Beyond the Pale: transgressing boundaries in Heaney's Translations

This essay investigates two of Seamus Heaney’s translations, The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), teasing out their relationship to his aesthetic philosophy and the parallels present with Lacanian and Derridean analyses of symbolic and ethical structures. The epigraph above provides an appropriate starting point for considering this topic, because it suggests that the effects of a poem go beyond the boundary of the written page, which is one of a series of boundary crossings that will be discussed in this essay. Beginning with Heaney’s positioning of the space of poetry outside of social and political concerns, it will be argued that these translations are analogous with his artistic philosophy: in The Cure at Troy through the ideas expressed in its language, and in The Burial at Thebes through the events of the plot, which provide a symbolic counterpoint to Heaney’s concept of the space of poetry. This outside space will be explored firstly in relation to Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, in which he argues that the general principle of justice is located outside of juridicial and legal structures, echoing the moral debates of the play. It will also be analysed in relation to Jacques Lacan’s commentary on Antigone in Seminar VII. Lacan proposes that Antigone, on which Heaney’s translation is based, dramatizes an individual crossing from the realm of language and law into an intermediary space between life and death; transgressing the symbolic order and moving into the liminal space of the second death