"The Translations of Seamus Heaney"
"As a translator, Heaney was an omnivore, reading across time and culture, finding poets he carried over to English with a freshness and diversity of tone—voices ancient and contemporary, male and female, Romanian, Spanish, Dutch, Old Irish, Czech, Greek. Sometimes he forged projects for a small eon: His most ambitious, like 'Beowulf,' spanned decades, and his work on the medieval Irish folk tale that became 'Sweeney Astray' spanned at least 10 years."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on David Ferry's The Odes of Horace
"The genius for a simple clarity is what makes all of Ferry’s Horace and Virgil so commendable, and his verse is proof as well that 'simple clarity' is not 'economy,' nor less and stranger language. That he adds a word or removes a god is hardly worth attacking when the former makes for grace and the latter is a name we neither cared about nor said correctly. Instead, like the King James translators, he understands that another language is another material, and one cannot build a wooden house from marble. The attempt will last forever." |
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