Seamus Heaney began a complete "rendering" of Virgil's Aeneid VI in 2007 after he finished poems written on the birth of his first grand-daughter. Now published, his version is a powerful piece, cresting the waves between poignancy and grand heroics, as Aeneas journeys through the Underworld, having crossed the Styx.
"This translation of Aeneid VI is neither a “version” nor a crib: it is more like classics homework, the result of a lifelong desire to honour the memory of my Latin teacher at St Columb’s College, Father Michael McGlinchey," writes Heaney in his introductory Translator’s Note
"The set text for our A-level exam in 1957 was Aeneid IX but McGlinchey was forever sighing, 'Och, boys, I wish it were Book VI.' Over the years, therefore, I gravitated towards that part of the poem and took special note of it after my father died, since the story it tells is that of Aeneas’s journey to meet the shade of his father Anchises in the land of the dead." The poet decided to render the complete book, after finishing poems written to welcome grand-daughter Anna-Rose, who was born to his son Christopher and his wife Jenny in 2006.
Aeneid VI already featured in a different context in Heaney's last book of poems, Human Chain, which was published in 2010. The old man who tells him which bus to get to Belfast is Charon, the mythical ferryman as Aeneas's journey to the underworld becomes conflated with the young poet's journey to the city on the 110 bus. It was in a second-hand market that the young Seamus bought his first copy of Virgil's poetry.
Knowing what we know of Heaney and the various poems he wrote about his father, the reader is somehow forearmed with a keener empathy when Aeneas finally meets Anchises in the highly dramatic 45-page version, which we can only hope is not the last we will hear from the poet.
Vouchsafe me one look,/One face-to-face meeting with my father./Point out the road, open the holy doors wide./On these shoulders I bore him through flames/And a thousand enemy spears. In the thick of fighting/I saved him, and he was at my side then/On all my sea-crossings, battling tempests and tides,/ A man in old age, worn out, not meant for duress.
Paddy Kehoe
