Four Sides of Seamus Heaney

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Four Sides of Seamus Heaney: Seamus Heaney - The Translator

Seamus Heaney - The Translator

BBC Radio 4 - Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney - The Translator

Theo Dorgan on Seamus Heaney's translations, their importance and impact on his own work

Seamus Heaney wrote a dozen books of poetry. But throughout his life he also translated poems from other languages. Theo Dorgan considers its range and its effect on his own work.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner and one of the best loved poets writing in English, died in August 2013. Radio 4 is marking this with Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, four programmes each on a different aspect of his work, each with a different presenter with one thing in common - they knew the poet well.

Seamus Heaney was a prolific poet but, as he said, 'lyric poetry isn't a full-time job; you wait for the surges and hope that they will come.' So, from his schooldays until his death, to keep his hand in, Heaney engaged in translation. When The Translations of Seamus Heaney was published late last year readers were amazed by its size, more than 600 pages.

Theo Dorgan, poet, novelist, translator and Irish speaker surveys the range and depth of the translations and discovers these excursions into around forty languages are an interrogation of Heaney's own. Irish English is inflected by the syntax of Irish -  he translates the medieval poem Buile Shuibhne, Sweeney Astray. There is a good deal of Scots in the speech of Northern Ireland - Heaney translates the makar Robert Henryson. He takes on the founding text of English - Beowulf - and the foundations of European literature - Sophocles' Philoctetes as The Cure at Troy (interpolating the much quoted by US Presidents lines about hope and history rhyming) and Virgil's Aeneid. 

Seamus Heaney, like James Joyce, translated himself out of Ireland and into the wider world. He travelled, befriended and was influenced by Derek Walcott, from St Lucia, Russian exile Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz, from Poland. 

Theo Dorgan hears from Marco Sonzoghni, editor of the monumental Translations, from Colm Toibin, and there are readings of his translations by the poet himself.

Presenter: Theo Dorgan
Producer: Julian May

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series exploring different aspects of the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winner and one of the most famous, and finest, poets writing in English, died in August 2013. BBC Radio 4 is marking this with Four Sides of Seamus Heaney, four programmes, each focusing on a different aspect of his work, each with a different presenter with personal knowledge of the poet.

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