Translation Or Creation

It was since 1970s that the cultural turning of translation studies emerged in Western translation circles. From then on, translation studies started to move from the microscopic level of linguistics towards the macroscopic level of context, history and culture, which meant to cast off the studies on the normativity of translation standards and turned to the concern about the relationships between the culture and the translation. Since the pursuit of objectivity seems to be impossible, the subjectivity of the translator began to rise up, which became the focus of the researchers. Meanwhile, translation is also highlighted and regarded by the post-colonial researchers as a new style of literary creation as well as a series of metaphors about the identification.Seamus Heaney (1939-) is a North Irish Poet famous for his poetry and translations. He is not only a great Irish poet since W. B. Yeats, but also an outstanding critic and translator. However, his translations and achievements is fully understood only when they are under the dual historical context of western Imperialism and colonialism as well as the creation of post-colonialism and politic culture studies. Absent from the fixed idea of literary canons, he embedded dialects into translation, and almost rewrote the canons, and thus gave a second birth to those canons, which fulfilled the attempt of rebuilding the subject of Ireland and national identification. It was through translation and creation that Heaney proved to English-speaking world that the subjectivity of a nation was a single being as well as a cultural construction. The subjectivity of an intellectual and the one of a nation was a modern Janus. Translation, as the indirect method, could help to make the fusion of an individual and a nation and the idea of rebuilding the subjectivity of a weak nation come true.Considering the blanks in Heaney studies, focusing on the Heaney's famous translations such as Beowulf, The Cure at Troy as well as Sweeney Astray and his poems, combined with the theories of Jacques Derrida, Theo Hermans, Maria Tymoczko, Tejaswini Niranjana, Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, this article will show the analysis of how Heaney tried to use different texts to illuminate, how he turned them into the resources of local thoughts and use them to interpret the importance of the translation and history to the production of the subject of a nation, how Heaney became the model of the post-colonial studies, and the importance of his cultural practices to the national discourse of Ireland and European theory of translation.