The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson, translated by Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber, £12.99; 208pp Buy the book

Collected Poems read by by Seamus Heaney
RTEF/Faber, £50 Buy the book

Seamus Heaney is celebrating his 70th birthday year in style, having attained what he calls “my apotheosis as the vox in the box”: a 15 CD set of his own readings of all 11 books of his poems. The icing on the cake is a new book of deft translations of the 15th-century Scot Robert Henryson. “A poet whose knowledge of life is matched by the range of his art, whose constant awareness of the world's hardness and injustice is mitigated by his irony, tender-heartedness, and ever-ready sense of humour” fits Heaney nicely. In fact it is his own accolade to Henryson.

Heaney relishes old influences on our language: he has cherry-picked from Gaelic and Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Latin. When he first translated a Henryson fable he loved the way that it reminded him of “the hidden Scotland at the back of my own ear”, and “developed a strong inclination to hum along with him”. Rooted in the Derry farm of his Ulster childhood, then branching into the scholarly worlds of Belfast, Harvard, Oxford and Dublin, he might well feel an affinity with Henryson, who rose from anonymous roots in the Fife countryside to teach at Glasgow University around 1462, and later settled at Dunfermline, dying in about 1500.

“Henryson is a narrative poet whom you read not only for the story but for the melody of understanding in the story-telling voice” Heaney says. He “belongs in the eternal present of the perfectly pitched”, a poet whose voice “can modulate from insinuation to instruction, from high-toned earnestness to wily familiarity”.

Suiting his selection to Henryson's aside that “scholars say it is most profitable/ To mix the merry in with graver matter:/ it makes the spirit lift and time goes quicker”, Heaney couples a sad mini epic with retellings of seven of Aesop's fables. Testament of Cresseid was both homage and sequel to Chaucer's tale of how Troilus loved then lost his adored Cressida to the Greek hero Diomede. It begins with the poet feeling his age, stoking up his fire and taking a tot to lift his spirits, before he embarks on a gloomy poem well suited to the freezing Lent season: how Cressida got her comeuppance. Cast off by Diomede, she becomes “as men say, available” in the Greek camp until she manages to return home to her father.

But then she makes the mistake of cursing Venus and Cupid. Cue a grand pageant of the Olympian superheroes who condemn her to be hideously disfigured by leprosy. She is begging from a lazar house when one day, in one of the most moving episodes in medieval literature, Troilus passes by. “And at a glance it came into his thought/ That he some time before had seen her face”. Neither quite recognises the other, but each is agonisingly reminded of their one-time love.

Like Heaney, Henryson wears his learning lightly, often writing in the first person, and using down-to-earth details. “Giddy young ones, with their minds on nothing/ But swanking in the street and being seen/ Have little interest in their besoming”. He loved a good moral, expanding each fable with an arresting Christian interpretation, which Heaney shows is not unsuited to our own times: “The drive to own possessions makes men blind./ Avarice rampant is renamed success./ But they forget the carter comes behind/ To spoil the sport and void what they invest”.

So that we can appreciate Henryson's original words and Heaney's translations to the full, the book is arranged with the original on the lefthand pages and Heaney on the right. Since Henryson's language is far from opaque, it is a brave move, daring readers to nitpick over what is retained and what replaced. Do I like “Summer comes in his garment green and cheerful,/ Every hem and pleating flounced with flowers” more than “The Somer with his jolie mantill green,/ With flouris fair furrut in everilk fent”? But time and again Heaney improves on his source (“shady rooms best suit the fly-by-night” for “for commonly such pykers luff not licht”) and what the nitpickers lose is the big picture, the rollicking rhyme that Heaney retains so well.

Listening to Heaney reading his life's work on the Collected Poems CD set is a reminder of how strong his appeal to the auditory imagination has always been, from the Joycean first line (“Between my finger and thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun”) to the end of his last poem to a blackbird (“Hedge-hop, I am absolute for you ... On the grass when I arrive, in the ivy when I leave”). Hopefully we will soon get a recording by Heaney of Henryson.

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