Word: beowulf
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...reminded him of his beloved Dublin (where he moved in 1972). Perhaps that explains why Heaney chose Cambridge, his home-away-from-home, as the place where he would personally unveil his two most recent works --Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996) and a translation-in-its-final-stages of Beowulf. The former work is a comprehensive anthology containing a large selection of poems from Heaney's previous books (up to and including 1996's The Spirit Level), several excerpts from his translation work and his Nobel acceptance speech on "Crediting Poetry." The latter promises to be an amazing and innovative...
While in town, Heaney also fulfilled his duties as Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet by giving several lectures about, and readings from, Opened Ground and Beowulf. Heaney is known for his humorous, warm and gentle spirit, a spirit than infuses even the most violent and political of his poems, and also for his tendency to avoid the "celebrity poet" spotlight. (In fact, he was in the Greek islands when the Nobel Prize announcement was made.) This came across in Heaney's three lectures and three "talking shop" sessions (informal talk-cum-question-and-answer sessions), in which the always-congenial...
Indeed, it became obvious through the course of his lectures why someone with a voice like Heaney's is so obsessed with the beauty of words and their sound. A large portion of Heaney's lectures focused on his translation of Beowulf and the problems of translation and language in general. Language in all its personal, social and political uses is the main focus of almost all Heaney's poetry. Thus, his political posturing was and still is expressed through the subtleties of language (although the works from his most recent work, The Spirit Level, are infused with a political...
...central linguistic motif of some of his political poems became of use to him, as he noted in his lectures, when he approached the translation of Beowulf. A motif of his political poems is the conflict between the rich vowel sounds of the Irish language and the consonant-heavy word-clumps of the Anglo-Saxon. In approaching the Beowulf translation, Heaney faced a different problem--cramming what he called the "giant ingots" of the Anglo-Saxon tongue into the "itty bitty tiny" parameters of moden English, parameters Heaney has broken through with consummate skill in much of his own poetry...
...public, past and present, political and personal--is matched only by listening to him read his poetry that so wonderfully orchestrates these various forces. At every appearance Heaney read some portion of his work, be it excerpts from or complete versions of poems, portions of his translation of Beowulf or an impromptu reading of probably his most famous poem, "Digging," meeting with thunderous applause. Perhaps Irish consul general Conor O'Riordan said it best when he said, "Seamus Heaney has spoken eloquently about a time in the future when poetry and history, rhyme and peace becomes a reality...