Interview: Ciaran Carson on translating Rimbaud

Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which earned him the Alice Hunt Barlett Award.

Belfast Confetti (1990) won The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. In 1993 Carson won the first ever T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, for his collection, First Language; while his 2003 collection, Breaking News, won the Forward Poetry Prize. That same year, Carson was appointed Professor of Poetry, and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Queen’s University in Belfast; a position he has held since.

Carson has also proved himself to be an accomplished translator. In 1998 he published adaptations of sonnets by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, in The Alexandrine Plan. His version of Dante’s Inferno in 2002 was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.