Seamus Heaney’s ‘Journey Into the Wideness of Language’

Dylan Martinez/Reuters Seamus Heaney in 1995.

Seamus Heaney, the esteemed Irish poet who died on Friday at 74, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. At the time, the poet Derek Walcott, a fellow Nobel winner, called Mr. Heaney “the guardian spirit of Irish poetry.”

In a 1997 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Heaney described winning the Nobel as “a bit like being caught in a mostly benign avalanche. You are totally daunted, of course, when you think of previous writers who received the prize. And daunted when you think of the ones who didn’t receive it.” In his Nobel lecture, Mr. Heaney described listening to the radio as a child, and how he “got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round.” He continued: “And even though I didn’t understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun my journey into the wideness of the world. This, in turn, became a journey into the wideness of language.”

In addition to writing his own poetry, Mr. Heaney was widely acclaimed as a translator, perhaps most notably of “Beowulf.” Reviewing that translation in 2000, James Shapiro called it a work “for which generations of readers will be grateful,” and said: “Heaney is as attuned to the poem’s celebration of the heroic as he is to its melancholy undertow, nowhere more so than in his hauntingly beautiful description of Beowulf’s funeral.”

In 2000, Mr. Heaney spoke to PBS about his translation of “Beowulf”:

This poem is written down, but it is also clearly a poem that was spoken out. And it is spoken in a very dignified, formal way. And I got the notion that the best voice I could hear it in was the voice of an old countryman who was a cousin of my father’s who was not, as they say, educated, but he spoke with great dignity and formality. And I thought if I could write the translation in such a way that this man â€" Peter Scullion was his name â€" could speak it, then I would get it right. That’s, in fact, how I started it.

Below are links to more reviews of Mr. Heaney’s work in The Times:

Poetry:
“Human Chain”
“District and Circle”
“The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ ”
“Electric Light”
“Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”
“Seeing Things”
“Selected Poems, 1966-1987”
“The Haw Lantern”
“Field Work”
“North”

Prose:
“The Redress of Poetry”
“The Government of the Tongue”
“Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978”