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The idea behind our project was simple but important. It offered
us a way of understanding how a literary text is produced and
then endlessly re-produced through translation, adaptation, or
simply being taught through a different medium in a different
culture. Our objective was two-fold: to work together in exploring
the idea of cross-currents in literatures; and then to construct
in each institution a part-module based on this idea, and to teach
it to our own or incoming Erasmus students.
Again one of the extraordinary things about our project was the
way in which it seemed to mirror the grander European project.
We had found an idea but we were now in search of a structure
or a course which would articulate that idea. The idea of a unified
European consciousness or culture has been around a long time.
T.S. Eliot has referred to “the mind of Europe”. But how easy
was it for an individual to feel that he was a part of it, if
there was such a thing? Or how easy was it for an individual to
feel “a citizen of Europe”? We had all been brought up on the
language of a strictly national identity and we could all think
of examples to illustrate the point. One of my own favourite examples
stems from the great Latin poet Virgil (70-19B.C). In the third
book of the Georgics, Virgil makes an intimate connection between
his art and his place of origin: “Primus ego in patriam mecum…..
deducam Musas”; “for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring
the Muse into my country.” For Virgil the word “patria” here meant,
not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood
on the Minicio where the poet was born. Virgil wanted to make
his art responsive to and loyal to his place of origin, the local
or (to use a more modern word) the parish. To this day when Italians
use the expression “la nostra terra” they mean, not the nation
to which they in theory belong, but the local place of origin
which commands their primary loyalty.
Such simple examples can be replicated in every European country
and they testify to the deeply-rooted loyalty which the local
and the national continue to command from us. Equally, however,
there exists in all of us a sense of connection with experiences
and cultural expressions which are rooted in other places and
which ‘belong’ to other groups. To return to Virgil. In the magisterial
Divina Commedia Dante makes constant reference to Virgil as his
mentor and literary guide. Although Dante was expelled from his
native Florence, he created a language which formed the basis
of the national language of all of Italy. More than that Dante’s
voice echoes down the centuries in every other national European
literature. It would be impossible to define the mind of Europe
without fully acknowledging the influence of Dante.
If I follow the trail from Virgil to Dante into the area of my
own teaching and professional interests, I am led inevitably to
the work of one of the most important of living Irish poets: Seamus
Heaney. In his translation of parts of the Divina Commedia Heaney
accompanies Dante and Virgil into the Inferno where he must bear
witness to atrocity and revulsion. In this way Heaney establishes
a revealing imaginative connection between the horror of the medieval
Italian inferno and the nightmare of modern Irish history.
All of us working on the project thought of such a connection
as a cross-current, a shared imaginative energy, which flowed
between writers and replenished them. The energy was not only
‘writerly’ but cultural. It had to be acknowledged and understood
by the reader and the teacher, and in being acknowledged, it changed,
no matter how minutely, the ways in which we might think of our
national literatures and our national cultures. Our hope was that,
by tracing such connections in an educational context, we would
make it impossible for our students to think of ‘their’ literatures
as independent, self-sufficient territories.
To the question “how easy is it for the individual to feel part
of the mind of Europe,” Seamus Heaney gives an exemplary and instructive
answer. He told Richard Kearney in an interview in 1992: “if you
grow up in Northern Ireland, you have the whole mind of Europe
there around you.” And he then goes on to enumerate the different
and conflicting European influences traceable in the Northern
Irish landscape: Ireland, Denmark, the Reformed Church, pre-Reformation
Catholicism and, finally, the affinities between Irish writers
and certain Eastern European writers. And yet Heaney is also a
profoundly local writer whose work can be read as a map of Ireland
and especially Northern Ireland. Place names are everywhere recorded
and generally lovingly described: Mossbawn, Anahorish, Broagh,
Lough Neagh, Glanmore. In Heaney’s work to be Irish is to be European
and vice-versa. |
