In partnership with Presents Yeats Reborn A seminar with readings and recitals October at in the Ireland Pavilion

Transcription

1 In partnership with Presents Yeats Reborn A seminar with readings and recitals October at in the Ireland Pavilion 1

2 Yeats Reborn commemorates the birth of William Butler Yeats who was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature in the English language. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923 was awarded to William Butler Yeats "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life. The Yeats Reborn project was launched by EFACIS as part of the celebrations to mark, in 2015, the150th anniversary of Yeats s birth. The project selected 34 poems written by Yeats which touched on the subject of death and rebirth. Through its extensive network, EFACIS invited, in an open competition, scholars from across Europe to translate poems from this selection into their own language. An expert panel was established, consisting of over 80 experts, to adjudicate on the quality of the translations and a shortlist was compiled of those which achieved the highest quality. The translations of those shortlisted will be published in a book which will be launched on December 4 th this year. The result of the project is more than 200 translations from 23 countries in 17 languages. The project has also resulted in the poems of William Butler Yeats being translated into some European languages for the first time. All of the translations will be posted on a dedicated website: 2

3 About EFACIS (ivzw) Legal Status and structure: EFACIS was founded in 1996 to promote interest in, and support the expansion of, Irish studies across Europe. In 2013 it was established as a not-for-profit international organisation under Belgian law with its official address in the historic Irish College, Leuven, Belgium. The association is managed by a board drawn from its members and elected at its annual general assembly which is open to all members. EFACIS Mission: 3 To promote Irish studies (in the broadest sense) in universities across Europe To provide a support network for regional/national associations of Irish Studies, centres of Irish studies and scholars active in the field of Irish studies. To encourage the development of new networks where they do not already exist in Europe. To encourage and support PhD students specialising in Irish studies to ensure an ongoing supply of teaching staff across Europe. To publish research work and increase access to relevant Irish material. Definition of Irish studies: For EFACIS Irish studies includes all aspects of the cultural life of the Island of Ireland including literature, history, the visual and performing arts including film, music and dance, socio-economic and political developments, the Irish language and Ulster Scots, philosophy, peace and reconciliation and the Irish diaspora Membership: Currently EFACIS has 500 active members engaged in research into and teaching of Irish studies in over 20 countries across Europe. Regional/National associations: EFACIS membership includes national associations in Spain and France; a regional association in Scandinavia which encourages cooperation between universities in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark; a network of universities in Central and Eastern Europe led from Prague; EFACIS is currently providing support for the development of a national network in Italy and works closely with the British national association BIAS. EFACIS is also encouraging universities in China to replicate the European model and establish a national association.

4 EFACIS Activities: Conferences Publications PhD seminars Website to facilitate networking and give access to material Irish Itinerary The Irish Itinerary is a series of clusters of universities across Europe to which EFACIS makes current-day cultural players - Irish writers, film makers, musicians, artists etc. available on tour. Their readings/performances are provided both to the universities and the local communities where the universities are based. Each cluster consists of 5 or 6 universities reasonably close to each other and the Irish Itinerary circuit would include 5 or 6 clusters each year. The circuit of clusters changes each year in order to spread participation as widely as possible. 4

5 Programme Sunday 18 th October Harp Musical Opening - Michael Scott setting of Yeats Welcome/Introduction (Irish studies in Europe): Sean Crosson, University College, Galway (EFACIS President) Readings - First one with harp underscore: Caitriona Yeats, Harp & Garvan McGrath, Actor The Yeats Reborn Project and reflections on Yeats: Hedwig Schwall, KU Leuven, Belgium (EFACIS board member) Musical interlude - Michael Scott piece 2 Readings Yeats in Italy: Chiara Sciarrino, University of Palermo (EFACIS board member) Harp Catriona Yeats performs on harp and reads Readings (some accompanied) Garvan McGrath The Yeats Year programme Senator Susan O Keefe Musical Finale - Michael Scott Piece 3 Closing remarks and reception John Kennedy Commissioner General, Ireland Pavilion, Expo Milan 5

6 W.B. Yeats s Convincing Conflicts, Hedwig Schwall, KULeuven : W.B. Yeats was a poet whose writings were generated by conflict: they often focused on the relations between the living and the dead, between material and spiritual life, between imagined and real life. In early poems like The Song of Wandering Aengus, Fergus and the Druid or The Rose of the World these relations are represented through the motif of metamorphosis, where past, present and future lives mix and mingle; in later work, like Leda and the Swan, this interaction of times is strongly eroticized. Interactions between life and death get more edge in the early The Ballad of Moll Magee where a poor woman kills her child out of despair and is driven out by her husband; unlike Aengus, her wandering is not driven by desire but by deepest sorrow. All people in Yeats s poetry are driven, especially the heroes of Easter 1916 : while they were ignited by excess of love, the poet says it is our part, our task, to keep that love alive. Yeats also believed that the excess of emotional energy a person had at death would linger and live itself out in the person s afterlife, and so he seemed bent on generating as much energy as possible from his own life. Maud Gonne was the perfect catalyst here: since Yeats had met her, he was a poète maudit and far gone. Not getting her drove him on Aengus path of desire of desire. This state of stretched desire may have sharpened the poet s sense of a spiritual reality that was palpable. We find this in The Withering of the Boughs, where dreams seem to have more impact on the boughs than the wintry wind. In He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven both the heavens' embroidered cloths and my dreams seem on a par; the beloved has to Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. While Yeats may have touched on a sentimental note in that poem, The Cold Heaven moves him to a different register: it may be Gonne s distance which drove Yeats to a lexicon of nakedness, coldness and exposure to lasting things, as we find later in his essays: all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. Ancient salt is best packing. The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death. ( A General Introduction for My Work, Essays and Introductions 522-3) When Nietzsche urged his readers to use all available contradictions of life to heighten the drama of existence this touched a deep chord in Yeats. He had actually been practising this inner drama all along, like when he used the pavements grey of London to intensify the nature scenes of his childhood into the summery Sligo scenes, summoned in The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Later, in The Tower, Yeats uses his indignation about the old battered kettle at the heel to fuel his imagination and make his song wilder than that of the young. This idea is further exfoliated in Sailing to Byzantium, itself a development of A Coat. Old age is played off against youth, war against peace. Indeed, in times of peace his speakers are wild, desiring what they do not have, as in The Wheel, What Then and An Acre of Grass. When war is looming and violence abounds the tone is more philosophical, as in Byzantium, Meditations in Time of Civil War and Lapis Lazuli. Likewise, honesty is pitched against authority in Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop where the overbearing and yet strongly sexualized speech of the Bishop is successfully mocked by the Hag of Beare- like Jane. In the light of such self-dramatizing poetics it is no wonder that the Dialogue poem is one of Yeats s favourites. A Dialogue of Self and Soul summarizes the poet s whole programme of the reliving of one s life: 6

7 I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul. At every stage of his life Yeats sought a new pitch and each time it demanded a change of style. In his last period the poet wrote quite a few poems about his poetics, one of which states that a poet should never let himself be inspired by politics, he should only Seek those images/ That constitute the wild ( Those Images ). In High Talk he is more precise: he has to keep away from (pre)modernist rhetorics and from any kind sensationalism that might go with it. Instead, he must go beyond the fashion of his own age to touch upon the deathly cold where barnacle goose fly and great sea-horses swim: only there will he find a new language to forge a new unconscious for his world in some terrible novelty of light. Indeed throughout his long writing career Yeats has picked up, tried and dropped masks, coats, stilts; he has dived deep down into the self to find the monsters in his darker self which gave him this authentic voice. Time and again, in his Autobiographies, Mythologies, Essays and Introductions, he pleads for honesty as the only way to find a way forward in the complexities of our human existence. If his art is honest it will give him the discipline to coral all his selves into a poem which will be vibrant with connotations. Many translators have said it that it was the layeredness of Yeats s texts which had most appealed to them. A translator of Yeats must get his/her b(e)arings, and each of them tried to render the complexity of their rhythms, references and connotations. It seems as if the brave and never-ending interaction between the poet s conflicting selves and souls is still reverberating in his texts. These will now find further echoes throughout the whole of Europe, thanks to the work of those who are participating in the project. 7