'a little passport'

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And then how did you find the tone and the voice for your own translation? I read that a word, is it "polean," helped you.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, well, this poem is written down, but it is also clearly a poem that was spoken out. And it is spoken in a very dignified, formal way. And I got the notion that the best voice I could hear it in was the voice of an old countryman who was a cousin of my father's who was not, as they say, educated, but he spoke with great dignity and formality. And I thought if I could write the translation in such a way that this man-- Peter Scullion was his name--could speak it, then I would get it right. That's, in fact, how I started it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you found words that had actually been words that you knew from childhood, right?

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, that's right. My aunt used a word. In fact, all the people around the district, in the countryside, use words that I gradually began to realize the more I read were Anglo-Saxon words. They would say, for example, of people who had suffered some bereavement, "well, they just have to thole." And they would say it to you when they're putting the poultice on your hand that was burning, "you'll have to thole this, child."

Now thole... "Thole" means "to suffer," but it's there in the glossaries of Anglo-Saxon, "tholian." So between the secret dialect speech of my home ground and the upper level discourse of the Anglo-Saxon textbook in university, there was this commerce. And I felt my own ear, my own language lived between... lived between that country-speak and learned-speak, and therefore, that I had some way of translating it, of carrying over from one to the other. I felt there was, like, a little passport into translating it, you know.

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