The Translations of Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, published in 2000, was immediately hailed as an undisputed masterpiece, “something imperishable and great” (James Wood, The Guardian). A few years after his death in 2013, Heaney's translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI created a similar stir, providing “a remarkable and fitting epilogue to one of the great poetic careers of recent times” (Nick Laird, Harper’s Magazine). Now, for the first time, the poet, critic, and essayist’s translations are gathered in one volume.

Heaney translated not only classic works of Latin and Old English but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, Classical and Modern Greek, Modern and Middle French, Medieval and Modern Italian, and more. In particular, the Nobel laureate engaged with works in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, the languages of his home and upbringing. As he said, “If you lived in the Irish countryside as I did in my childhood, you lived in a primal Gaeltacht.”

In The Translations of Seamus Heaney, Marco Sonzogni has collected Heaney’s translations and framed them with the poet’s own writings on his works and their composition from his introductions, interviews, and commentary. Through these writings, we come closer to grasping the true extent of Heaney’s extraordinary abilities and of his great genius.