The sonnets of Seamus Heaney in Spanish

This paper seeks to offer a more nuanced and further-reaching exploration of the translation of all of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets into a Spanish ‘collected’, lead by the Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé. Taking in critical thinking on creativity and the ‘post-colonial’ sonnet as well as Heaney’s and López-Colomé’s own views and metaphorics relating to literary translation, this paper asks not only what Sonetos brings to the originals, but what they bring also to poetry and translation. The paper argues that Sonetos offers a distinct insight into questions of semantic faithfulness and the translator’s visibility, but also that whilst we must eschew metaphysical or essentialist language in analysis, the project of Sonetos has also been to communicate not just original poetry’s, but also translation’s qualities as a strategy of (secular) revelation