Sir, - Recently I spent some five weeks in Germany and in Poland where, unfortunately, The Irish Times did not seem to be available. It was disappointing to find - on my return to Ireland - that the Irish media apparently did not report the two day Irish festival in Krakow, organised in connection with the visit to Poland of Seamus Heaney and his wife Marie.
One could hardly have wished a better day for the opening of the event. On October 3rd, as the 1995 Nobel laureate arrived in Krakow, a Polish poetess "rooted" in Krakow, Wislawa Szymborska, was named winner of this year's Nobel Prize. "It is incredible that I am here, in Krakow, on the very day when the wonderful news was announced in Stockholm", said Seam us Heaney when he arrived straight from the Frankfurt Book Fair. "I met Ms Szymborska personally two years ago . . . and I know her poetry from English translations by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagah".
Kralow celebrations were coordinated by ZNAK, Heaney's publishers in Poland. The programme was extensive and varied. Three books were launched on the occasion: a 300 page volume of Heaney's selected essays and prose; his last collection of poems The Spirit Level, superbly translated by S. Baranczak, a Polish poet and Heaney's fellow colleagues from Harvard; and Over Nine Waves, the book of Irish legends by Marie Heaney. Tributes were paid to the late Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel laureate, during a splendid evening to which actors and poets from different countries contributed.
Seamus Heaney delivered a lecture to a large audience in the theatre of the Polish Department at the famed Jagiellonian University, known as "the second oldest university north of the Alps" (founded in 1364). The Gothic cloister of the Dominican church was a perfect setting to celebrate an "Irish Evening".
There is a remarkable and fast growing interest in Irish arts and culture in Poland. Your readers may be interested to know that all major Polish papers reported extensively on the Frankfurt "Ireland and Its Diaspora" festival. - Yours, etc.,
(Honorary member of Polish
Celtic Cultural Association in Krakow),
Woodley Park,
Dublin 14.