Heaney the Correspondent and Translator

1.
In ‘The Conway Stewart’, a poem from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), Seamus Heaney puts letter-writing at the centre of his writing life. The poem describes his parents’ gifting him a fountain pen when they arrive for the first time to boarding school in Derry: the Conway Stewart pen’s ‘pump-action lever’ nods to the pen, ‘snug as a gun’, in another ‘inaugural’ poem, ‘Digging’; then, there’s a play on his distinctive sound-palette as he describes refilling the pen: ‘Guttery, snottery, / Letting it rest then at an angle / To ingest’; finally, the poem recounts the advent of one part of his writing life – as a boarder posting letters home, ‘my longhand / ‘Dear’ / to them next day’. These letters home will, though, be a way of keeping the lines of communication open rather than a place where the stricken child will confess how he feels. What he cannot say in letters will, decades later, be the subject of the poems themselves, including other heartsore memories in ‘Album’, a defining sequence in Human Chain.

Letter-writing remained part of Heaney’s daily practice, connected to and – to borrow a word he liked to use – corroborating the poems. And in The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Christopher Reid, ed., Faber, £40), we see, to its editor’s credit, that the poems are at the centre of the letters. Even more than in his proxy autobiography Stepping Stones, we see the force fields he encountered, and entered, and which he was both shaped by and sometimes shaped to his own ends as a poet. ...