Long before he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature in mid-career at the ridiculously early age of 56 - although there have been even younger laureates - Seamus Heaney was well established as Ireland's major poet, and one who is as important in his own country as he is internationally. For all the cynicism of the age, poets retain their special place. The likeable Heaney, who is 60 today, has achieved the impossible: he has acquired the status in Ireland of Yeats and Kavanagh and of Hughes and Brodsky abroad, without being aloof, miserable, tragic or belligerent.
And all that is aside from the undoubted quality of his work. Since the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966, this son of a Co Derry farmer has produced a vast body of work which remains closely rooted to personal experience and memory while also possessing a diversity which is often overlooked. North (1975), his artistic coming of age which drew on the harshness of history, is one of the finest poetry collections published anywhere this century. With Seeing Things (1990) the poet of bog and water moved on to air and light.
Political dilemma
Some observers have accused Heaney of failing to address his country's political dilemma. But he has confronted the situation in the North by adopting the role of witness and a tone of righteous indignation. Latterly, as in The Spirit Level (1996), exasperation and a rueful thoughtfulness is emerging. A lyric, pastoral poet shaped by the diction of Frost, the rhythms of Hopkins and the "placeness" of Kavanagh, Heaney has also looked to myth, history and classical European literature. `Ugolino,' his reworking of a passage from Dante, is a violent and angry lamentation.
In 1990, The Cure at Troy, Heaney's version of Sophocles's Philoctetes, was staged. Drawn to the play by the Greek playwright's understanding of the tensions between public and private morality, Heaney was also alert to the ways in which victims of injustice can become as obsessed with the wrongs committed against them as their oppressors are with justifying their sins. As with his work on Dante, Heaney's excursion into classical literature reveals his ability to merge classical form with a persuasive use of the vernacular.
This grasp of political realities and of the ways in which literature often moves beyond its time and becomes topical helped to lead him to his latest work, a translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Composed in the eighth century, and set in the heroic societies of fifth-century Scandinavia, Beowulf is the most important poem in Old English, and the only complete one. It is also the first major poem in a European vernacular. It tells the story of the Geatish hero Beowulf, who as a young man arrives to slay Grendel, the monster who has been terrorising Heorot, the hall of the Danish king Hrothgar.
Life and death
Having killed Grendel, Beowulf is then faced with the monster's avenging mother, whom he also despatches. Time passes. Beowulf becomes king. He rules well for 50 years until a hoard-guarding dragon is disturbed. Now elderly, Beowulf, "the kindest to his people, the keenest for fame", discovers that one of the burdens of kingship is having to do things yourself. He defeats the dragon but is also mortally wounded.
The poem is a celebration of a heroic life and death, and equally a study of a society and its values. Feasting and fighting preoccupy these warriors. For Heaney, Beowulf is "a terrific poem for the late 20th century as it is about surviving trauma. It is also about having to face facts."
Central to Anglo-Saxon poetry is the role of "weird", or fate. Composed to be recited rather than read, Beowulf, with its lines often only consisting of two or three compound words, is the gate through which students begin the study of English literature. It contains the beginning of a language which develops through Chaucer and Langland, to Spenser, on to Shakespeare and Milton - whose sheer power reverberates with echoes of Beowulf - and onwards again to the language we have today. Above all, though, Beowulf is a gripping yarn, a saga of bloodshed and violence, dread and manic heroism.
A few weeks ago a large noonday audience filled UCD's largest lecture theatre as Heaney read from his Beowulf translation. His relationship with the poem dates back to his student days at Queen's, where it gave him an insight into the importance of establishing a confidence in his vernacular. His love of Hopkins clearly owes something to the echoes of Anglo-Saxon evident in the Victorian poet's rhythm and vocabulary. The language of Beowulf and its insistent, physical imagery remained rooted in his poetic consciousness.
Slow going
In 1982 he was approached to translate the poem for the Nor- ton Anthology of English Literature and found it such slow going that after about 80 of the 3,182 lines he abandoned the attempt, feeling unable to continue the "glossary-gazing, wall-staring" process. In March 1995 he resumed his labours. The key to his translation has been the finding of a voice and the melody to match the big Anglo-Saxon words. The voice which emerged comes straight from his native Bellaghy inheritance.
Reading the poem aloud, true to its oral formulaic tradition, Heaney, standing at the lectern of Theatre L, was interrupted by a super-clever student who was following the poet's new translation against the original Anglo-Saxon text. "What line are you at?" Heaney was asked. "I don't know," he replied.
For all its barbaric splendour and its evocation of a far-distant, ancient world, Beowulf is as close to Milton (and indeed, to J.R. Tolkien, whose "Middle Earth" was inspired by it) as it is to Homer. Heaney's soft voice caught the urgency, atmosphere and lyricism of the work. The performance left two first-year law students wondering, "Should we switch to English?" Heaney's translation of Beowulf will be published next year and should make a great work freshly accessible as the marvellous, rich adventure it is. And who better to made a recording of it than Heaney himself?