Entre Belfast et Madrid Seamus Heaney dans le monde souterrain

In “Summer, 1969”, Heaney describes his encounter with Goya’s paintings in the Prado, at a time when riots between Protestant and Catholic factions are breaking out in the streets of Belfast. The resulting ekphrases are graded into an artistically shaped katabasis: while moving by degrees further from the situation in Belfast, he traces a descent and return journey via Goya’s historical and mythic canvases, until he is able to confront the violence of history from which he had initially recoiled.