Seamus Heaney and the Ethics of Translation

Abstract

This essay deals with two of Heaney’s major translations, Sweeney Astray and The Cure at Troy, are connected in terms of their ability to enunciate the voice of the other as well as to convey increasingly more complex notions of selfhood and identity. Heaney’s notion of translation is transformative in that meaning is rendered as a process of interpretation as opposed to a fixed essence. This creative concept of translation allows him to engage with the matter of the past while at the same time taking up a form of critical distance from that past.