Words from Elsewhere: In the Light of Aisling

Annual Robert Welch Memorial Lecture in Literature

Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney Chair of Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast will deliver the Annual Robert Welch Memorial Lecture in Literature

Ciaran will be reading from his translations of Dante’s Inferno, Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court), Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and the poetry of Jean Follain, linking them to the aisling or ‘dream vision’ tradition.

L'epingle: The Pin

translated from the French of Jean Follain

Face to the tide the city looms

the flukes of a troop of whales

beat together beneath the clouds

in spite of all one can hear

the pin that drops

off a chimney mantel

on to a blade of parquet floor

no one has waxed for years.