Linguistic hybridity as constituted in translation can not only braid together multiple cultural identities but also proclaim these as markers of assurance that underlie the contemporary writer's voice. This is a characteristic of Seamus Heaney's version of the Antigone, The Burial at Thebes. Seamus Heaney's occupation of classical ground as a means of crossing and redefining intra-cultural faultlines in Ireland is a phased process in his work refined in The Burial at Thebes in a process that builds on the poems in his earlier collections, including Spirit Level (1996) and Electric Light (2001) in both of which he moves to the field of classical poetry to work out aspects of his poetic and political relationship with the tensions in Irish history.

Heaney's 'classical ground' is thus a complex and shifting site. In The Burial at Thebes, which he himself describes as 'a version not a translation' he uses a number of translation strategies to enable him both to follow the Sophocles text quite closely and at the same time to develop a poetic diction that reflects the interplay of strands in the Irish/English literary tradition. Heaney is sensitive to the linguistic and ideological strands that have contributed to the development of Hiberno-English. These include Anglo-Saxon and Latin as well as Irish and Ulster Scots. Ireland is unique among colonized countries in having a classical tradition that was associated with European and Irish culture and preceded colonial domination by the English, so classicizing elements in the English language were not necessarily perceived as alien to Irish culture. When in the nineteenth century English increasingly became the literary vernacular, the concern of Irish writers was more with transplanting the idioms of Irish into English. Michael Cronin described this as 'a transition from translation as an act of exegesis to translation as an agent of aesthetic and political renewal. This could also serve as a comment on Heaney's versions of Greek plays which bring together literary traditions in English, Hiberno-English, and Irish and mark Greek theatre and its conventions as a site for a convergence and reciprocal engagement that recognizes but is not constrained by the linguistic conflicts and cultural and ideological fissures of the intertwined histories of Ireland and England.

A key element in Heaney's approach in Burial was to use as mediators translations by classical scholars, notably R. C. Jebb and H. Lloyd Jones. However, there were differences in his approach--They had a scholarly discipline to obey. I, on the other hand, did want to give the substance of the meaning, but my first consideration was speakability. I also wanted different registers, in the musical sense, for different characters in the play. You could say mine is a parallel text.' However, in approaching the story of Antigone, Heaney also drew on an eighteenth-century Irish lament, Eibhlin Dhibh Ni Chonaill's Caonineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire (Lament for Art O'Leary), the tale of a woman whose husband had been shot and left to rot at the roadside by the British. From this poem Heaney transplanted the three-beat line used for Antigone's protest and established the resonances between the Irish tradition of keening and the women's role in funeral ritual in ancient Greece. For the Chorus he also drew on the rhythms and diction of Anglo-Saxon epic. So the multiple cultural strands running through the poetics of Heaney's dramatic text served as a proclamation of the confidence of an Irish cultural identity that drew on all these. The combination of translation techniques that he used created a palimpsest of cultural layers and spheres of relevance for the story of Antigone as well as a 'braiding' of language that reflected the intra-culturality of Irish/English resister and idiom and its histories.

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