Seamus Heaney in profile – Il Sole 24 ORE
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Seamus Heaney was one of the most read, studied and translated poets of the last twentieth century. He was born in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, in Castledawson, Northern Ireland, on the family farm, the first of nine children. And he disappeared ten years ago, in 2013, shortly before his usual stay in Mantua, in the Virgilian lands. In almost half a century he has published twelve collections of verse, three volumes of critical essays and translations from fifteen different languages.
If in translating he encounters other poetics and performs a creative act, when he writes poetry he reconquers his own interiority making it legible, starting from shareable details, from the commonality of everyday objects. In 1995, at the age of fifty-six, he was the youngest intellectual in history to receive the Nobel Prize “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth”.
Humble dedication to poetry
He was a well-known academic, occupying the chairs of Harvard and Oxford, and not as the goal of a personal and ambitious journey, but as recognition of his humble dedication to poetry. He never made his international profile weigh, although they called him “Seamus Famous”.
“Infant”
The term “infante” derives from the Latin “infans”, “mute”, still without a word; and Heaney frequently defined himself as such, almost as if he felt predestined to an inclusive use of language. His natural transfusion from sensory listening to silent reading is evident right from his debut, “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), translated posthumously by Marco Sonzogni. The rural scenes are poignant in their normality: the rural noises are imprinted in his childhood memory, influencing his entire production and leading him to merge the excavation of the ancient spade held by his grandfather and father with that of the real pen on the sheet. “It eradicated the high tufts, it sank the shining blade”: in “Digging” the rhythm of the tool that plowed the ground stands out, beating and oscillating at the same time, which in the timeless dimension of poetry relates the present and the past, the different moments of the same existence or of different lives.
The tenth anniversary of the disappearance
Professor of translation studies, Italian studies and intercultural communication at the University of Wellington, New Zealand, Sonzogni has enjoyed friendship with the Nobel laureate for years. And today he is one of the most authoritative personalities on his work, to such an extent that he is dealing with the main publications dedicated to him and planned for the coming months. If last autumn we had the hardcover “The Translations of Seamus Heaney” (Faber&Faber), edited by himself, the paperback edition will be released next October. At the same time, he introduced the texts of Meridiano which will be included in Lo Specchio Mondadori, but without critical apparatus, between the end of August and the beginning of September. The novelty on our publishing market, curated by Sonzogni, will be “Come a casa. Pascoli’s versions” (Samuele Editore), a volume conceived with Leonardo Guzzo and Federica Massia which will inaugurate the poetic schedule of the Turin Book Fair, under the aegis of Pordenonelegge.
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