Tag Archives: Seamus Heaney

Heaney and the Hare

Next week sees Oxford University’s tribute to Seamus Heaney.   Amongst all the immense losses brought about by the death of this great poet is the loss of a skilled translator of Middle English, a translator who brought medieval poetry to a wider audience.  In 2009, Heaney published a translation of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and seven of his Moral Fables.  Earlier in his career, Heaney translated a short Middle English text called  ‘The Names of the Hare’.  This early Middle English poem is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86, a late thirteenth-century West Midlands trilingual miscellany written by an anonymous scribe for his own use.

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