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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I'm very fond of Seamus Heaney, not because he is Irish and I have a weakness for the Irish, but because, among other things, he made me enjoy reading Beowulf.
Beowulf is a piece of 6th century Anglo-Saxon poetry, which I had to study during my university years. It was both difficult and boring but we had to suffer the agony of going through it, line by line.
Then came Seamus with his rendering of Beowulf into easy and simple verse, which made the poem most enjoyable. Who would have believed that Beowulf would become a best seller and would win the prestigious Whitbread Book Award.
Seamus Heaney is very Irish. When his name came up as a successor of Ted Hughes as poet laureate he intimated that were the post offered to him he would decline it. He was always at pains to point out that he was not a British poet but Irish. And yet he is one of the best, if not the best, of the Irish writers using English as a medium of literary expression. Such were Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey and others.
I still remember his address at the memorial service for Ted Hughes. It was almost poetry:
"At this moment in this Abbey where kings and poets lie translated into legend, it is impossible not to think of Ted Hughes as one of the figures in the tapestry, a permanence who would be as much at home with Caedemon, the first British poet in the 7th century monastery at Whitby, as he would have been with Wilfred Owen and the doomed men in the trenches of the Somme. He has become another 'Genius of the shore, a guardian spirit of the land and of the language'."
Such beauty of expression is unfortunately now missing in modern English. It has always taken an Irishman to bring the best out of the English language.
For those who have little or no knowledge of Heaney, let me give some details of his life. His talent showed when at the age of 11, as a bright farm boy from Northern Ireland, he won a scholarship to a prestigious Catholic school. Since then he has not stopped winning prizes, including the Nobel Prize in 1995, the Somerset Maugham Award as well as almost 30 others.
Heaney won the Whitbread Prize twice. When he won it the first time in 1997, the critic and writer Malcolm Bradbury said: "Poets admire him to adulation. He is the poet of poets." Another critic called him "one of the greatest poets of the 20th century".
In an interview in The Sunday Times Heaney had some interesting things to say. Commenting on his seemingly unending prize-winning, Seamus was asked if he ever craved for the unknown, "the illicit thrill of failure," to which the poet answered, and here I quote again:
"I think failure is always available and it can go along with prizes. I can say with honesty that I have never sought any award in any way. I've never networked, never gone after these things. They have come after me."
On a short listed opponent for the Whitbread Prize, Heaney said the following: "I've never read the Harry Potter book. I've skimmed over the surface of it. But I wouldn't have been disappointed if it had won. I think children's books are very important. I spent many years as a teacher trying to introduce teenagers to the value of imaginative writing, so, philosophically, I am entirely in favour of children's literature as a category."
Heaney is a great believer in the value of poetry in our lives. He is of the opinion that people should spend more time reading and listening to poetry. He thinks that reading poetry is "an anthropological necessity because if you didn't have poetry, everything would slip back into media speak."
"Poetry is religious," he adds, "it is complimentary of experience under the eye of eternity. It helps us to live our lives in the face of destruction. It can give us a spiritual strength."
