HEANEY, Seamus (trans.).

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Beowulf. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Heaney on the title page to his friends Paul and Ulla Sullivan, "to Paul and Ulla, 'A light appeared and the place brightened', Solstice, December 1999, Seamus", together with his signed 1999 Christmas card loosely inserted.Heaney and Paul Sullivan's decades-long friendship, rooted in a shared love of poetry, grew out of their mutual associations with the printer Peter Fallon, who introduced Sullivan, a stockbroker in Massachusetts, to contemporary Irish literature in the 1970s. Sullivan quickly became an enthusiastic patron and collector of Heaney's writing. When Heaney lectured at Harvard in the 1980s and 90s, Sullivan and his wife Ulla hosted the poet for dinner twice a week; on his return to Ireland, Heaney invited them to stay with him.Heaney's translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, dedicated to the memory of Ted Hughes, won the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year award. His Christmas card for that year prints three lines from his translation, the same he quoted in his inscription, immediately follow the hero's victory over Grendel: "A light appeared and the place brightened / the way the sky does when heaven's candle / is shining clearly" (lines 1570-2).This copy and the card were acquired direct from the Sullivan estate; Fallon has also inscribed the book on the half-title.

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