Actor Ben Whishaw visits 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center on Wednesday, May 3 at 7:30 pm to deliver a dramatic reading of literary classics and poems translated over the years by the late, great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
The works that Whishaw will read in the in-person and online event – including excerpts from “Beowulf” and Virgil’s “The Aeneid” — are published in the new book, “The Translations of Seamus Heaney,” edited by Marco Sonzogni. Whishaw's script, which has been created by award-winning novelist Colm Tóibín, will also feature excerpts from the introductions and commentaries that Heaney often wrote to accompany his translations.
Heaney translated not only classic works of Latin and Old English, but also a great number of poems from Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Russian, German, Scottish Gaelic, Czech, Ancient and Modern Greek, Middle and Modern French, and Medieval and Modern Italian, among other languages. In particular, he engaged with works in Old, Middle and Modern Irish, the languages of his homeland and early education.
Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf” (1999) has been hailed as a masterpiece, “something imperishable and great” (James Wood), and his translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid Book VI” (2016) provided “a remarkable and fitting epilogue to one of the great poetic careers of recent times” (Nick Laird).
“His books were events in our lives, monuments,” wrote Tóibín, upon Heaney’s death in 2013. “He was not merely a central figure in the literary life of Ireland, but in its emotional life, in its dream life, in its real life. His skill at playing with rhythm, pushing phrases and images as hard as they will go, offered the poems an undertone, a gravity—a space between the words that allowed them to soar or shiver.”
Television and film star Ben Whishaw has appeared in “No Time to Die,” “Women Talking,” “Paddington, “The Lobster,” “A Very English Scandal,” “The Personal History of David Copperfield” and “Mary Poppins Returns,” among others.
Go to the 92NY website here for more details.
