by exploring factors that might explain why Seamus Heaney's work is so self-reflexive, self-referential in its cast, and how despite the verification gained from within his family, from mentors at school and university, from academic success and critical acclaim, tensions persisted in him about the value of the artistic enterprise. Its principal focus is his latest collection, Human Chain, which repeatedly dramatises such moments of division, as his hand accustomed itself to holding the pen and making it speak of ‘fissured traditions’. Acts of translation - linguistic, cultural, psychological, spiritual - play a hugely significant part in this collection, a sign of his ongoing quest for self-renewal and reconciliation and of his assent to T.S. Eliot's contention that ‘The serious writer of verse must be prepared to cross himself with the best verse of other languages and the best prose of all languages’. Close analyses of individual poems and sequences demonstrate the plurality of traditions which energise the collection, which incorporates repeated echoes from English Romanticism in its opening movement, proceeds to ‘derrycise’ Virgil's Aeneid VI in its central section, and ends constructing lines of linguistic, musical, and formal continuity with the ‘much-tried pens’ of Irish cultural tradition, medieval and modern.