New York Circle of Translators
The Translations of Seamus Heaney
with Marco Sonzogni
Description
Seamus Heaney translated not only classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, Ancient and Modern Greek, Middle and Modern French, and Medieval and Modern Italian, among other languages. In particular, the Nobel laureate engaged with works in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, the languages of his homeland and early education. As he said, “If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.” - Macmillan Publishers - Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"An immense and informative gathering . . . Heaney’s voice is so unusually lucid that his translations are a triple gift. There’s the ravishing selection of poems, picked by Heaney, the shrewd curator. There’s the chance to hear Heaney again—almost as if we’re being given new poems by Heaney himself. There is also the chance to see how translation and poetry reverberate across a career. . . . As we face down our own troubling era, this book is a potent reminder of literary possibility and literary imagination on a large scale."
Tess Taylor, The New York Times
About the Speaker
Prof Marco Sonzogni (OMRI, Officer) is a widely published and award winning scholar, literary translator, poet and editor. He teaches translation and intercultural communication at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and at the Communication University of Zhejiang in China.
In The Translations of Seamus Heaney, Marco Sonzogni has collected Heaney’s translations and framed them with the poet’s own writings on his works and their composition, sourced from introductions, interviews, and commentaries. Through this volume, we come closer to grasping the true extent of Heaney’s extraordinary abilities and his genius.
