A few days back I mentioned the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the context of historical wrongs that refuse to be healed. I’m moving my desk in, and the yellowed clipping fell from a drawer. I’m afraid I don’t know the source for this interview, which is not online, but it is a conversation with Heaney about a play he had written.
I [felt that] a play about a person with a wound, who is resentful and refuses to yield up the wound, who hugs the wound, and hugs the resentment, and hugs the isolation, and hugs distrust, obviously a play like that has applications in a situation like Northern Ireland. There each side, Protestant or Catholic, feels itself in different contexts [to be] a minority, feels itself ill-done-by, feels itself betrayed….So what you have is the sense of identity getting tied up with the sense of betrayal, and the sense of identity and integrity getting tied up with the refusal to be healed. The dream is that you might loosen all that, that it might thaw. This play was written–I mean I translated it–just after the events of late 1989: the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and so on, so there was a feeling of possibility in the air. So, this is the Chorus speaking about the possibilities of changes after the psyche has got hardened:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard
No poem or play or son
Can fully right a wrong…
Hmmm. Beautiful. Oh, Annapolis!
