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This chapter explores the paradox that translations of classical texts are necessary both because the texts are valuable and because they are inadequate and that therefore the translations ensure that the notion of ‘the classic’ is constantly being both reasserted and subverted. The discussion considers examples of overt and covert translation in the work of creative writers and scholarly translators, and demonstrates how translations can become hybrid texts that occupy new sites within and between cultures, transforming temporal and aesthetic relationships as well as provoking resistance and conflict. The impact of recent classical translations in poetry and theatre shows there is a continuing central and catalytic role for Greek and Roman texts. However, this activity challenges some traditional formulations of classical genealogies and values, and requires models of translation theory that conceptualise dialogue and exchange rather than emphasising invasion and violence.

The relationship between the study of classical culture and the formation of empire is well established. This chapter traces alternate spaces of engagement within the decolonizing public sphere in Ireland. It focuses on a range of twentieth‐century writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney. Specific focus is given to the ways in which contemporary events, including independence, partition and state formation, have been represented through images of the ancient past in a form of vernacular classicism. Ideas of literary and political language, from the epic to the republic, took revolutionary form in the modernist works of Joyce and Yeats. For the subsequent generations of MacNeice, Longley, and Heaney, the classical world has allowed culture to engage with, and question, the violent legacies of colonization.

This chapter examines some productions in the late twentieth century (Fugard's The Island, Gambaro's Antígona Furiosa, and Glowacki's Antigone in New York) that have employed Antigone as a kind of homo sacer, and then applies this analogy in a more detailed discussion of Seamus Heaney's version of The Burial at Thebes at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004. Heaney's version was inspired by President Bush's ‘war on terror’ and the detention and ‘rendition’ of suspected terrorists in prisons beyond legal redress. The language deployed in the play echoed statements made by President Bush and evoked his administration's unwarranted invasion of Iraq and torture of prisoners. By comparing recent versions of Antigone that represent her as homo sacer, subjected to a liminal state between life and death, the chapter demonstrates how the ‘state of exception’ theorized by Georgio Agamben has become normalized in the twenty‐first century. It draws parallels between the ‘exceptional’ actions of governments such as the Bush administration and the Argentinian dictatorship, making up the laws as they go along, removing people from their homes and environment, and incarcerating or disposing of them outside the polis, outside the reach of their friends and families. Moreover, it shows that Western governments are taking advantage of the ‘war on terror’ to develop new methods of social control (such as increased security measures by the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, including more intensive customs inspections, omnipresent CCTV cameras, heightened threat alerts, etc.) that deprive citizens of their civil rights. By applying Agamben's notions of ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exception’ to these adaptations, as well as Slavoj Žižek's and Judith Butler's comments on recent political developments, it demonstrates the claim that Antigone makes on behalf of the disenfranchised of the world.

Heidegger and Lacan both emphasize the uncanny, monstrous aspects of Antigone, who must be expelled from the polis, and yet who plays a liminal role in which she is the excluded yet facilitating other. In Žižek's Lacanian reading, Antigone is regarded as ‘proto‐totalitarian’. By contrast, the tradition of political, dramatic appropriations of Antigone, including five Irish versions since the 1980s, among them Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes—which is the focus here—establish Antigone as a freedom fighter. A critique of Lacan's reading of Antigone is provided which, the argument goes, fetishizes the character of Antigone. In contrast to the abstract gesture that is content to construe Antigone as a figure of excess, as if she merely marked the limits of the articulate, her continual renaissance is read as a genealogy of that which is figured as abject by dominant narratives by each new political staging of Antigone's rebirth.

This chapter discusses the ethical implications of the choice made by Antigone in terms of loyalty to her family or loyalty to her polis. It does this through the prism of Jacques Derrida's ideas on responsibility and irresponsibility. For Derrida, to be responsible to one is of necessity to be irresponsible to the other, so the choice made by Antigone is a synecdoche of the ethical dilemma of all such choices. Examples are adduced in the chapter to underline this point: the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, the Northern Irish IRA hunger striker Francis Hughes, Robert McCartney, murdered by the IRA in Belfast.

This chapter argues that through the work of Pound, Auden, Morgan, and Heaney—all of them major and influential poets—the influence of Old English has made itself felt more widely throughout 20th-century poetry, difficult as this impact is to quantify exactly. The poets under consideration are contrasted, perhaps surprisingly, with those 19th-century enthusiasts of Old English, who saw the ‘purity’ of Anglo-Saxon roots as a cure for supposed contemporary linguistic decadence. Finally, Allen Frantzen's idea of ‘the shadow’ is borrowed to argue that New Old English is distinct, yet inseparable from the English tradition which it both helps to define, and simultaneously challenges.

This chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s idea of Louis MacNeice as a vital means of holding Ulster, Ireland, and England within the purview of a single imagination. It argues that such an idea, to be accurate, must register MacNeice’s extreme antagonism towards Ulster and Ireland. This antagonism is contextualized within the intense culture of propaganda and rising ideological terror throughout the 1930s. Such a context spurs MacNeice’s interest in the relationship between empiricism and abstraction, which is key to his aesthetics. The chapter traces the multifaceted idea of time in his verse and explores his poetry’s simultaneous striving towards representing newness and registering social reality. Focusing on the figuration and musicality of his poems, the centrality of these to his growing political commitment is discussed, moving into a major interpretation of his masterpiece Autumn Journal. His critical treatment of Ireland is then contextualized within his broader concern for the political agency of poetry in general.

This chapter argues that the key Ovidian triangle of dislocation, political problems, and lamenting tone is often encountered in later versions of and allusions to Ovid’s exile poetry. This pattern is traced in poetry of the twentieth century, including Robert Lowell’s ‘Beyond the Alps’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Exposure’ (which alludes specifically to Ovid’s Tristia), and Derek Walcott’s ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’. The chapter ends with a detailed consideration of a very recent application of Ovidian poetics in Bob Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times. Richard Thomas has persuasively shown that Dylan used Peter Green’s translation of the exile poems, but this chapter presents a more nuanced account which demonstrates that Dylan too engages with the Ovidian triangulation of dislocation, political issues, and lamentation.

Christopher Logue's versions form Homer, War Music, begin with a view: ‘picture the east Aegean sea by night’. In what follows, episodes from Homeric narrative and allusions to modern life are located on the same artificial landscape, and the narrative zooms in and out. This mode of translation‐as‐zoom, which is inflected by contemporary visual media, embodies an awareness of how much of Homer is lost and is having to be made up: this is akin to Anne Carson's way with Stesichoros in Autobiography of Red (1999) and contrasts with Seamus Heaney's assertion of continuities in his Beowulf.

T. S. Eliot lived to experience the fullest extent of his own critical authority, and, to judge from the evidence of his later essays and addresses, he became increasingly bemused by the weight which his own opinions had come to carry. The young Eliot went on to be seen as the ancestor of an altogether less dangerous school of literary criticism in the United States and Britain, many of whose members adopted his literary enthusiasms and dislikes, along with a few motifs of interpretation held to be his ideas. Eliot confessed that he can never re-read any of his own prose writings without acute embarrassment. This chapter also examines the poem The Redress of Poetry, in which Seamus Heaney gives more than a glimpse of the charm, grace, and carefully judged gravity with which the poet handled his acts of praise. Geoffrey Hill as a poet-critic and the influence of his critical work on contemporary poetry other than his own are also discussed.

The themes of the continually colonial and the neocolonial are prominent in this chapter’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes. The chapter situates the discussion in the context of what it regards as the ‘modern McCarthyism’ involved in the suppression, by the government of the United States, of the academic investigation of post-colonialism. It argues that Heaney’s language in the play relates both to the history of British colonialism in, and oppression of, Ireland, and to the contemporary neocolonialist actions of America and its allies in Iraq. It combines close textual and rhythmic analysis with discussion of the primary sources relating to the commissioning and production of Heaney’s play in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The chapter suggests that the play takes up the post-colonial trope of gender politics as an analogy for geo-political developments.

Poetry is a literary form especially suited for exploring the religious imagination, calling both poets and readers of poetry to an experience beyond the state of ordinary perception. A number of poems accomplish this task particularly well because they are grounded in certain metaphysical presuppositions that are foundational to Catholicism and resonant with the broader Judeo-Christian tradition. First, creation is grace, albeit deformed by the presence of sin. Second, the physical world is incarnational, embodying the immanence of the God who created it. Third, language possesses a unique power to express divine immanence and transcendence. Fourth, the act of making a poem manifests a primary way in which we are made in God's image. Poems by Dante, Levertov, Hopkins, Heaney, Milosz, and Jacobsen demonstrate the intricate connections between the religious and the artistic impulse. These poets are conversant with the realms of both the sacred and the secular. Consequently through their art they help lead poets and readers alike on the pilgrimage of paradox all human beings are all blessed to take, simultaneously alone and together.

This chapter reviews Seamus Heaney's Human Chain. Heaney is the most popular literary poet since Frost, who convinced most of his readers that he wasn't a literary poet at all. Readers often love in Heaney what they loved in Frost, the unassumed and unassuming wisdom. In Human Chain the poet is again a child in the world of things, his attention drawn to objects such as the binder and the baler, the heating boiler and the mite box and the gold-banded fountain pen—possessions that also possess, things that seize the people who use them. While far from being Heaney's best book, he is still good at the character sketches from the Irish hinterlands, the deft evocations of common objects, the elegies and funerals that increasingly have dominated his work.