The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Seamus Heaney

  • Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…

  • Great and Small Mythologies

    Great and Small Mythologies

    Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…