'the Digging Skeleton After Baudelaire', Seamus Heaney (Critical Essay‪)‬

'The Digging Skeleton After Baudelaire' rests between 'Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces' and 'Bone Dreams' in North (1975). (1) It is a poem not much noticed by readers, as far as I can discern, and one never chosen by its author for inclusion in any of the selections from his works. It is a version of 'Le Squelette Laboureur' from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) that Seamus Heaney has included in a book of poems concerned primarily with understanding imaginatively the North of Ireland in relation to the bloody, violent history of northern Europe. The Parisian setting and the surreal image of what Baudelaire calls 'ces mysterieuses horreurs', skeletons doomed to dig barren soil for all eternity, may seem surprising and, at a superficial reading, included only because of its ghoulish subject matter in a book preoccupied with death, bones, and excavated human remains. However, it has rightly been observed that 'Baudelaire's poetry concerns us much more, and much more valuably, by its strangeness than by its familiarity: its authentic relation to us is its remoteness. (2) It is surely these qualities of otherness and immediacy that captured Heaney's imagination. On first acquaintance, 'The Digging Skeleton' may strike the reader as a melodramatic tour de force. Like many of the lyrics in Les Fleurs du Mal it has the appeal of the strange, the weird, the exotic, even the outrageous, qualities that made its author the scourge of the contemporary French literary establishment and a hero to the avant garde. No doubt some of these characteristics appealed to Heaney as they had appealed to one of his most influential mentors, Robert Lowell. Heaney, as we see elsewhere, has a relish for translating or, more properly, creating his own versions (what Lowell referred to as 'imitations') of dramatic narratives as, for example, his translations of Inferno xxxii-iii, 'Ugolino' from Field Work (1979), his accounts of the Sweeney legends from the Irish, and his rendering of Beowulf (1999). His achievement in all of these and in many other instances is that he manages to be faithful both to the detail and to the spirit of the texts translated whilst accommodating them to his own preoccupations. Heaney's remakings (3), at their best, echo faithfully the voices of the originals while modulating their details and idioms to his own. Such is the case with 'The Digging Skeleton', a poem that marks the 'continued life' (4) of Baudelaire's text and, at the same time, is informed by his sense of his role as a poet in a community fractured by sectarian strife and violence. In this regard, it may be read as a signature piece that reveals ways of seeing and feeling that characterize some of the more celebrated lyrics in North. Indeed, it is informed by the emotional and moral pressures that lie behind much of the poetry that he wrote during the 1970s.