Seamus Heaney and the Art of Translation

Eugene O'Brien, Ian Hickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040658048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Literature

Seamus Heaney and the Art of Translation is comprised of 11 chapters that examine the Nobel prize winning poet's translations and that situate the works within a transnational perspective. The chapters focus on the broad and varied connections Heaney makes with writers from an Irish and European background. The book contains close readings of the poet's associations and interest in exemplars such as Dante, Virgil, Baudelaire, Blandiana and Ní Dhomhnaill, to mention but a few. Attention is also paid to broader areas of influence such as the Greek and Roman classics, Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Eastern-European literature. The volume addresses Heaney's poetry in translation, as well as his dramatic works and prose writing. This study is broad in its approach to Heaney's translations and offers new readings of these works from leading international scholars in the field.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Seamus Heaney and the Art of Translation
• 1 ‘Written on Water’: The Ethics, Epistemology and Aesthetics of Seamus Heaney's Translations
• 2 Is This Translation?: A Discussion of ‘Lightenings VIII’
• 3 Aiming into the Sky: Seamus Heaney's ‘Translated’ Objects
• 4 What Seamus Heaney Makes of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
• 5 The Gallery of the Tongue: Poet-Painter—Seamus Heaney's Ekphrastic Translations
• 6 ‘Talk about defamiliarization!’: Seamus Heaney and French
• 7 ‘On the Whim of a Marvellous Thing’: Heaney's Translations of Contemporaries
• 8 Cultural Transfer in Translation: Seamus Heaney's Poetry. A Case Study
• 9 Musicality, Translation and Seamus Heaney's Prose
• 10 The Ecologies of Seamus Heaney's Translations
• 11 From a Dark Wood to the Light of Heaven: Translation as Po-Ethics in Seamus Heaney
• Index