Translating Tragedy: Seamus Heaney’s Sophoclean Plays
The interest of contemporary Irish authors in the Greek and Roman antiquity testifies to their renewed effort in appropriating the classical tradition both as a source of inspiration and as a means of redefining the nature of Irishness through a constant confrontation with Otherness. Translation and adaptation are among the favoured approaches to the ancient texts, whichoftenbecome metaphors for the Irish political situation. My paper analyses Seamus Heaney’s challenge to the established canon by his creative use of the classical tradition in The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), adapted from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Antigone . My aim is to illustrate the relationship between Heaney’s translation practices and his role as a poet.
The Cure at Troy: Sophocles or Heaney?
The Cure at Troy is subtitled ‘A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes’. What kind of version? Is it, like the translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon known to Terence Rattigan’s audiences as The Browning Version,1 severely literal? Or is it more like Pope’s Iliad, on which Richard Bentley rightly commented, ‘it is a pretty poem, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer’?2 Whereabouts on the scale between these two extreme types of ‘version’ does Heaney’s work belong?
The cure at Troy : a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes
Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' "Philoctetes" is responsive to the Greek playwright's understanding of the relations between public and private morality. It dramatizes the conflict between personal integrity and political expediency and explores ways in which the victims of injustice can become as devoted to the contemplation of their wounded as the perpetrators are to the justification of their system. This play is the 1990 production of the Field Day Theatre Company.