From Elsewhere

by Ciaran Carson

Ciaran Carson is among the most restlessly groundbreaking poets now writing in English. In From Elsewhere, he adds yet another dimension to his poetry and to the act of translation by combining them in homage to the French poet Jean Follain (1903–1971). Carson not only translates the original, but also adds his own poetic rendition, crafting a mosaic of translation and free response. The implications of Follain’s poems are often made arrestingly explicit in Carson’s versions. The silences in “Without Language” resound as the unfathomable echoes of “In Memory.” The terror of Modernism in “The Burnt Island” becomes the modern terrorism of “Timing Device.” When we arrive at “Without Courage” / “Translation” at the beginning of the third part, the poetic flight from Follain to Carson is comprehensive, though “changed in the meantime / that is elsewhere.” We understand the title intimately as a conversation between poets across time and space.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Ciaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.

He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.