METAPOETIC SELF-DIGGING TO MUSIC: THE METATEXTUAL PARADOXICALITY AND APPROPRIATENESS OF THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY AND TED HUGHES (BASED ON THE POEMS “DIGGING”, “THE THOUGHT-FOX” AND “OPUS 131 IN C SHARP MINOR”)

Abstract

The article examines the poetic(al) and poetological regularities of the metatextual basis of the artistic writing as a way of authorial reflection, when the text itself refers to the author’s word about it to establish self-identity as a category of cognition. The approaches from idealistic theory to empirical practice and from creative authenticity to formalized academicism as prerequisites of the method determine the foundations of a complex worldview genesis in the metapoetic work of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, two representatives of the new generation of the English-language postmodernist tradition. The translations of the poems “Digging”, “The Thought-Fox” and “Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor” proposed by the author of the article as well as their introspective analysis offer an insight into metatextuality through the historical and cultural prism of intermediality, in particular from the musical and cinematographic perspective, which position poets as mediums endowed with the ability to transform both individual introspection into collective energy, and linguistic and anthropological artifacts into universal archetypes. The article takes the form of an implicit polylogue between the poets and the world of metamorphoses, figurative and expressive components of the postmodernist metanarrative, which revisit the function and potence of the poetic diction as part of a cult, ritualized by the native Anglo-Saxon and Celtic neo-pagan tradition at the level of initiation, which, by exhausting the medium channel, guarantees the restoration of the original source. The poetry of Heaney and Hughes appears as a paradoxical antithesis to the post-structuralist pragmatism of the languistic game, instead gravitating towards the reformulation of the socio-cultural paradigm of anthropological and hermeneutic universalism and dialecticism despite their idealistically questionable relativism. The article is focused on the debatable aspect of the canonicity or suggestiveness of the author’s style and the authorial semantics, which are conditioned by a complex transpersonal approach to autobiographical issues and critical rhetoric of art.