Word: heaneys
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...Heaney, however, wanted to have another go at the 3,182-line epic, but not only as a sort of "prescribed" poetic exercise for himself. His return to the Anglo-Saxon (or so-called "Old English") text was also an act of cultural reclamation. In his own words, he wanted "to subvert all notions of the English language as a racial possession...
Being a big fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence Seamus Heaney, I spent much of the past three weeks hopping from lectures and readings by him to discussions about him. It was wonderful to hear him read aloud some of those poems I had only rehearsed in my head, but it was as wonderful to hear lines from his new translation of Beowulf. His wry running commentary--that the genre demanded the heroic "Charlton Heston or Clint Eastwood bit" or that he pictured the monster Grendel as a sort of "reeking dog-breath in the dark"--helped...
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...
...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. His main means of combating this problem was to reject the use of the heraldic language...
...experience of listening to Seamus Heaney talk about his mastery of the balancing act that is poetry--maneuvering between the private and the 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...