Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture: a note on the germane, but unspoken.

The is an interesting instance and moment in Seamus Heaney's Nobel lecture: the guttural.


I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot.


What he gives us one layer below, is the Irish sympathy - the sympathies in Dublin and elsewhere - for the German national project in opposition to the British.  Heinrich Böll's  Irisches Tagebuch for County Mayo did make such mention, if my memory serves me ... and Heaney would later choose Dublin as his stepping stone.  The gutturals of which he spoke - unlike the mere strident sibilants - cannot be passed over - the poet was choosing his memorable words, official words (Heinrich Böll's prize came 23 years earlier, and not for poetry.) The "sweep" and the "short bursts" cannot be ignored in this reading.

"Wideness" is in keeping with a German linguistic tendency - and "wide" itself comes to us from the same root as the Dutch and the German words.  The "wideness" of language and the world.  Not the "wise" and the "wisdom".

And one such point of arrival was Dublin.  He came out of Casteldawson, County Londonderry.  Here is how he begins his lecture:

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm


Here is the Gailic: Gearmáinis, the word for things German — and a translation for germane might be?

For one of my many "german cousins", the late Heather Elaine Solomon, née Shiplett/Shifflet, a McKay or Mackay, a Coles/Scott, a Bahá'í and a teacher in the Canadian Arctic, a student of sociology and a believer in the good in mankind.