Anything can happen. You know how JupiterWill mostly wait for clouds to gather headBefore he hurls the lightning? Well, just nowHe galloped his thunder cart and his horsesAcross a clear blue sky. It shook the earthAnd the clogged underearth, the River Styx,The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.Anything can happen, the tallest towersBe overturned, those in high places daunted,Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak FortuneSwoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,Setting it down bleeding on the next.Ground gives. The heaven’s weightLifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
Anything Can Happen
Horace
Translated from the Latin
Feature Date
- October 10, 2023
Series
- Translation
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“Anything Can Happen,” from THE TRANSLATIONS OF SEAMUS HEANEY.
Published by Farrars, Straus, and Giroux in March 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Seamus Heaney.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
John Minihan
John Minihan
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”
New York, New York
Macmillan
"An immense and informative gathering . . . Heaney’s voice is so unusually lucid that his translations are a triple gift. There’s the ravishing selection of poems, picked by Heaney, the shrewd curator. There’s the chance to hear Heaney again—almost as if we’re being given new poems by Heaney himself. There is also the chance to see how translation and poetry reverberate across a career. . . . As we face down our own troubling era, this book is a potent reminder of literary possibility and literary imagination on a large scale."
—Tess Taylor, The New York Times
"This volume is handsome testimony to Heaney’s lifelong service to a noble art."
—David Wheatley, The Guardian
“Often thought of as a poet of place, preserving and remaking a rural Irish world, and of the Troubles that bloodied his purest source of memory, the extensive commentary in this invaluable collection repeatedly reminds readers of how Heaney drew deeply on the poetry of other places and other times.”
—Michael Autrey, Booklist
"I knew and loved Seamus Heaney’s own poetry before I read his translations. If you, too, treasure his poems, this collection will extend and deepen your appreciation, while it also introduces you to new writers and reintroduces those you’ve read in other versions."
—Susanna Lang, RHINO
“These 101 texts across 14 languages demonstrate how vital a role translation played in the imagination of Nobel Laureate Heaney (1939–2013) . . . These well-contextualized translations are a resounding testimony to Heaney’s remarkable contributions to literature.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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