Creating a Poetics of Allusion in Two Early French Translations by Seamus Heaney

Early in his career, Seamus Heaney translated two French poems, an unpublished Renaissance ‘spiritual sonnet’ and a nineteenth-century narrative poem in rhyming quatrains that appeared in North. The translations invite attention to his methods in creating the sonorities and prayerful themes of a Renaissance sonnet, and the linguistic and political significance of a poetics of allusion in his translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’. Heaney’s use of an allusive technique in translating Gabrielle de Coignard’s ‘Sonnet Spirituel’ (‘Prayer’) and his politically charged English version of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’ (‘The Digging Skeleton’) lay the foundation and supply the encouragement for his later work in translating Sweeney Astray, Beowulf, Pascoli’s The Last Walk, and Aeneid Book VI. These French translations demonstrate his skill and inventiveness with diction and syntax. They reveal his use of Northern Irish locutions on two occasions: portraying the private prayer of a soul in extremis and showing the sufferings endured by physically weakened and exploited labourers.