Marco sonzogni seamus heaney biography
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Photo (CC) Andy Rogers @ Flickr
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Bye Bye Blackbird
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&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;I know noble accents
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;But I know, too,
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;That the blackbird is involved
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;In what inom know.
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;—Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways to
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;Look at a Blackbird’ (VIII)
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&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;I’ve seen the waterdipper
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;rise from the lightning rod:
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;I knew him from his pride in flight,
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;by his flutelike trill.
&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;—Eugenio Montale, ‘From a Tower’
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&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#;&#; up all my care and woe
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Lecture: Marco Sonzogni, "Is this translation?: ‘Lightenings viii’ (‘The annals say…’) and The Translations of Seamus Heaney"
As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall speaker series and in celebration of International Translation Day, Professor Marco Sonzogni will deliver a lecture titled, "Is this translation?: ‘Lightenings viii’ (‘The annals say…’) and The Translations of Seamus Heaney."
Lecture Abstract
As a poet and translator, Seamus Heaney () embraced the ‘liberating idea’ that ‘an original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations’ (Translations of Poetry and Poetic Prose: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium , ). Heaney’s poem ‘1 Lightenings viii’ (Seeing Things, 62) exemplifies this idea.
In this poem— known also as ‘The annals say…’ — Heaney relays to readers an extraordinary event recorded in Irish annals: the sighting of crewed ships in the sky. Reported, among other sources, in Lebor Laignech (‘B
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The Translations of Seamus Heaney
‘A huge book, an immense book. Such adventure and variety, such industry, such subjugation of self.’ Michael Hofmann, TLS
Heaney not only translated classic works of Latin and Old English but also poems from a great number of ancient and modern European languages, not least translations from the Old, Middle and Modern Irish of his homeland. The breadth and depth in evidence here is extraordinary — from monastic hymns and prayers, to the civic and familial tragedies of Sophocles and Kochanowski; from Virgil and Dante’s living underworld to the stark landscapes of Sweeney’s Ireland.
As editor, Marco Songzogni frames the translations with the poet’s own writings on his works. Collectively these bring us closer to an understanding of the genius for interpretation and transformation that distinguished Heaney as one of the great poet-translators of all time.
‘The Translations . . . is a landmark volume, a striking testament to the particular and g