province, an Ireland of the mind where contesting identities come
together, an-ëother worldí.^85 This was one intention of the Field Day
group in which both Hederman and Heaney were involved during the
1970s and 80s. Field Day imagined that a resolution for nationhood
could be found if nationality was understood as a state of mind which
is also acknowledged by the 1998 Settlement where politicians came
to the realization that minds must change as well as political realities
in Ireland. However, republicans, including some of those involved in
Field Day, continue to want Ireland to be a place rather than a state of
mind. Field Dayís importance lay in the way that it claimed the
necessity for aesthetics to imagine something other than what is given
in the hope of political, cultural and social change. ëMaking Strangeí
and ëThe Other Sideí attempt to negotiate a point of balance alluded to
at a metaphorical level by Hederman. Hedermanís image of the fifth
province can be connected with the bubble of the spirit-level as a
meaningful ëabsenceí or an in-between space that delicately moves
with complex understanding of each extreme.
In his essay ëThe Impact of Translationí and elsewhere in The
Government of the Tongue (1988), Heaney turns to the Eastern
European poet and Polish Catholic exile, Czeslaw Milosz, who
experienced life under martial law and the Russian exile, Osip
Mandelstam. In an interview with Corcoran, Heaney suggests:
there is something in their situation that makes them attractive to a reader
whose formative experience has largely been Irish. There is an unsettled aspect
to the different worlds they inhabit, and one of the challenges they face is to
survive amphibiously, in the realm of ëthe timesí [Ö]^86Joyceís advice to swim out into the deep has been translated by
Heaney via the experiences of Eastern European poets into a need for
the ëamphibiousí, to exist on land as well as in the water, and neither
land nor water provide a pure original source for identity. In The Spirit
Level Heaney translates from the Romanian of Martin Sorescu,
rejecting the notion of a pure source:
85 Mark Patrick Hederman, ëPoetry and the Fifth Provinceí, Crane Bag, 9:1,
(1985), p.116. Cf. Wills, Improprieties, p.31.
86 Corcoran, p.224. Unfortunately, Corcoran does not footnote this comment and
so a reference for the Heaney interview cannot be provided.