Sweeney Astray

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This landmark anniversary will be marked by two performances of Sweeney, a song cycle composed by Neil Martin based on the Derry poet's 1983 work, Sweeney Astray, the first in a lunchtime concert on Tuesday 15 August at the National Concert Hall, 1.05pm, the second on Wednesday 16 August in a concert at St Canice's Cathedral at 7.30pm as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Another veteran of that place and time, actor Stephen Rea, will narrate the story, while the singing will be by Iarla Ó Lionáird, direct from a week of selling out the same NCH with The Gloaming. Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 2, 1980; October 21, 1984; June 2, 1985; October 27, 1987; August 26, 1990; December 27, 1992. in this work that balances the poetry of pain, it is the poetry of praise. And what is praised most beautifully and convincingly is the landscape of Ireland, its fields, meadows, hills, rivers, mountains, glens, the sea's eternal exciting creation that seems to grow into an original work. Some prose passages and even some of the poems are relatively flat, deliberately so. The original is also prose and poetry, but it is only as one reads and rereads Mr. Heaney's

Spectator, September 6, 1975; December 1, 1979; November 24, 1984; June 27, 1987; September 16, 1995, p. 39; September 5, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 36; April 6, 2002, p. 32. 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.

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Time, March 19, 1984; February 25, 1985; October 16, 1995; March 20, 2000, Paul Gray, "There Be Dragons: Seamus Heaney's Stirring Translation of Beowulf Makes Waves on Both Shores of the Atlantic," p. 84. Sweeney is cursed by a Christian cleric named Ronan whom he has insulted and humiliated. As a result, he becomes a mad outcast, a paranoid fugitive from life, a shifty victim of panic who lives on watercress and water and is driven to the tops of trees, Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton – Oxfor (...) Aodh, won the battle that day. A kinsman of Sweeney's called Aongus the Stout survived and came fleeing with a band of his people into Glen Arkin. They were wondering about Sweeney because they had not seen him alive after the fight

For further instances see: “he went into the yew tree of the church”; “he cowered in the yew tree” (...)

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Financial Times, March 21, 1998, p. 5; March 24, 2001, p. 4; March 30, 2002, p. 4; September 27, 2003, p. 26. 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. The complete translations of the poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate and prolific, revolutionary translator. But in O’Brien’s book, as Sweeney continues to eulogise the trees in rich Irish, while still naked, he is further tortured by the company of misfits whose idea of poetry includes “A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man”. This volume collects all the translations of Seamus Heaney: 101 texts from fourteen languages that demonstrate how prominent, powerful and personal a role translation played in the poet’s imagination and work. It testifies also to the form’s enduring importance to the author across time: he began the first of them before the publication of his 1966 debut, Death of a Naturalist; he was working on the last of them in the months before his death in 2013.