In this blog post, Professor Rióna Ní Fhrighil gives an overview of the research project Republic of Conscience: Human Rights and Modern Irish Poetry.
A survey of Irish Poetry 1914-2020
The research project Republic of Conscience: Human Rights and Modern Irish Poetry examines the representations of international human rights violations or crises in Irish poetry from the outbreak of World War I until 2020. It includes poems written in either English or Irish, or translated into Irish or English, in this period. The title of the research project is a reference to Seamus Heaney’s poem titled “From the Republic of Conscience”, a poem commissioned by Amnesty International Ireland to mark Human Rights Day in 1985. The speaker of Heaney’s poem travels to an imagined destination; a republic that is radically democratic. There he engages in self-reflection and returns with a deep understanding of, and a strong commitment to, the ethical responsibility that accompanies the artistic vocation. In the final four stanzas of the poem, the speaker affirms his steadfast commitment to freedom of expression, and to bearing witness ethically:
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs
woman having insisted my allowance was myself.The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.— Seamus Heaney
The attractiveness of this principled stance must be counter balanced by an awareness that conscience itself is shaped by culture, as Marilynne Robinson observed: “conscience can be slow to awake even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values”.
Defining Irish Poetry
Poet Chris Agee, among others, has lamented the narrow ethnic and monolingual definition of the ‘Irish poet’. In a similar vein, Peter Sirr has criticised the ‘parochiality’ of much critical and cultural discourse that fails to recognise the international impulse at the heart of Irish poetry. With this in mind, our definition of Irish poetry is capacious and guided by a civic paradigm. We include poems by poets born in Ireland; poets resident in Ireland who identify themselves as Irish or part Irish; poets seeking residency in Ireland. Many of Ireland’s poets, in both languages, are also active translators of poetry. Our definition of Irish poetry also includes poems translated by Irish poets from other languages into Irish or English. Contrary to conventional thought and practice, texts translated by Irish poets will be discussed in the context of their own oeuvre. This is a radical contestation of the view that translating is peripheral to the act of creative writing itself. In the context of this research, we argue that it is important to examine those instances of translation to fully appreciate the role of the poet-translator in an interconnected world.
The Poet as Witness
Although poetry is often understood as pertaining to the individual and to the private realm, Heaney’s poem seeks to explore what the poet’s relationship to the communal is. Indeed, in times of great crisis, poetry has always been a portable and often clandestine form employed by people to register their experience, to bear witness to atrocities and, sometimes, as a form of activism. An oft-cited example is the poem “Requiem”, composed by Anna Akhmatova between 1935 and 1961 and based on her personal experience. The poem bears witness to the experience of those who stood outside the Leningrad Prison and who suffered enormously under Stalin’s politically repressive campaign known as the Great Purge. A more recent example discussed by Brenda Carr Velino is the poetry of Guantanamo prisoners who inscribed poems on coffee cups with pebbles, not only as an affirmation of their humanity, but also as a critique of the human rights discourse from a non-Western perspective.
The majority of twentieth-century Irish poetry was written in the shadow of struggles for political and civil rights. When W.B. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, it was in the wake of a bitter War of Independence and a devastating Civil War. When Seamus Heaney received the prize in 1995, violent political conflict had loomed large in Northern Ireland for the previous 30 years. In the face of the increasing minoritization of the Irish language, language and cultural rights provide an additional context, particularly for poets for whom Irish is their chosen artistic medium. The economic boom during the Celtic Tiger years (1995-2007) and the sudden downturn that followed, prompted a renewed focus on socio-economic rights in Ireland. Although the primary focus of this research is the international rather than the domestic context, the extent to which local and national circumstances inform the poet’s response to human rights violations and crises abroad will be examined. Of course, in an interconnected world, the division between here and there, domestic and international, may be a matter of perception rather than reality. Indeed, an important difference between poetry and news media according to Jahan Ramazani is poetry’s ‘wider temporal horizons and its relative freedom from the imperatives of the immediate present’, a freedom that allows for a trans-temporal and a transnational understanding of issues and events.
Primary Sources
The research corpus will include iconic and frequently anthologized poems such as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” by W.B. Yeats, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” by Derek Mahon, “Known World” by Seamus Heaney, “Aifreann na Marbh” [Mass of the Dead] by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, and “Dubh” [Black] by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Thematic anthologies of particular interest include In the Heart of Europe: Poems for Bosnia (1998), Human Rights Have No Borders: Voices of Irish Poets (1998), Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914-45 (2008) and Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets (2019). A lesser known, but a noteworthy point of reference is The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Expanse of Space and Time (2017), an anthology of poems by writers who have lived or are living in Direct Provision as refugees or asylum seekers in Ireland.
Translated collections such as After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets (2004), an anthology of German-language poems translated by Eavan Boland, and Nótaí ar Fhilleadh ar mo Thír Dhúchais (2016), a translation by Pádraig Ó Máille of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, will also be included.
Words Matter
Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, echoing George Orwell and George Steiner, asserts that ‘moral and political abberations almost always start with linguistic neglect’. This research project pays special attention to the intersection of language and human rights. It engages critically with questions concerning signification, the role of the poet-witness, and the ideological underpinnings of the human rights discourse, as currently conceived.
