All the Dead Voices: Communicating Across the Grave in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry Open Access

Abstract

All the Dead Voices:
Communicating Across the Grave in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry
By Michelle R. Miles
"All the Dead Voices" is an exploration of the various fashions in which three
contemporary Northern Irish poets-Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek
Mahon-have consulted, ventriloquized, adapted, and ultimately translated the buried
speech of the dead into living verse. I argue that the vessel of the ancient Classics has,
like Charon's skiff, ferried these writers to underworld shores and facilitated their own
creative resurrections alongside those of the shades they encounter, both during the
period of the Northern Irish Troubles and in its aftermath.
This dissertation interrogates the ethics of translation and argues that while most critical
response to the work of the three poets has investigated the relationship between politics
and aesthetics in their verse, less attention has been devoted to the role that the translation
and adaptation of Greek and Roman Classical texts has played in their artistic
development, despite the increasing number of such works in their respective oeuvres.
The cultural, temporal, and linguistic distance of ancient Mediterranean texts from the
present moment has offered each Northern Irish poet a degree of aesthetic distance from
historical event, allowing him to approach his "own dead" through the trope of nekuia-
Classical underworld journey. Responding to the political and aesthetic question of what
it means to bear witness to a traumatic event, this dissertation argues that the translation
and adaptation of ancient Greek and Roman texts is both the poets' means of bearing
witness to the deaths of those who have gone before and an instinctive grappling with the
imperative of their own survival in the aftermath of these losses.
Finally, I offer a reading of Heaney's, Longley's, and Mahon's use of lyric poetry (and
occasionally, theatrical dramatization) as means of translating trauma-experienced,
witnessed, and survived-into bold threads of grief that together, create a survivors'
tapestry reminding audiences of the capacity of formal poetic rhythm and structure to
accommodate the most searing measure of human experience-a truth Classical writers
knew well.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
Memento Mori: The Classical Configurations of Seamus Heaney,
Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon

Chapter 1 23
"Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink":
Seamus Heaney, Translation, and The Diviner's Craft

Chapter 2 88
"Walking backwards into the future like a Greek":
Michael Longley's Classical Twinning

Chapter 3 137
"For even at one remove / The thing I meant was love":
Forging Home in Derek Mahon's Classics

Conclusion 191
"The bloodstained warrior and the gentle philosopher":
Voyaging to the Underworld and the Wanderlust of the Lyric

Works Cited and Consulted 197

Non-Printed Sources Cited 207

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Classical Literature, English Literature, Modern
Keyword	Classics Northern Irish Poetry Trauma Translation Underworld
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Higgins, Geraldine, Emory University
Committee Members	Schuchard, W Ronald, Emory University Ruprecht, Louis A. Jr., Georgia State University Chace, William M, Emory University

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