Seamus Heaney, _The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes_

 WONDERING WHAT DREW Heaney to this play, I figured it must have had something to do with Ireland. The translation of Dante and the Dantean influence in Station Island have something to do with Ireland, I feel sure--the Ugolino episode evokes civil conflict, betrayal, and the thirst for revenge: the main ingredients of most literature about the Troubles, from Juno and the Paycock and The Informer and The Hostage up to The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Cal and Milkman.

So is there something Irish about Philoctetes? Betrayal? The nursing of grievance? The passing along of grievance, the legacy of injury, to the next generation?

I'm guessing it's the hope for reconciliation that drew Heaney to the play. The story, briefly: Ten years ago, on the way to Troy to reclaim Helen, the Greeks marooned one of their warriors, Philoctetes, because he had an incurable wound in his foot so putrid-smelling that his presence was intolerable. Now, however, they learn from an oracle that they will never take Troy unless they have Philoctetes' bow. Odysseus recruits the now-dead Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, to gain Philoctetes' trust, obtain the bow, and skedaddle back to Troy.

Philoctetes, who is still on that island with his suppurating foot, is still angry at the Greeks and will do nothing to help them voluntarily. Neoptolemus does win his trust...but then feels bad about misleading him. He wants to bring to Troy not just the bow, but Philoctetes himself. He wants a reconciliation. 

And the point of The Cure at Troy is that such a reconciliation can happen; the seemingly impossible yet deeply hoped-for thing can occur. This leads to the lines of the play, spoken by the chorus, that Joe Biden often quotes:

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Is this about Ireland? The Cure at Troy was published in 1991, quite a while before the Good Friday Accords. Is it about 1989, about what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia? Heaney was acquainted with Milosz, I believe, possibly with Havel. 

The "hope and history rhyme" line is a striking one, which made me wonder how others had translated it.  Turns out it is not a translation at all, but all Heaney. At least, the choral song in which it occurs near the end of the play did not show up in the first three English translations I found. Heaney wanted it there, which, I suspect, tells us a lot about what he found in the play. Or maybe wanted, or hoped, or needed to find in the play, even if he had to write the passage that embodied it himself.