Interviewing Ciaran Carson

Abstract

Ciaran Carson (1948 -) is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of several collections of poems, including First Language, which won the 1993 T. S. Eliot Prize. He has written prose books, a book about Irish traditional music, a memoir for Belfast and also a novel, Shamrock Tea, longlisted in 2001 for the Booker Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno (2002) was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2005, he published The Midnight Court, a translation of the classic Irish text “Cuirt an Mheaan Oiche” by Brian Merriman and in 2007 he translated “The Tain” from the old Irish epic Tain Bo Cualinghe, with great success. During the summer of 2008 Prof. Ciaran Carson agreed to be interviewed in his office at Queen’s University, Belfast, by Maria Graciela Adamoli and Maria Graciela Eliggi from the National University of La Pampa, Argentina who were interested in his work as poet as well as translator.