Stephen Regan compellingly brings into dialogue Sweeney Astray with Heaney’s collection Station Island, also published in 1984 (Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 333-338). Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney invoked medieval literary allusion, adaptation, and translation to punctuate his iterations of Irish history. [1]And not, as one might expect, to catalyze a nostalgic sense of lost authenticity, but extensively and strategically, to transformative structural ends. To elucidate a ‘transformation’ is to speak of the coeval nature of latency, of potentiality, alongside those qualities that outlast an ending. As Heaney’s translation of Sweeney Astrayopens: “the why and wherefore of [one’s] fits and trips, and alsowhat happened afterwards.” To transformis supremely a matter of artifice: to incarnate a subject’s alterity requires exposing narrative architecture, a willingness to display ‘character’ as an instance of technê, through which modes of art fluctuate or combine. The result for Heaney is often an episodic, associative, rhetorical structure designed to privilege perception over physicality, thus dilating the historical present. Wood, adj., n.2, and adv.”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Likewise, the Irish word geilt (used (...) It's hard to believe that Seamus Heaney, one of the most feted and famous poets in literary history, died ten years ago this August 30th.

Janet Timbie, “A Liturgical Procession in the Desert of Apa Shenoute”, in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, David Frankfurter (ed.), Boston, Brill, 1998, p. 420. Author of introduction) Thomas Flanagan, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill, New York Review Books, 2003. highest artistic level and offer the strongest invitations to the translator of verse. Yet I gradually felt I had to earn the right to do the high points by undertaking the whole thing: what I was dealing with, after all, is a major work Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 329. Regan highlights that Heaney had no “reservations in emphasizing the penitential qualities of Sweeney’s suffering”. Ellmann, Richard. "Heaney Agonistes." Rev. of Station Island, by Seamus Heaney. The New York Review of Books. March 14, 1985.loneliness. ''I am the bare figure of pain,'' Sweeney cries. And he gives us examples: Almighty God, I deserved this, my cut feet, my drained face, winnowed by a sheer wind and miserable in my mind. Last night I lay My first impulse had been to forage for the best lyric moments and to present them as poetic orphans, out of the context of the story. These points of poetic intensity, rather than the overall organization, establish the work's The third part is titled "Sweeney Redivivus." It consists of poems (or "glosses" as Heaney terms them) based on the figure of Sweeney from Sweeney Astray (1983), Heaney's translation of the medieval Irish text Buile Suibhne. In his introduction to Sweeney Astray Heaney indicates the significance that the story of Sweeney has for him by writing that it can be seen as "an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation." [9] Reception [ edit ] Joining Ó Lionáird for the performances, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra will be under the baton of David Brophy, who conducted the National Chamber Choir of Ireland, the Dublin Orchestral Players, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, before being appointed Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (RTÉCO). Brophy conducted at the opening ceremony for the Special Olympics in 2012, and for the late Queen Elizabeth II in the National Convention Centre in 2011. Proceedings will be presented by Liz Nolan of RTÉ Lyric FM. The lunchtime concert in the NCH will be presented by Liz Nolan of RTÉ lyric fm and John Kelly will interview composer Neil Martin before the Kilkenny performance.

Helen Vendler similarly applauded the collection when she reviewed it for The New Yorker. She writes: O'Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing, Florida University Press (Gainesville, FL), 2002.Welch, Robert, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing, Routledge (London, England), 1993. Nation, November 10, 1979; December 4, 1995, p. 716; January 4, 1999, Jay Parini, review of Opened Ground, p. 25. Sweeney is indeed astray. He lets his temper and exaggerated self-image drag him into an act against the church which is too excessive for God himself, and Sweeney must suffer.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography: Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992. Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself. The two tones he generally avoids—on principle, I imagine, and by temperament—are the prophetic and the denunciatory, those standbys of political poetry. It is arresting to find a poetry so conscious of cultural and social facts which nonetheless remains chiefly a poetry of awareness, observation, and sorrow." [11] New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973; September 30, 1976; March 6, 1980; October 8, 1981; March 14, 1985; June 25, 1992; March 4, 1999, Fintan O'Toole, review of Opened Ground, p. 43; July 20, 2000, p. 18; November 29, 2001, p. 49; December 5, 2002, p. 54.While this scholarly question – how much of this version is the Medieval poem and how much is Seamus Heaney – is one I can’t answer, the story as presented by Heaney as Sweeney’s story is powerful, moving, tragic and fascinating. It reveals a story-telling world where the wildest exaggerations and physically impossible activities are everyday parts of the story. However, it isn’t very difficult to accept that, and move along looking for the deeper levels that appear to me to be rather obvious in the story. Thus, without dealing with the problem of the original medieval poem and Heaney’s translation/retelling, I will sketch the marvelous story in store for any who read this delightful and challenging poem.