Sweeney Astray

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New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1967; April 18, 1976; December 2, 1979; December 21, 1980; May 27, 1984; March 10, 1985; March 5, 1989; December 14, 1995, p. 15; June 1, 1997, p. 52; December 20, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 10; June 6, 1999, review of Opened Ground, p. 37; February 27, 2000, James Shapiro, "A Better 'Beowulf'" p. 6; December 3, 2000, p. 9; April 8, 2001, p. 16; April 29, 2001, p. 22; June 3, 2001, p. 24; October 6, 2002, p. 33.

Heaney’s first foray into the world of translation began with the Irish lyric poem Buile Suibhne. The work concerns an ancient king who, cursed by the church, is transformed into a mad bird-man and forced to wander in the harsh and inhospitable countryside. Heaney's translation of the epic was published as Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1984) . New York Times Book Review contributor Brendan Kennelly deemed the poem "a balanced statement about a tragically unbalanced mind. One feels that this balance, urbanely sustained, is the product of a long, imaginative bond between Mr. Heaney and Sweeney." This bond is extended into Heaney's 1984 volume Station Island, where a series of poems titled "Sweeney Redivivus" take up Sweeney's voice once more. The poems reflect one of the book’s larger themes, the connections between personal choices, dramas and losses and larger, more universal forces such as history and language. In The Haw Lantern (1987)Heaney extends many of these preoccupations. W.S. DiPiero described Heaney's focus: "Whatever the occasion—childhood, farm life, politics and culture in Northern Ireland, other poets past and present—Heaney strikes time and again at the taproot of language, examining its genetic structures, trying to discover how it has served, in all its changes, as a culture bearer, a world to contain imaginations, at once a rhetorical weapon and nutriment of spirit. He writes of these matters with rare discrimination and resourcefulness, and a winning impatience with received wisdom." Wood, adj., n.2, and adv.”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Likewise, the Irish word geilt (used (...) Vendler, Helen. "Books: Echo Soundings, Searches, Probes." Rev. of Station Island, by Seamus Heaney. The New Yorker 23 Sept. 1985: 112 Sweeney Astray is an early Medieval Irish epic poem. The “Astray” is not his last name, but the fact of his going astray from normal life after a regrettable deed he committed.Fergus Kelly, “Trees in Early Ireland”, Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters, vol. 56, no. 1, 1999, p. 41. The other “lords” were oak, hazel, ash, pine, holly, and apple. Trees were evaluated by their usage, their comparative stature, and their longevity, and a complex system of penalties was in place for their misuse. Indeed, there are surviving references in 7 th-century texts to a lost law tract titled Fidbretha (Tree Judgments) that indicates woodland as a legal jurisdiction. See Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Cork, The Collins Press, 2003, p. 13. With Dennis O'Driscoll) Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, Farrar Straus (New York, NY), 2008.

First published by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1983 and then by Faber and Faber in 1984, Seamus Heaney’s version is based largely on James George O’Keeffe’s first full translation into English: Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne): Being the Adventures of Suibhne Geilt, a Middle-Irish Romance, James George O’Keeffe (ed.), London, Irish Texts Society, 1913. The long poem is the story of his fall from greatness and the long period that follows before his death. Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History, University Press (Manchester, England), 2000. For further instances see: “he went into the yew tree of the church”; “he cowered in the yew tree” at the church at Drum Iarann in Connacht. At one point, he rests “for six weeks in a yew tree” in Rasharkin (p. 28, 74, 29). Molino, Michael R., Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Catholic University of America Press (New York, NY), 1994.Author of introduction) David Thomson, The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend, Counterpoint, 2002. Edel Bhreathnach, “Perceptions of Kingship in Early Medieval Irish Vernacular Literature”, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, Linda Doran, James Lyttleton (eds.), Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007, p. 21. from which vantage point he gazes down, terrified yet furiously articulate. From the heights of his mad agony, Sweeney makes sad, beautiful, thrilling poems. He is the voice of darkness and nightmare but also, in his naked and ravaged