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‘The New Age of Anxiety’: Transnational Memory in District and Circle

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Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work

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Abstract

In this chapter concepts and approaches from transnational memory studies are used to show how these poems contribute to a transnational memory culture of 9/11. This national memory of the 9/11 attacks, which circulated transnationally, tended to shut out other perspectives. Seamus Heaney’s contribution to the literature of 9/11, ‘Anything Can Happen,’ is used to trace the circulation of a transnational 9/11 memory. The translation of a Latin ode and the later appropriations of the text, the Amnesty translations in 2004 and the musical adaptation, disrupt the national memory frame that has circumscribed 9/11.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    9/11 Memorial and Museum, ‘A Look at the Museum’s Memorial Hall,’ https://www.911memorial.org/blog/look-museum%E2%80%99s-memorial-hall

  2. 2.

    Caroline Alexander, ‘Out of Context,’ The New York Times, April 6, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/opinion/07alexander.html

  3. 3.

    David W. Dunlap, ‘Scholarly Perspectives on Inscription at the 9/11 Memorial Museum’ The New York Times, April 2, 2014, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/scholarly-perspectives-on-inscription-at-the-911-memorial-museum/?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer

  4. 4.

    Michael Rothberg, ‘Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post 9/11 Literature,’ in Literature after 9/11, ed. Anne Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (New York: Routledge, 2008), Kindle Edition.

  5. 5.

    Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), Ebrary edition, 6.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 4.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 6.

  8. 8.

    George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Addresses the Nation,’ The Washington Post, September 20, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html

  9. 9.

    David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.

  10. 10.

    Ann Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,’ Poetics Today 25, no. 2 (2004): 383, doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-2-361.

  11. 11.

    Dinitia Smith, ‘In Shelley or Auden, in the Sonnet or Free Verse, the Eerily Intimate Power of Poetry to Console,’ The New York Times, October 1, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/01/books/shelley-auden-sonnet-free-verse-eerily-intimate-power-poetry-console.html

  12. 12.

    Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 58.

  14. 14.

    Laurence Goldstein, ‘The Response of American Poets to 9/11: A Provisional Report,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 1 (2009): 54, http://search.proquest.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/docview/232307800/abstract/9D1D3A58EE849BBPQ/1?accountid=8330

  15. 15.

    Jeffrey Gray, ‘Precious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable,’ in Literature after 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansby Quinn (New York; London: Routledge, 2008), Kindle edition, chap. 14.

  16. 16.

    Ibid.

  17. 17.

    Natalie Hopkinson, ‘Out of the Ashes, Drops of Meaning: The Poetic Success of Suheir Hammad,’ The Washington Post, October 13, 2002, https://electronicintifada.net/content/out-ashes-drops-meaning-poetic-success-suheir-hammad/4173

  18. 18.

    Michael Rothberg, ‘“There Is No Poetry in This”: Writing, Trauma, and Home,’ ed. Judith Greenberg, Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), Kindle edition.

  19. 19.

    James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), Kindle edition, chap. 3.

  20. 20.

    Rebecca Braun, ‘Fetishising Intellectual Achievement: The Nobel Prize and European Literary Celebrity,’ Celebrity Studies 2, no. 3 (2011): 321, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2011.609340.

  21. 21.

    Jeffrey H Kaimowitz, The Odes of Horace (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), Muse ebook, xxiii.

  22. 22.

    Astrid Erll, ‘Traumatic Pasts, Literary Afterlives, and Transcultural Memory: New Directions of Literary and Media Memory Studies,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 3 (2011): 3, doi:https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.7186.

  23. 23.

    N. K. Zumwalt, ‘Horace C. 1.34: Poetic Change and Political Equivocation’ (paper presented at the Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1974): 436, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2936101

  24. 24.

    Stephen Harrison, ‘Heaney as Translator: Horace and Virgil’ in Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses, ed. Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh & Helen Eastman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 251.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 464.

  26. 26.

    Seamus Heaney, Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty, (Dublin: Townhouse, 2004), 19.

  27. 27.

    Harrison, ‘Heaney as Translator,’ 252.

  28. 28.

    Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 2.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 4.

  30. 30.

    Paul Allen Miller, ‘Horace, Mercury, and Augustus, or the Poetic Ego of Odes 1–3,’ American Journal of Philology 112, no. 3 (1991): 365, http://www.jstor.org/stable/294738

  31. 31.

    Jeffrey Gray, ‘Precocious Testimony: Poetry and the Uncommemorable,’ ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Literature After 9/11 (New York; London: Routledge, 2008), Kindle edition, chap. 14.

  32. 32.

    Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), Kindle edition, 21.

  33. 33.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Reality and Justice: On Translating Horace Odes, 1, 34,’ Irish Pages 1, no. 2 (2002): 52.

  34. 34.

    Heaney, Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty, 18.

  35. 35.

    Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), Kindle edition, 424.

  36. 36.

    David-Antoine Williams, Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 151.

  37. 37.

    A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, ‘A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory,’ ed. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), Ebrary edition, 33.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Heaney, Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty, 19.

  41. 41.

    NUI Galway, ‘Seamus Heaney Launches “Anything Can Happen” at NUI Galway,’ https://www.nuigalway.ie/about-us/news-and-events/news-archive/2004/november2004/seamus-heaney-launches-anything-can-happen-at-nui-galway.html

  42. 42.

    Krista Tippett, ‘Transcript for Mohammed Fairouz – the World in Counterpoint,’ On Being (2015), http://www.onbeing.org/program/transcript/7517#main_content

  43. 43.

    Mahommed Fairouz, ‘Anything Can Happen,’ 2012, http://mohammedfairouz.com/anything-can-happen/

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    David Wright, ‘Back Bay Chorale Muses on Last Things with New Fairouz Work, Mozart Requiem,’ Boston Classical Review (2013), http://bostonclassicalreview.com/2013/03/back-bay-chorale-muses-on-last-things-with-new-fairouz-work-mozart-requiem/#sthash.osAjZxHb.dpuf

  46. 46.

    Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, 13.

  47. 47.

    Tobias Hill, ‘Arms around the World,’ The Observer, April 2, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/02/poetry.seamusheaney

  48. 48.

    Ibid.

  49. 49.

    Seamus Heaney, “One Poet in Search of a Title,” The Times, March 25, 2006.

  50. 50.

    Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘Readings and Conversations: Seamus Heaney with Dennis O’Driscoll,’ Lannan Foundation, Podcast Audio, October 1, 2003, http://www.lannan.org/events/seamus-heaney-with-dennis-odriscoll. Heaney quotes from another translation of Beowulf rather than his own. Although the differences are insignificant, he refers to ‘the poet’ without discussing his own prior translation.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘The Reluctant Transatlanticist: “Like a Weeping Willow Inclined to the Appetites of Gravity”’ in “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 194.

  53. 53.

    Meg Tyler, ‘“The Whole of Me A-Patter”: Image, Feeling, and Finding Form in Heaney’s Late Work’ in “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, ed. Eugene O’Brien (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 132.

  54. 54.

    Version by John Montague. Cited in Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London: Granta Books, 1997).

  55. 55.

    Tyler, ‘The Whole of Me A-Patter,’ 134.

  56. 56.

    The Book Show, ‘Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,’ ABC Radio, Podcast audio, September 29, 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/nobel-prize-winning-poet-seamus-heaney-at-the/3348670#transcript

  57. 57.

    De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, 17.

  58. 58.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture: Seamus Heaney,’ YouTube video, 1:09:14, posted by Boston University April 8, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emuYwWT7s4A

  59. 59.

    Michael Parker, ‘Fallout from the Thunder: Poetry and Politics in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle ,’ Irish Studies Review 16, no. 4 (2008), doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09670880802481213.

  60. 60.

    Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Kindle edition.

  61. 61.

    Thomas O’Grady, ‘The Art of Heaney’s Sonnets,’ The Dalhousie Review 80, no. 3, (2000). http://hdl.handle.net/10222/63442

  62. 62.

    Especially the ‘Station Island’ sequence of 1984, based on Dante’s Purgatorio.

  63. 63.

    Rachel Falconer, ‘Heaney and Virgil’s Underworld Journey,’ in Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses ed. Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh & Helen Eastman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 192.

  64. 64.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 411.

  65. 65.

    Roderick Beaton, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 403.

  66. 66.

    Heaney had used Dante’s Purgatorio as a model for the exploration of poetic responsibility in ‘Station Island.’

  67. 67.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘To George Seferis in the Underworld (Poem),’ Times Literary Supplement, TLS, no. 5268 (2004).

  68. 68.

    Beaton, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, 397.

  69. 69.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Homage to Seferis,’ Harvard Review, no. 20 (2001): 37.

  70. 70.

    Michael Thurston, The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

  71. 71.

    Rachel Falconer, ‘Heaney, Virgil, and Contemporary Katabasis,’ in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Proquest ebook, 409.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 405

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 412

  74. 74.

    Williams, Defending Poetry, 151.

  75. 75.

    Richard Rankin Russell, Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 285.

  76. 76.

    Rothberg, ‘Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private in Post 9/11 Literature.’

  77. 77.

    De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory, 17.

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  1. Independent Scholar, Mount Waverley, VIC, Australia

    Joanne Piavanini

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Piavanini, J. (2020). ‘The New Age of Anxiety’: Transnational Memory in District and Circle. In: Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46927-6_5

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