The Testament of Cresseid

Limited Edition. Numbered and Signed. No 374 of 425.

Seamus Heaney’s vivid and eloquent retelling of the most celebrated poem by the Scottish Chaucerian Robert Henryson (c.1420 –c.1490) is perfect material for an artistic collaboration with Hughie O’Donoghue, whose own sense of history and narrative is central to his work. The Testament of Cresseid takes up the story of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, focusing on the moral and social dramas facing the abandoned Cresseid at Troy. Heaney has known and admired the Henryson text for many years, finding himself entirely ‘in tune with [Henryson’s] pace and pitch’, and with ‘a strong inclination to hum along with him’. Not long after completing his best-selling version of Beowulf he started translating The Testament of Cresseid, prompted by the sight of a Henryson manuscript at the British Library. He soon found that ‘the job was its own reward. The sweet pain of searching for rhymes and trying to naturalize rhythms, the inevitable fallings short, the occasional delicious clinch, the sheer challenge to get to the end – in every sense, it distracted me.’ Heaney’s version is colourfully matched by a remarkable sequence of images by Hughie O’Donoghue and by a signed and numbered etching accompanying the de luxe edition. Writing of O’Donoghue, Heaney declares, ‘War and the pity of war have engaged him, bog meadow solitude and battlefield distress’ – and this tragic strain in his vision is the perfect complement to something stern in the poet and the poetry. Heaney continues, ‘This artist has mastery and gravitas, a combination of detachment and answerability, of intimacy and bigness, that are reminiscent of Henryson.’

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