I had the rare privilege of knowing two of the greatest Irish poets of the last century. One was Seamus Heaney who died on August 30th, 2013. Seamus was head prefect during my first years at St Columb’s College, Derry many years ago. He saved my bacon by not reporting me when he caught me sneaking behind the handball alley, dodging a perilous Latin class. A token kick on the backside and Seamus let me go; ever the defender of good order but always with forbearance and generosity!
The other outstanding poet was Michael Longley, who died earlier this year.
I first met Michael high in the cloud-topped reaches of Nagano Prefecture in Japan when we were hosted by the Irish Literature Society of Japan. I was Irish Ambassador. He was guest poet and full of uplifting energy during a long weekend when Japanese and Irish were together confined in a remote mountain campus by mist, rain, sleet and threatened snow. He lightened our mood and ignited our wonder by laying out before us in poem after poem the grey-flagged marvels of the Burren, the fierce battlefields of Homer’s Troy and the precious, dishevelled memories of a bygone Belfast.
Like many Irish writers, both Heaney and Longley were fascinated by Japan. Heaney was a frequent and much acclaimed visitor. He was a very welcome guest at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and the Emperor and Empress made a point of calling on his Co Wicklow retreat during their state visit to Ireland in 2005.
Longley, in memory of his inclement mountain sojourn, named one of his most celebrated volumes The Weather in Japan. For this collection, he won the prestigious TS Eliot Poetry Prize in 2000 and became the inaugural winner in 2018 of the distinguished Japanese Yakamochi Poetry Award.
Importantly, Irish interest in Japan has been more than reciprocated by Japanese writers.
It began with Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the wandering Irish-Greek scholar, who introduced his Tokyo University students to a still emerging WB Yeats and the early collection of poems, The Wind among the Reeds. The Celtic otherworld of Yeats touched a chord with the resurgent Shinto imagination of a rapidly modernising Japan, loyal to a reinvigorated imperial inheritance and its founding myth of divine origins. Through their encounter with Yeats, Japanese writers came also in time to know Synge and Shaw, Joyce and Beckett.
The modern Japanese novelist and critic, Kenzaburo Oe, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, the year before Heaney. In his Stockholm acceptance speech, he identified Yeats “as the writer in whose wake I would most like to follow”. Samuel Beckett was also a big inspiration for a younger Oe as he was for many other Japanese writers of the postwar years. Beckett, for his part, like Yeats, was intrigued by the flamboyant minimalism of traditional Japanese Noh theatre and we find its echo throughout his work.
As for Joyce, he quickly found fame in Japan. Ulysses has been translated multiple times into Japanese and Finnegans Wake twice.
I was lucky to know the latter’s first translator, Naoki Yanase, who told me only half-jokingly that he nearly went mad midway through the project, confronted with its overwhelming scale. In the process, he created a masterpiece of Japanese literature in its own right, drawing on ornate and often antique Japanese written characters little in use to capture the music and mystery of Joyce’s multilayered meanings.
This translation won the admiration of a very senior Japanese industrial leader, Gaishi Hiraiwa, chairman of the powerful Employers’ Assosciation. He took delight in regularly inviting Yanase, myself and semistate colleagues for a traditional Japanese lunch and an obligatory reading from the text. Inevitably, we kept a chair vacant for the ghost of a somewhat bemused James Joyce, listening with curiosity and attention as commerce and artistry seamlessly combined.
Once in our Tokyo Embassy I found myself alone and answering the door to a woman university student looking for help in identifying a location in Northern Ireland. We were up to our eyes and ears at the time, in the wake of the terrible Kobe earthquake, preparing for a State visit by former president Mary Robinson. Given all the pressures we faced, I made the mistake of asking what the location was, only to be told it was Mossbawn, Seamus Heaney’s childhood home, As a Derryman and Heaney fan, I was hooked. I happily spent the next hour with a young Japanese student poring over a map of Co Derry in search of the townships and parishes beloved by the great poet.
It has to be said, of course, that in Japan and throughout Asia as a whole Ireland is at best dimly perceived by the general public as a small and remote European country with little or no historic Asian connections. At the same time, it is an extraordinary thing that the streets and pubs of Dublin city, the hills and lakes of Co Sligo, and the townlands and byways of south Derry have all become an essential part of the literary imagination of the world.
Irish diplomats owe an unpayable debt to Irish writers like Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley and countless others for giving our diplomacy a head start in distant countries where we have few ties and are barely known. Seamus especially has been unsurpassed as an ambassador of good will for our republic.
With his self -deprecating understatement and typical good humour, Heaney merits the last words: lines from the poem Villanelle of North West Orient 4, written as he tells us “shaken and jet- lagged” on the way back from his first visit to Japan:
Their word for mister is the suffix- san
Their cherry blossom is a perfect pink
Haikus in English hardly ever scan.
The bard should know. The bard was in Japan.
AloJapan.com