tradition.í^44 In ëThe King of the Ditchbacksí the poet writes of
Sweeney: ëHe was depending on me as I hung out on the limb of a
translated phrase like a youngster dared out on to an alder branch over
the whirlpool.í^45 Corkeryís quaking sod of Irish consciousness
becomes in Heaneyís work a quivering alder branch, bending over the
depths of a whirlpool. The act of translation of Irish into English
juggles cultural identities and treads a minefield between contesting
cultures. Richard Kearney compares Heaney with Brian Friel, noting
how his poetry, like Frielís plays, must negotiate, translate or
transgress the sectarian boundaries existing in the North.^46 Kearney
examines the split selves represented by Sweeney (the displaced and
wandering king), Terminus (the god of boundaries) and Janus (the
double-faced god who looks simultaneously backward to the myths of
indigenous culture and forward to the horizons of the future). It is
therefore apt when Heaneyís poetry is defined as ëjourney workí or a
migrant preoccupation with threshold and transit, passage and
pilgrimage, with the crossing over of frontiers, gazing at the past
while being catapulted into the future.^47
Such a concern with frontiers and their transgression is
demonstrated in Heaneyís critical essay ëFrontiers of Writingí which
was given in 1995 as part of his Oxford Lectures and published in The
Redress of Poetry. Here, Heaney describes how the result of Partition
is the creation of a state that, depending on where one stands, is
named Northern Ireland or the North of Ireland, and in this way, exists
between two worlds being ëBritainís Irelandí and ëIrelandís Irelandí.^48
He notices how the ëwhole population are adepts in the mystery of
living in two places at one time.í Heaneyís essay looks to an
ëelsewhere beyond the frontier of writingí where, in Wallace
Stevensís words, ëthe imagination presses back against the pressure of
realityí. Explaining that he ëwanted to suggest that poetry represented
a principle of integration within such a context of divisioní, Heaney
shies from stating this in anything but a past and conditional tense
44 Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p.40.
45 Heaney, ëThe King of the Ditchbacksí, Station Island, p.57.
46 Richard Kearney, ëFrom Transitionsí in The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, ed., Seamus Deane, Vol.3 (London: Faber, 1991), p.632.
47 Ibid., p.631.
48 Heaney, ëFrontiers of Writingí, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, p.188.