Seamus Heaney's Antigone, Translation and Tranposition: From The Abbey Theatre to The Globe via the Caribbean

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney has used translation in the past as a means of examining political situations from an oblique angle. His earlier translation of Philoctetes (which was performed as The Cure at Troy for the Field Day Theatre) was very clearly a comment on the political situation in the North of Ireland. One of the most memorable quotes from the play “Making hope and history rhyme” has become a catchphrase used by artists and politicians alike. Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott have long association, dating back to their days on the faculty at Harvard in the 1980’s. This paper will examine Heaney’s translation of Antigone and determine how and why Walcott chose to transpose it to the Carribean. It will also examine the use of language in the translation and illustrate how Heaney and Walcott are together at an ironical distance from “the English tradition of English literature and of English culture. Because I’m doing English in Belfast and he’s doing English in St Lucia” as Heaney put it in an interview given before the premier of the opera in 2008.