Poetic License.(Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney translates Leos Janacek's 'Diary of One Who Vanished')(Interview)

Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney's new translation of Diary of One Who Vanished comes to New York

Twentieth-century writers of art songs turned to sources that would have been unimaginable to nineteenth-century composers. Darius Milhaud set trade-catalogue descriptions of agricultural machinery and flowers. Alexander Mossolov set newspaper advertisements, and both Charles Ives and Leos Janacek also found inspiration for songs in newspapers. The poems of Janacek's song cycle Zapisnik Zmizeleho (Diary of One Who Vanished) were published in Brno's Lidove Noviny (People's Paper) in 1916 as being "From the Pen of a Self-taught Writer," although the latest scholarly view is that they were actually the work of Moravian writer Ozef Kalda.

They tell of a young man's infatuation with a dark-eyed Gypsy girl and his eventual disappearance from home when he takes off with his newfound love. For the sixty-three-year-old Janacek, there actually was someone he regarded as a dark-eyed Gypsy in his life -- Kamila Stosslova, thirty-eight years his junior, whom he first met in 1917. In spite of much burning, more than 700 letters survive, and Janacek documented specific moments of the relationship in his Second String Quartet, Intimate Letters. The heroines of his operas reflect Kamila, as does Diary of One Who Vanished. "That's why there's such emotional heat in these works," he wrote to Kamila. "So much heat that if it caught both of us, there'd be just ashes left of us."

This spring, Lincoln Center's Great Performers series presents a staged performance of Diary of One Who Vanished, in a new translation by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. (Tenor Ian Bostridge, mezzo Ruby Philogene and pianist Julius Drake are the soloists, and Deborah Warner directs.) Heaney came to the Janacek cycle by accident -- through a call from the Netherlands at a time when he was laid up with one leg in plaster. He was sent the material, including a Czech recording of the songs, which he found "exquisite -- the music itself. And I looked at the material, and I could see why they thought of me. It's kind of `country boy and ploughs.' Yeah, there it goes. It's the package, all right. I simply listened and listened and tried as far as possible to make verse that would be singable as I could hear it.

"I think it was obviously the relationship with the woman that was the voltage in [Janacek's] attraction to the material. It must have been. I was interested also in the fact that it was, as it were, a local language, Janacek's own country-hearth speech. I gestured towards that a little bit here and there." So, instead of fledglings, Heaney's translation speaks of scaldies, and the tree in the hedge becomes the boor tree, "an Ulster Scots term, which I like to think eroticizes the elder as a `bower tree.'"

Heaney worked from what he calls "three cribs": one in Czech, "which I could look at"; one in German; and one in English. "They were all strictly, metrically, four-square quatrains. Now, I know that the distinction of Janacek and his genius is somehow to match cadence to rhythm and run of speech. I followed with my ear as far as possible what was happening in the Czech and bound it together to make it singable. My concern, to tell you the truth, was to write verse that was not embarrassing. I was concerned that someone who read verse would not say, `What's this stuff?' It's very risky. It's very conventional material." The true setting of the poems, he says, is "the clear and passionate land of `once upon a time,'" their ultimate home "the new country of melody and desire."

Writing singable verse is "a special art that a few poets have. I think Auden had it. Of course a number of the Elizabethans had it. Shakespeare had it -- to write verse that has texture and lambency and staying power without the music, but at the same time will fly, will lift, will go."