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Seamus Heaney.
Sweeney Astray.
London: Faber & Faber, revised reissue 2001 (previous edition was 1983).
Paperback, stitch bound.
129x197mm.
ix,75pp.
English.
Unused bargain.
This item £4.50
[Publisher's price £8.99]
128g.Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a demented flying creature at the Battle of Moira.
Heaney worked on this translation when he moved in the early 1970s to the Wicklow countryside, and managed to embody 'the green spirit of the hedges' in the poetry spoken by the outcast poet-king. And yet, as Heaney writes in his introduction, there were other topographical connections that linked him to the Sweeney figure so that 'one way or the other he seemed to have been with me from the start'.
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