"Signatures on your own frequency": Translation and the Modern Irish Poet

This essay discusses the activity of translation in the work of two modern Irish poets, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella. In his poetry, Thomas Kinsella seeks out new and modernist forms expressive of a desire to extricate himself from the burden of a tradition in Anglo-Irish writing dominated by Joyce and Yeats and conscious of a need to forge an Irish and artistic identity which participates in world history and does not remain hidden in provincialism and detachment. In his comments on his work as translator of An Tain, however, he gives expression on the one hand to a sense of affirmation through his desire to preserve and give continuity to the literature of the dying language of his native land, and on the other to a debilitating sense of alienation and loss, ambivalently calling his “a labour of some kind of love”. In the case of Seamus Heaney, translation is an important element in his poetic agenda and sits in close relationship with the themes of identity, place and language which are at the heart of his artistic endeavour. Fundamental in this regard is how the act of translation and his use of the language of Ireland and its literature, or the Old English in Beowulf, acquires a nourishing and inspiring role in his engagement with the question of the Irish writer’s relationship with the English language and his search for his own “frequency”.