Revolutionary Russia and led the exponents of Russian Formalism to
be suppressed by Stalin, silenced or forced into exile.
Shklovsky goes back to Aristotle:
According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful;
and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the
Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages [...] the obscure style of the language
of Arnaut Daniel with the ëroughenedí [...] forms which make pronunciation
difficult ñ these are used in much the same way.^63Comparably, in Heaneyís poem the speaker experiences the sense of
wonder that is felt in the act of cultural translation, where the lines of
what is familiar and supposedly strange, can be both defamiliarized
and familiarized. The potential provided by such a transformation is
that linguistic, cultural and territorial boundaries may be shifted and
transgressed, at an everyday and a poetic level. It is interesting to
notice how at the end of ëMaking Strangeí, the speaker is on another
journey, taking his own route and taking possession of the land, as he
is depicted ëdriving the stranger/ through my own countryí. The
emphasis here is on travelling between and across cultural, linguistic
and territorial boundaries, and the problematization of such a
transgression.
Comparisons can be made here between linguistic and territorial
decolonization and this is perhaps best expressed with Heaneyís use of
the dinnseanchas tradition. As a major poetic genre in the Gaelic
tradition, dinnseanchas poems celebrated rootedness and knowing
oneís place through etymological understanding and the history that
goes with it.^64 ëDinnseanchasí translated from Irish into English
means ëtopographyí. This is a tradition which provides detailed
representation of a place and is connected with map-making or the
remapping of certain characteristics of a place by paying particular
attention to the place name. Heaneyís earlier poems ëAnahorishí,
Toomeí and ëBroaghí (1972) can initially be read as examples of this
63 Victor Shklovsky, ëArt as Techniqueí (1917), Modern Criticism and Theory: A
Reader, ed., David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), pp.16ñ30, p.20, p.27.
64 ëPoems of placeí explore the geographical and etymological aspects of the Irish
landscape. Cf. Clair Wills, ëLanguage, Politics, Narrative, Political Violenceí,
in The Oxford Literary Review: Neocolonialism, ed., Robert Young, p.37.