Seamus Heany translating Sophocles'Antigone

A friend of mine loved to describe a cartoon he had either seen or imagined. The setting is an Elizabethan alehouse, with the Globe Theatre just visible through an open door. In one corner, pale forehead in his left hand, poised quill in the right, sits a well-known contender from Stratford; in an opposite corner, tankard clasped in both his hands, sits a resentful Ben Jonson, with a "thinks" cloud over his head that reads: "Of course, of course. Will doing the work of the imagination."

It was a good spin on Yeats's famous phrase and a good illustration of Jonson's famous competitiveness, but not so good as a take on Shakespeare. By Jonson's own admission, there was nothing voulu about Shakespeare's lines: his imagination was constantly in spate and as far as Jonson was concerned, it flowed altogether too copiously. Shakespeare, he thought, would have been better employed revising his stuff than reeling it out.

Shakespeare, as far as we know, didn't need to think twice. The problem identified once upon a time by Philip Larkin - of the discrepancy that often exists between the poems we would wish to write and the poems we are given to write - doesn't appear to have existed for him. According to the actors: "His mind and his hand went together." He possessed in abundance that "boldness in face of the blank sheet" which Pasternak regarded as the sine qua non of genius.

It is probably the sine qua non of translation also, especially the translation of poetry or poetic drama. Getting started on a verse translation is in some respects not all that different from original composition. In order to get the project under way, there has to be a note to which the lines, and especially the first lines, can be tuned. Until this register is established, your words may well constitute a fair rendition of the paraphrasable meaning, but they cannot induce the necessary sensation of being on the right track, musically and rhythmically.

Readers recognise this rightness too. They take vicarious pleasure in the promise of openings such as "It is an ancient mariner/ And he stoppeth one of three" or "I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree". In such cases, you know that when the poets wrote the lines, they could have said what DH Lawrence says at the start of his Song of a Man Who Has Come Through: "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me ..." Or, to put it another way, and in the words of a different poet, the gift of the right opening helps the poet and the translator of poetry to escape from what Robert Lowell called "the glassy bowing and scraping of [the] will" into the "maze of composition", led by an "incomparable wandering voice".

When Lowell wrote that, he was thinking of Racine, whom he called a "man of craft", but one who was helped beyond craft when he found a voice for the heroine of his 17th-century tragedy, Phèdre. At that point, the poetry he wished to write suddenly became the poetry he was given to write, so he was up and away.

There's no comparison between Racine's French classic and the job of translation I did on Sophocles' Antigone a couple of years ago - a commission from the Abbey Theatre - but there was at least this one thing in common: I was able to start into the maze of composition only after I heard an incomparable voice. Until that happened, the head was in one hand and the pen in the other, but there was nothing doing. The sheet stayed blank.

One consideration, however, was weighing heavily in favour of a new start. Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon figure if ever there was one: a law and order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his. With the White House and the Pentagon in cahoots, determined to bring the rest of us into line over Iraq, the passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as vital as oxygen masks.

For weeks, I had been reading desultorily about the play in various essays and introductions, my eyes glazing over as again and again the familiar topics came swimming up: individual conscience versus civil power, men versus women, the domestic versus the public sphere, the relevance of the action at different times of crisis in France, in Russia, in Poland, in Northern Ireland - of course, of course, of course. But why do it again? Indeed, how do it again, if there was no tuning fork?

I've written elsewhere what happened next: all of a sudden I heard a note being struck in my head and inside seconds I had the pen in my hand and had done a number of the opening lines. Purchase on a language, a confidence amounting almost to a carelessness, a found pitch - all arrived in a breath. "Not I, not I," I could have exclaimed, "but the wind that blows through me." What had got me going was not study of the text or of the criticism surrounding it, but the words and rhythms of another work entirely.

The tuning fork sounded when I remembered the opening lines of one of the most famous poems in the Irish language, Eíbhlin Dhubh Ní Chonaill's Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire/ Lament for Art O'Leary.

My love and my delight,

The day I saw you first

Beside the markethouse

I had eyes for nothing else

And love for none but you

This stricken, urgent keen for a murdered husband, beaten out in line after three-stressed line, gave me the note I needed for the anxious, cornered Antigone at the start of the play. The wife in desperation provided a register for the desperate sister. Inside a couple of minutes I had the first sample lines to show to the artistic director:

Ismene, quick, come here!

What's to become of us?

Why are we always the ones?

From that point onwards, I had a purchase on the actual writing, and took pleasure in it. Years before I'd made a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, but mostly in blank verse, which came more and more to feel just like a container for the sense: there was never any great job of fashioning being done. Whereas in the case of Antigone, as a result of that opening donné, I had the idea of making different metrical provisions for different characters and this meant a far greater sensation of working at a verbal face. There was an ongoing line-by-line, eye-to-hand engagement with the material. First came the three-stress line for exchanges between the sisters, then a surge into more or less Anglo-Saxon metre for the chorus, then another change of register into blank verse, but blank verse that was dramatic and suited to the character of Creon rather than simply a metronome.

Antigone is poetic drama, but commentary and analysis had turned it into political allegory. What I wanted to point up was the anthropological dimension of Sophocles' work: I didn't want the production to end up as just another opportunistic commentary on the Iraq adventure, and that was why I changed the title.

I called my version The Burial at Thebes partly because "burial" signals immediately to a new audience what the central concern of the play is going to be: a contest involving the rights of the dead and the laws of the land. But mainly I changed the title because "burial" is also a word that has not yet been divorced from primal reality. It still recalls to us our destiny as members of a mortal species and reminds us, however subliminally, of the need to acknowledge and allow the essential dignity of every human creature. It implies respect for the coffin, wherever it is being carried, whatever flag is draped over it, whatever community is crying out alongside it. It emphasises, in other words, what Hegel emphasised about Antigone, those "Instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship" which authority must honour and obey if it is not to turn callous.

An extract:

Burial at Thebes

Chorus

Love that can't be withstood,
Love that scatters fortunes,
Love like a green fern shading
The cheek of a sleeping girl.
Love like spume off a wave
Or turf-smoke in the air,
Love, you wield your power
Over mortal and immortal
And you put them mad.

Love leads the good astray,
Plays havoc in heart and home;
You, love, here and now
In this tormented house
Are letting madness loose.
The unabashed gaze of a bride
Breeds desire and danger.
Eternal, sexual, smiling,
The goddess Aphrodite
Is irresistible.
Love mounts to the throne with law.

(Antigone is led in under guard.)

But the law and all it stands for
Cannot hold back my tears.
Antigone, you are a bride,
Being given away to death.

Antigone

Given away to death!
Remember this, citizens.
I am linked on Hades' arm,
Taking my last look,
My last walk in the light.
Soon the sun will go out
On a silent, starless shore
And Hades will step aside.
He will give me to Acheron,
Lord of the pitch-black lake,
And that bridegroom's cold hand
Will take my hand in the dark.

Chorus

Steadfast Antigone,
Never before did Death
Open his stone door
To one so radiant.
You would not live a lie.
Vindicated, lauded,
Age and disease outwitted,
You go with head held high.

Antigone

I am like Niobe,
Niobe turned to stone
In the thawing snow and rain,
A rock that weeps forever
Like ivy in a shower
Sluicing down the ridge
Of high Mount Sipylus.

Chorus

Niobe was immortal,
Sky-born, far beyond us,
For we are born of the earth.
But someone as glorious
In life and in death as you
Can also seem immortal.

Antigone

Stop. Enough. Don't mock.
Wait, at least, till I'm gone.
I am still in life, and I dread
To leave our groves and springs.
O fortunate men of Thebes,
O my Thebes of the chariots,
Farewell. I am going away
Under my rock-piled roof.
No mourner waits at the mound.
I'll be shut in my halfway house,
Unwept by those alive,
Unwelcomed as yet by the dead.

Chorus

Ah, child, you were carried away
But now you're halted and hauled
Before implacable Justice,
Paying, perhaps, in your life
For the past life of your father.

Antigone

There. You have hit home.
Over and over again
Because I am who I am
I retrace that fatal line
And the ghastly love I sprang from.
My father weds his mother.
He mounts her. Me and mine,
His half-sisters and brothers,
Are born in their sullied bed.
These are the stricken dead
I go to meet in Hades.

Chorus

You go because you were noble.
Nobility mitigates
The offence you gave; but power
And everyone who wields it
Will brook no opposition.
You were headstrong and self-willed
And now you suffer for it.

· Burial at Thebes, a translation by Seamus Heaney, was specially commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004 (March 31 to May 1) and will be published by Faber on March 4.

[It's been done, then, good for us :)]