HEANEY, Seamus.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Ugolino. First edition, number 117 of 125 copies signed by Heaney, the illustrator le Brocquy, the book designer Liam Miller, and the publisher Andrew Carpenter; only 30 copies were for sale. The book prints for the first time Heaney's translation of the Ugolino canto of Dante's Inferno, later collected in Field Work (1979).In the poem, Dante meets the Italian nobleman Ugolino della Gherardesca (1214-1289) in the ninth and lowest circle of hell, reserved for traitors. Dante's account is paraphrased by Chaucer in the Monk's Tale and was translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Heaney was drawn to the material because he sensed "there was something intimate, almost carnal, about these feuds and sorrows of mediaeval Pisa, something that could perhaps mesh with and house the equivalent and destructive energies at work in, say, contemporary Belfast".

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