POETRY:Seamus Heaney's translation of a Renaissance text speaks to us in our own terms, writes AIDAN MATHEWS
WE KNOW hardly anything about Robert Henryson, who died in the 15th century, and a great deal about Seamus Heaney, who will die in the 21st. But fame and effacement are not always the most revealing imaginative categories: they are historical circumstances, contexts instead of texts, which belong to the order of laborand not of opus. The mystery of the mediation of art is such that information is never actual knowledge and proximity is never total access. Real presence, as in the dying (and resurrecting) myth of the Christian community, relies on the deepest displacements and disguises; relies indeed on the paradoxical plenitude of a real absence.
Accordingly, the utterly blurred image of the obscure master of Middle Scots, who may or may not have been a tutor or an attorney in a late medieval monastery at Dumfermline, quickens with vitality and the kind stink of his particular body-odour as we enter the detached contrivance of his strictly conventional sentences, while the invigilated celebrity writer whose objective is often subjectivity itself, fidelity to the facts of his life in the see-hear-touch-taste-smell science of his most private self, remains ultimately undocumented. Truly, quantum physics is Page One material when it comes to the metaphysics of the presence of the human person, a word that wisely means mask in Latin and nobody at all in French.
There's Latin and French galore in the pre-history of Robert Henryson's Renaissance project, together with the troubadours' determination that desire is always tragic since, marriage being mercenary, authentic love must perforce be adulterous. The Testament of Cresseid, his succinct Lowland Scots sequel to the continental instalment-story of the Trojan traitor's notorious daughter who sabotages her sweetheart's trust and establishes the European stereotype of the false and fickle woman, draws strength from many tells and sediments, among them – big breath here – Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, Guido delle Colonne's Historia Destructionis Troiae, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Lydgate's Troy Book(commissioned by Prince Hal in the dying days of parchment), Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy(the first printed volume in the English language), but especially from Chaucer's exquisite Troilus and Criseydeinto which masterpiece, indeed, Henryson's codicil was subsumed for centuries as the closing chapter of the chronicle of the star-crossed lovers, much as Mapheus Vegius's addition of a 13th book to the text of the Aeneidhad already been incorporated into the classroom verses of the schoolmen's Virgil. The Iliadis, after all, the saline undertow of our common cultural odyssey.
Yet literary sources, however prestigious, were resources and not rivals in the age of Christendom. Imitation and not originality was the primary aim at a time when the innumerable Romance derivatives of the Latin root-word libermeant both the noun for book and the adjective for perfect freedom. We need only trace the temporal fortunes of the verb "to con" – from signifying a copyist's loyalty at the outset to a plagiarist's resentment at the end; from fabulist to confabulator in 400 years – to map the drift towards modernity and the studious howl of the moiunder his own (and no-one else's) angle-poise.
So Henryson’s many predecessors and his posterity too, even including Dryden’s improbable rehabilitation of Cressida in his rewrite of Shakespeare’s black comedy, where the pimp Pandarus emerges as the real protagonist, are part of a complex and incomparable ecosystem of reference and reminder, call and response, that we mystify as the western narrative tradition, because we are too shy (and perhaps too proud) to say simply that this is the way we have been fashioned, this is the way we are made. It is us, our self. It is our doing and our undoing. It is our hereditary DNA, a sum of stories, a canon, and no sentimental Minority Studies syllabus will ever alter or abate it. Homer is there and Ovid and the counter-tenors of our second lung as well, Luke and Ezekiel with their glittering, semitic Kyries; and if the mythical Aesop has pride of place in this grand sodality of scripts, it is because every proper name is ultimately an alias for Anon, the communal humus that nourishes the canopy.
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, the Cock and the Diamond, the Preaching of the Swallow: in all, seven beloved Aesopian anecdotes from the baker's dozen back in Henryson's initial edition of Morall Fabillisappear in Heaney's genial and frequently ingenious modernisation of the makar's stanzas. The Taill of the Wolf that gat the Nekhering throw the wrinkis of the Foxe that begylit the Cadgear, for example, revisits and replenishes itself on the friendly facing pages where the versions converse equably as The Fox, the Wolf and the Carter. There's the same aplomb, the same astringency, the same coyote cunning in the trickster theme, although the earlier harshness has been eased a little as if the barbs of the thorn tree had been humbled here and there into the prickles of a holly bush. Scots may mean Irish in the back-streets of many Christian capitals where our Celtic monks once missioned, but the poet of Northis more south-facing than his pre-Reformation role-model; and his multiple, mirthful use of the hendecasyllable, the 11th extra syllable in the routine pentameter of the poetry, makes that stately metre twinkle and frisk with informal affection. The effect is beautifully lenient, a Beaujolais freshness about it.
THERE'S AN EQUINOXin every individual life, a balance of bereavement, when half our loved ones are still living and half again are gone. It could be called, I suppose, the holy communion of the quick and the dead, and the experience of its equilibrium is the closest we can come in this life to peace of mind. If literature is the graphic form of that complicity, then here is Heaney at the end of his days at play among his peers, lightly and learnedly, in the acapella acoustic of canticles that have shaped our culture, elatedly translating. And if the town of Troy, where the apostle Paul crossed into Europe from Asia Minor in the 30s of the first century, is nowadays better known to us as Gallipoli, that only serves to show, contrary to the usual wordplay, that the best translators are not always betrayers. Like the saintly Jew who wrote such excellent Greek to the Romans, they are instead the people of Pentecost, speaking to us in our own terms and in our own fiery tongue.
Aidan Mathews is a writer. He has translated plays by Lorca, Sophocles and Euripides