Cracking good reads

Cork 2005: Pat Cotter and the Munster Literature Centre must have been encouraged by the sensation - almost unknown in Cork - of seeing "sold out" notices for a literary event.

Admittedly, the 500 people gathered at the Metropole Hotel last Sunday were drawn by the presence of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, reading with Cork poet Greg Delanty, but the undoubted success of the first weekend in the "World Writing" series organised by Cork 2005 augurs well for the Centre's Éigse na Babel multilingual festival opening on Thursday next.

This festival launches the second book in the year-long translation series which is the centre-piece of the literary programme. Native or associated poets were commissioned to translate the work of contemporaries in the European Union accession states; the result in every case is a volume - slim but produced to an admirably high standard - of modern poetry in English.

Already A Visit to the Clockmaker by Kristin Dimitrova of Bulgaria (Gregory O'Donoghue) has appeared, while translations by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin make up After the Raising of Lazarus by Ileana Malancioiu of Romania.

This will be launched at a reading by Ní Chuilleanáin at the Triskel Arts Centre on Thursday next at 7.30 p.m., and Triskel is also the venue for the rest of the weekend programme, with Desmond O'Grady and Pearse Hutchinson reading from their own translated work at 4 p.m. on Friday, Peter Fallon with his rendition of Virgil's Georgics, and Ciaran Carson with his Divine Comedy at 7 p.m., and, for the stalwart from 9 p.m., a bi-lingual medley of Conal Creedon, Theo Dorgan, Patrick Galvin and Professor Catherine O'Brien.

Head of Italian at UCG, O'Brien also leads the panel discussion on the translation of poetry from 11 a.m. on Saturday; Tom McCarthy's poems in English and Portuguese will be read at 3 p.m., followed by Haken Sandell of Sweden and John F. Deane at 4 p.m. and by Ré Ó Laighléis reading fiction in Irish and English at 8 p.m. Admission to this event and to the Friday night late session is €8, but everything else is free, while the books, which will make up a unique collection, cost €10.

Something of this mutual multi-lingual transfusion of language and languages distinguished the first of the two weekends in the World Writing Series (the second programme for last Saturday and yesterday included Doris Lessing, Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon and Anthony Cronin).

Each session was introduced by poet Tom McCarthy, who on Saturday also did Claudio Magris the favour of reading the Italian writer's work in English, delivered with McCarthy's own sense of humour, timing and literary flourish.

Magris, whose father was taught English in Trieste by Stanislaus Joyce, read from a book which he said was "his" book; that in McCarthy's hands was "a book by two authors, myself and the translator".

Friday's inaugural session at Trinity Presbyterian Church featured Nuala Ní Dhomhnall reading in Irish and English. Her missionary sense that lost worlds were incorporated in languages which were beginning to slip out of history and her urge to state, on their behalf, that "we're here too!", was shared by the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

It was while a prisoner for crimes of literary politics that he decided to abandon English as his medium. In order to recover what he called "the lost land of language" he chose to write in Kikuyu despite the success of his earlier, English-language work.

This sharing of the literary embrace was evoked again on Sunday, with Heaney's amiable performance including a line from Desmond O'Grady in a poem and Delanty, for some years now working in Vermont, incorporating references to colleagues, including Heaney.