The Rack-Brain Pencil-Push of hurt-in-hiding: Translating the Poetry of Seamus Heaney into Slovene

Abstract

The paper raises the issue of the Slovene possibilities of translating culture-, politics-, and language-specific poetic texts of the Irish author Seamus Heaney. The inquiry has been triggered by the unfavourable response to the poet’s work in Slovenia, which is all the more telling in light of other modern Irish writers, especially dramatists, who have lately gained firm ground and acquired sympathy from the Slovene public. Our comparison of Heaney’s poems with their Slovene translations is, therefore, aimed at elucidating the main reasons for such a tepid response, drawing mainly on a variety of the Slovene stylistic, linguistic, and pragmatic interpretations of his poetic output, which happen to be more often than not at variance with the author’s intrinsic poetic output and thus the chief culprit in the misapprehension of his poetic communique.