The complete translations of the poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate and prolific, revolutionary translator.

Kirkland, Richard, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger, Longman (London, England), 1996. This sends Sweeney racing off to hide from the hag and he travels all over Ireland and even to Scotland and Britain. He meets up with another madman on the run, this man from British foes. Sweeney proposes an alliance in their hiding. He and Alan had similar experiences of running into very difficult situations which made them outcasts. Alan soon goes off to his death and Sweeney moves on, trying to recover his life. World Literature Today, summer, 1977; autumn, 1981; summer, 1983; autumn, 1996, p. 963; summer, 1999, p. 534; autumn, 2000, p. 247; winter, 2001, p. 119; winter, 2002, p. 110. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton – Oxfor (...)O'Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing, Florida University Press (Gainesville, FL), 2002. The medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne was left untranslated from 1913 till Seamus Heaney published this, Sweeney Astray, in 1983. Heaney breathed new life into it for the contemporary audience. The hero of the poem is Mad Sweeney, who is cursed at the Battle of Moira; he is turned into a bird and flees. The Mad Sweeney from Gaiman's American Gods is based (quite loosely) off Buile Suibhne, which is perhaps the only other reference to the poem I can think of. The blurb of my old Faber & Faber edition states, "The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature." Translator) The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles'"Antigone," Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004.

Richard Ellmann, in his review of Station Island for The New York Review of Books, praised the collection writing, "Many of these poems have a tough rind as though the author knew that for his purposes deferred comprehension was better than instant. Obliquity suits him. Heaney's talent, a prodigious one, is exfoliating and augmenting here." [10] Astray,'' a complete translation of the medieval Irish work ''Buile Suibhne,'' shows that Seamus Heaney's imagination is continuing to deepen in intensity and range. Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Samuels, editors, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, Zed (London, England), 1998. and he had not been counted among the casualties. They were discussing this and deciding that Ronan's curse had something to do with it when Sweeney spoke out of the yew: Soldiers, come here. You are from Dal-Arie, and the man you Deane, Seamus, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1997.Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History, University Press (Manchester, England), 2000. this lonely pilgrimage, Sweeney, instead of wishing for a return to court, comes to yearn for the solace of the woods. On Ailsa Craig, “[a] hard station!” (p. 53), he laments:

ne of the crucial signs of a genuine imagination is its ability to give new life to old myths, stories and legends. By that criterion, ''SweeneyContributor to 101 Poems Against War, edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2003. Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1993, p. 18-19.

The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles'"Philoctetes" (drama; produced by Field Day Theatre Company in Dublin, Ireland, 1990), Farrar, Straus, 1991. Translator) Leos Janacek, Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song Cycle, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.New Republic, March 27, 1976; December 22, 1979; April 30, 1984; February 18, 1985; January 13, 1997, review of Homage to Robert Frost, p. 14; February 28, 2000, Nicholas Howe, "Scullionspeak," p. 32; February 28, 2000, p. 32. Heaney’s next volume District and Circle (2006) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. Commenting on the volume for the New York Times, critic Brad Leithauser found it remarkably consistent with the rest of Heaney’s oeuvre. But while Heaney’s career may demonstrate an “of-a-pieceness” not common in poetry, Leithauser found that Heaney’s voice still “carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken—even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say.” It was in this state that he grabbed Ronan’s psalter and threw it in a lake. The psalter was later returned by a magical otter. But unappeased, the saint cursed the king, condemning him to wander the world for the rest of his days, naked, and flying like a bird. The poem is mostly plotless. The poem's catalyst is Sweeney's curse and metamorphosis, but from there, Sweeney journeys across Ireland (and beyond) and the poem becomes an ode to the landscape as much as it does his character and arc. Ireland is at the heart of the poem. The American photographer Rachel Giese (now Rachel Brown) accompanies Heaney's poem with incredible, dramatic photographs of Northern Ireland in her subsequent publication called Sweeney in Flight. Her phot For further instances see: “he went into the yew tree of the church”; “he cowered in the yew tree” (...)