As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series and in celebration of International Translation Day, Professor Marco Sonzogni will deliver a lecture titled, "Is this translation?: ‘Lightenings viii’ (‘The annals say…’) and The Translations of Seamus Heaney."
Lecture Abstract
As a poet and translator, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) embraced the ‘liberating idea’ that ‘an original work exists not in order to be perfect but in order to engender itself repeatedly in new translations’ (Translations of Poetry and Poetic Prose: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 110, 1999: 331). Heaney’s poem ‘1 Lightenings viii’ (Seeing Things, 1991: 62) exemplifies this idea.
In this poem— known also as ‘The annals say…’ — Heaney relays to readers an extraordinary event recorded in Irish annals: the sighting of crewed ships in the sky. Reported, among other sources, in Lebor Laignech (‘Book of Leinster’), in Lebor Bretnach (Irish Nennius) and also in Konungs skuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’), the sighting reaches Heaney’s imagination through K.H. Jackson’s English translation, ‘The Air Ship’ (Celtic Miscellany. Translations from the Celtic Literatures, 1971: 165).
In this lecture, Professor Marco Sonzogni reviews his conclusion that ‘Lightenings viii’ was an original poem and why, consequently, he did not include it in the edited collection, The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022). Rather, Sonzogni singled the poem out in his ‘Introduction’ as an example of the evolutionary impact of translation as practiced by Heaney. While Sonzogni is now uncertain that he made the right decision, he remains convinced that this text too – like all the texts collected in The Translations – bears witness to Heaney’s ‘credo’ in ‘discovering what survives translation true’ (‘Remembered Columns,’ The Spirit Level, 1996: 45).
Speaker Biography
Marco Sonzogni (OMRI, Officer) is an award-winning scholar, literary translator, poet, editor, and cultural activist. He is a Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches evolutionary translation and intercultural communication at undergraduate and postgraduate level and directs the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation. He is the editor of the critically acclaimed The Translations of Seamus Heaney (Faber 2022 and FSG 2023). He is also the editor of the definitive edition of Seamus Heaney’s poetry in Italian translation, Poesie (Mondadori 2016).
This event is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Center for Italian Studies.