All the Dead Voices: Communicating Across the Grave in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry Público
Miles, Michelle Raelene (2011)
Published
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
School | |
---|---|
Department | |
Degree | |
Submission | |
Language |
|
Research Field | |
Palavra-chave | |
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor | |
Committee Members |
Primary PDF
Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
---|---|---|---|
|
All the Dead Voices: Communicating Across the Grave in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry () | 2018-08-28 14:50:32 -0400 |
|
Supplemental Files
Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
---|