This essay investigates two of Seamus Heaney’s translations, The Cure at
Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), teasing out their relationship to
his aesthetic philosophy and the parallels present with Lacanian and
Derridean analyses of symbolic and ethical structures. The epigraph above
provides an appropriate starting point for considering this topic, because it
suggests that the effects of a poem go beyond the boundary of the written
page, which is one of a series of boundary crossings that will be discussed in
this essay. Beginning with Heaney’s positioning of the space of poetry
outside of social and political concerns, it will be argued that these
translations are analogous with his artistic philosophy: in The Cure at Troy
through the ideas expressed in its language, and in The Burial at Thebes
through the events of the plot, which provide a symbolic counterpoint to
Heaney’s concept of the space of poetry. This outside space will be explored
firstly in relation to Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, in
which he argues that the general principle of justice is located outside of
juridicial and legal structures, echoing the moral debates of the play. It will
also be analysed in relation to Jacques Lacan’s commentary on Antigone in
Seminar VII. Lacan proposes that Antigone, on which Heaney’s translation is
based, dramatizes an individual crossing from the realm of language and law
into an intermediary space between life and death; transgressing the symbolic
order and moving into the liminal space of the second death
