> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:53:24 +0100
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Ferrater
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> I've come across a strange thread which starts from the Catalan poet
> Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972). It is that at Queens University Belfast
> in the 1960s, the then Professor of Spanish Arthur Terry was
> translating Ferrater, and Seamus Heaney and others took a great
> interest in the results and possibly they, and Terry himself, were
> important factors in establishing the direction of those Northern
> Irish poets who became so successful. Terry's translations of Raymond
> Queneau are also said to come into this. The point would be some kind
> of breaking away from modernistic poeticism into a plainer, unloaded
> manner and direct delineation of personal experience, within
> traditional formalities. Ferrater declared himself opposed to
> "obscurantism".
>
> Has anyone else come across this story? The trouble with it seems to
> me to be that whatever Ferrater is like Queneau's way of writing is
> several thousand miles away from Heaney's.
>
> The only other poet I've noticed heavily influenced by Ferrater is the
> Belgian William Cliff, whose earlier work (all I know) I found very
> readable. He is several thousand miles away from Heaney in another
> direction.
>
> There are a few Ferrater poems readable on-line which seem engaging,
> and in no way plain-speaking but with a lot of the symbolistic and
> image-laden writing you expect in the Hispanic world. There is a book
> translated by Terry published by Arc, (introduction by Heaney) which I
> don't think includes the texts in Catalan, making me reluctant to
> purchase it.
>
> PR