“Transportation” between contradictory worlds in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Lightenings viii” and its translation into French

In his final Oxford lecture, Seamus Heaney writes that “There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds” (The Redress of Poetry 202). He goes on to affirm that:[…] we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; […] that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing. (203)Heaney’s poem “Lightenings viii” (Seeing Things 62) hovers on the threshold between two starkly incompatible worlds, that of the monks in the monastery at Clonmacnoise, and a ship sailing above them in the air, mythical time and present time vacillating. In this poem, Heaney enacts his defiance of intractable dualities such as that between Irish and English, moving away from what John Montague referred to as “the partitioned intellect” towards what Heaney describes as “an entry into further language” (Beowulf xxv). This article firstly examines how the story-telling approach taken by Heaney in “Lightenings viii” creates the poem’s layered sense of in-betweenness, magnified by the subtle influence of “single word heteroglossia” in P. L. Paddington’s terms. Secondly, we will consider the creative strategies similarly used by Patrick Hersant in his translation, “Illuminations viii” (La lucarne 129). How might this in-betweenness, this sense of heteroglossia, be translated into French?