![]() The longing in the breast and planted feetĪnd gazing face and heart of the kite flier Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flowerĬlimbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher Here, below is Heaney’s version of Pascoli’s, The Kite.Īfter “L’Aquilone” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912)Īir from another life and time and place,Ī white wing beating high against the breeze,Īnd yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoonĪmong the briar hedges and stripped thorn,īack in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.Īnd now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew, And when Heaney died last year he might have been surprised to have seen that line quoted in tributes to him to refer to the grief of his passing. ![]() ![]() The strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief. It was one of the wonderful links between these two men that Heaney had already seized on it as a vital image in a poem he had written for his sons about 30 years before - A Kite for Michael and Christopher- a poem that startles me again and again with these lines: Heaney’s interest in the kite as an image did not begin with Pascoli. For an article by a professor at the University of Urbino, Gabriella Morisco, describing how she introduced Heaney to Pascoli, click here. The modified version is set in Ireland not Italy and was included in Heaney’s book The Human Chain, published in 2010.įor a commentary by Heaney on Pascoli’s The Kite and Heaney’s full translation Click here. Heaney discovered Pascoli in Urbino, Italy in 2002 and was introduced then to Pascoli’s poem L’Aquilone( The Kite), which Heaney, in a sense, translated twice: once in its entirety and later as a modified version, A Kite for Aibhin (after L’Aquilone by Giovanni Pascoli). The Seamus Heaney translations of two poems by Giovanni Pascoli (1855 – 1912) published in the New Yorker after the death of Heaney (1938 – 2013) last August sent me scrambling to find out more about Heaney’s connection to Pascoli.
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