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?
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.” Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.