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