The Way Via Warsaw: Seamus Heaney and Post-War Polish Poets

Abstract

Heaney’s interest in Eastern European poetry, well documented and often discussed, can be traced in the style and the themes of a substantial number of his poems, but also, more conspicuously, in Heaney’s criticism, interviews and occasional commentaries. Among the Eastern European poets on whom Heaney has written, one finds the Czech poet Miroslav Holub and a host of Russian writers, including Anton Chekhov, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva and Josip Brodsky. As a translator, Heaney has contributed to a collection of poems by the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu, The Biggest Egg in the World (1987), and offered a new version of a song cycle by the Czech composer Leos Janacek, Diary of One Who Vanished (1999). It seems, however, that — for reasons I will try to identify — the closest links bind Heaney with contemporary Polish poets, primarily, of course, with his long-time friend Czeslaw Milosz, but also with other post-war writers from Poland: Zbigniew Herbert, to whom Heaney dedicated an elegy in Electric Light (2001); Stanislaw Barańczak, exile poet and translator, with whom Heaney co-translated Jan Kochanowski’s Laments; Wislawa Szymborska, the 1997 Nobel Prize winner; and Adam Zagajewski.