{"id":44,"date":"2015-07-01T16:24:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T16:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/specialcollections\/?p=44"},"modified":"2024-03-20T17:22:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T17:22:32","slug":"heaney-manuscripts-ms-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/specialcollections\/heaney-manuscripts-ms-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Heaney Manuscripts MS 20"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Beowulf\"<\/a>First published in 1999, Seamus Heaney\u2019s translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf<\/i> achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success.\u00a0 Beowulf: A New Translation<\/i> won Heaney his second Whitbread Book of the Year Award<\/a> in 2000[1]<\/a> and the volume enjoyed \u201clengthy stints at the top of the best-seller lists in Britain and Ireland and in the United States.\u201d[2]<\/a> Heaney\u2019s translation was first included in the 7th<\/sup> edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature <\/i>in 2000, and 2002 saw the publication of the Norton Critical edition of his translation, edited by Denis Donoghue.<\/p>\n

Donated to Queen\u2019s University by Seamus Heaney in 2005, the Heaney Manuscripts (MS 20)<\/a> consist of a total of nine archive boxes of material. The focus of the collection is predominantly on Heaney\u2019s translation of Beowulf<\/i>, but it also contains a small assortment of his other writings and correspondence, including several drafts of poems.<\/p>\n

The Beowulf material in the collection includes the original manuscript drafts and subsequent typescripts drafts of Heaney\u2019s translation \u2013 drafts from which the revision process of the poem can be traced \u2013 as well as later drafts sent out to various Old English experts for their comments, and a reasonably substantial amount of correspondence dealing with the practicalities of the publication process and detailing Heaney\u2019s consultation with various academics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Also of particular interest in MS 20 are two of Heaney\u2019s student notebooks and assorted loose-leaf notes from his time as an undergraduate student here at Queen\u2019s University, one of which – \u201cFirst Arts: English (Language)\u201d – documents the student Heaney\u2019s first encounters with medieval English literature.<\/p>\n

Heaney and Queen\u2019s<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Heaney<\/a>Seamus Heaney came to Queen\u2019s in 1957, on a scholarship from St Columb\u2019s College, Derry, and he graduated with a first-class honours degree in English Language and Literature in 1961. It was during his time as an undergraduate at Queen\u2019s that Heaney first seriously began to write, and he published a number of poems and prose pieces \u2013 including a short story \u2013 in various Queen\u2019s student publications: the literary magazines Gorgon <\/i>and Q<\/i>, and independent student newspaper, The Gown<\/i><\/a>.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Among the most influential of Heaney\u2019s lecturers at Queen\u2019s was Professor John Braidwood, who oversaw the English Language elements of the degree, and first introduced him to Old English literature. \u00a0Affectionately remembered by another former student of his, Hugh Magennis (who would himself go on to become an preeminent Old English scholar) as a \u201cno-nonsense Scot\u201d, Braidwood was \u201can old style philologist who seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the history of every word you could think of\u201d, [4]<\/a> Braidwood taught Heaney on the first year history of the language course, \u201cThe Growth and Structure of the Language\u201d and the second year course \u201cEarly English\u201d.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 An expert on Ulster dialects \u2013 the subject of his inaugural lecture<\/a> \u2013 Braidwood\u2019s teaching impressed upon Heaney an awareness of the validity and legitimacy of his regional culture and \u201coffer[ed] a sense of belonging within a wider, richly varied English-language tradition\u201d.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Reflecting, some forty-odd years later, on the relationship between his undergraduate studies and his translation of Beowulf, Heaney commented,<\/p>\n

[\u2026] I couldn\u2019t have done Beowulf<\/i> if I hadn\u2019t felt that I had some path into it, and it into me. And the path was to be found in the kind of noises I made in my early poetry and the kind I make in my speech. I was delighted to discover in \u2018Digging<\/a>\u2019 two or three pure Anglo-Saxon lines, lines like \u201cMy father, digging. I look down\u2026\u201d.\u00a0 When I was at university the study of Anglo-Saxon meant something to me. I gradually came to love the weather and strange melancholy in \u2018Seafarer<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018The Wanderer\u2019<\/a>. I also very much liked \u2018The Battle of Maldon\u2019<\/a>.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heaney and Medieval Translation<\/b><\/p>\n

Since the publication of his celebrated translation in 1999, Beowulf<\/i> is perhaps the medieval text with which Heaney is most commonly associated. However, as Conor McCarthy rightly points out,<\/p>\n

Important as the Beowulf translation is [\u2026] it is not the full extent of Heaney\u2019s poetic engagement with medieval poetry. In 1983, Heaney published a translation of the medieval Irish Buile Suibhne<\/i>, and he has held an extensive dialogue with Dante\u2019s Commedia<\/i> involving translation, adaption and allusion across three books in particular: Field Work<\/i>, Station Island<\/i> and Seeing Things<\/i>. [Heaney\u2019s translation of Beowulf<\/i> ] was followed by a Modern English translation of Robert Henryson\u2019s Middle Scots text The Testament of Cresseid<\/i>. Heaney\u2019s translations and adaptations of medieval poetry, then, form a substantial body of work, drawn from across the medieval period and from a number of languages (Irish, Italian, Old English, Middle Scots), extending through much of his career.[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Station<\/a>\"Sweeny<\/a>\"Henryson\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Moreover, Heaney\u2019s literary response to medieval literature goes beyond direct translation. Many of his own original poems also show the influence of the medieval literature he first encountered as an undergraduate at Queen\u2019s, perhaps most obviously in his 1975 collection, North<\/i>, considered by Chris Jones to be \u201cOne of Heaney\u2019s most powerful deployments of his knowledge of Old English\u201d.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHeaneywulf\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Heaney\u2019s engagement with a translation of Beowulf<\/i> long predates the publication of his poem in 1999. He had been approached in the early 1980s by the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature<\/i> with a commission to translate the poem, and a portion of his early work on the translation appeared as \u201cA Ship of Death\u201d in his 1987 collection The Haw Lantern<\/i>.\u00a0 However, progress was slow, and, despite his \u201cinstinct that it should not be let go\u201d,[10]<\/a> Heaney eventually set the project aside, resuming it,\u00a0 as an autograph note on the inside cover of one of his notebooks explains, in March 1995, when an editor at Norton asked him for suggestions as to who else they might approach regarding the translation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When Beowulf: A New Translation<\/i> was published by Faber in 1999, much of the critical reception of the poem focused on Heaney\u2019s use of Ulster and Irish dialect words – \u201cthe Hibernicization of the word-hoard\u201d.[11]<\/a>\u00a0 Responding to Heaney\u2019s own framing of his poetic process in the introduction to the translation, critics and commentators were quick to locate and discuss the translation in terms of post-colonial theory, in which Heaney\u2019s translation of such a canonical English literary text as Beowulf<\/i> into Ulster English was viewed as an act of post-colonial appropriation. The extent of the Hibernicisms in the poem has perhaps tended to be over-stressed in such criticism (interestingly, they are more frequently attested in Heaney\u2019s early drafts of the translation) and, as Chris Jones observes, \u201cThe reality of the identity politics of Heaney\u2019s Beowulf<\/i> is simultaneously less radical and more complex [than] the audacious possession of the cultural territory of a former imperial occupying power\u201d.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

Beowulf<\/b><\/p>\n

Preserved in a single manuscript dated to the early eleventh century, although likely to have been composed some two or three centuries before that, Beowulf<\/i> has proved fertile ground for translators since Gr\u00edmur J\u00f3nsson Thorkelin\u2019s first complete translation of the poem (into Latin) in\u00a0 1815. Largely the preserve of scholars in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, the poem has steadily gained appreciation, interest and popularity from the late nineteenth century to the present day, aided in no small part by J. R. R. Tolkein\u2019s seminal 1936 lecture \u201cBeowulf: the Monsters and the Critics\u201d, which revolutionised the study of the poem.<\/p>\n

The poem, or excerpts thereof, has been the subject of translations by poets as diverse as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Morris and Edwin Morgan and on average, one new translation of the\u00a0 poem appeared every two years in the twentieth century. The Heaney Manuscript Collection (MS 20) throws light on the poetic and translation process of the most widely known and popular translation of Beowulf<\/i> in current use, and is of interest to scholars of Old English and twentieth-century poetry alike.<\/p>\n

Works cited:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ekestad, Nils. “Negotiating the Canon: Regionality and the Impact of Education in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry.” ARIEL<\/em> 29.4 (1998) 7-20.<\/p>\n

Heaney, Seamus and Karl Miller. Seamus Heaney: in conversation with Karl Mille<\/em>r. London: Between the Lines, 2000.<\/p>\n

Jones, Chris. Strange Likeness: the use of Old English in twentieth-century poetry<\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

Magennis, Hugh. Translating <\/em>Beowulf: Modern versions in English Verse<\/em>. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011.<\/p>\n

McCarthy, Conor. Seamus Heaney and medieval poetry<\/em>. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
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[1]<\/a> His first was awarded for his 1996 collection The Spirit Level<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> Magennis, 161. By 2000, Heaney\u2019s translation of Beowulf <\/i>had achieved 135 000 hardback sales world-wide (Miller, 43).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a> Publications as an undergraduate student include four poems and a prose piece, all published under the pseudonym \u2018Incertus\u2019, as well as a poem, \u2018Aran\u2019 and an editorial, \u201cThe Seductive Muse\u201d, \u00a0published under the name \u201cSeamus J. Heaney\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a> Magennis, vii.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/a> Eskestad, 10.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6]<\/a> Eskestad, 7.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7]<\/a> Miller, 40.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8]<\/a> McCarthy, 1.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9]<\/a> Jones, 213.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[10]<\/a> Heaney, xxiii.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[11]<\/a> Jones, 229.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[12]<\/a> Jones, 229-230<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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