New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 112 pages. $23.00.
In an opening note, Seamus Heaney writes that his translation of the Aeneid’s sixth book came out of a lifelong wish to honor his Latin teacher at St. Columb’s College, Father Michael McGlinchey; but that the impulse to get going on the text actually came with the birth of his granddaughter in 2007. It seems fitting that a writer who devoted so many of his later poems to friends, artists, and family members past and present should mark this book as both a parting gift and a welcome gift.
All the more fitting if we take into account the story of Book VI: Aeneas’s journey to the underworld, where he encounters the shade of his father, Anchises. The poem long had a powerful influence on Heaney’s imagination, both for its images (the golden bough, Lethe, Charon’s barge) and the resilience with which it confronted mortality. In his final book, Human Chain, Heaney described translation as coming to terms, bravely, with death: “Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / ‘In a retired vale . . . a sequestered grove’ / And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola.” “Confound” here means “conflate” (seeing the two together), but also “surprise” (his, our own upon reading this imagined translation, the river’s at being so conflated), and “conquer” (vanquishing the Lethe by transposing it into a familiar environment).
Personal attachments of this kind matter because the present translation will be of interest less to readers looking for a new version of the Aeneid and more to readers of Seamus Heaney wishing to see the poet apply his mind and sensibility to a work of great significance to him.
As with all posthumous releases, there is admittedly some concern about how complete a work we are being given and whether the author would have wanted to see the text published in its current state. Catherine Heaney and Matthew Hollis inform us at the end of the book that Seamus “had largely settled the first 1064 lines of his translation” at the time of his death, leaving 158 lines in typescript. Thankfully there is little in these final moments that sounds slapdash, so while it is likely that Heaney would have continued revising the typescript, the poem has a coherence, a maturity, and (yes) a finished quality that should set any such worries to rest. This is a beautiful translation, and a fitting end to Heaney’s writing life.
In his note, Heaney writes of “the need for a diction decorous enough for Virgil but not so antique as to sound out of tune with a more contemporary diction,” and his translation rises to the challenge. His lines are invariably supple and modulated, so that immense feelings are carried by subtle changes in rhythm. The language has a grandness to it even as it refuses to grandstand; the highest of oratory receives a strong counter-pull of restraint.
Some of the best pleasures to be had in this poem occur at the level of the phrase, as when Deiphobe “Summons the Trojans into her high inner sanctum”: a rather majestic expression, though one that does not quite shake off its aridity (this majesty has a certain bleakness about it). Heaney also has a keen ear for the line as a unit and the balance of a line. “Meanwhile, the Sibyl, / Resisting possession, storms through the cavern.” Notice how the first half of that second line recoils upon itself—six syllables contracted to a verb and a noun before the comma—only to be let loose in the second half.
There is a sense here that the translator’s responsibility to the original text should be matched—and perhaps even surpassed—by the responsibility of the new text to itself and its readers. Nowhere is this more evident than in Heaney’s use of resources specific to English poetry: for example, the cohabitation of Germanic and Latinate words in a single language, and the powerful effects to be had from the arrangement and proportion of these two groups in a sentence. “A deep rough-walled cleft, stone jaws agape, / Above a dark lake, with the lake and a grove / For protection and shelter.” The landscape is described in short, stark Germanic words, until the final line where we land softly on the Latinate word “protection” and the tenuous relief contained in that word. Heaney is not simply copying Virgil’s text; he is writing a new poem that can be taken on its own terms.
At the same time, this translation remains deeply faithful to the music of the Aeneid and Book VI in particular. The elegiac quality of Virgil’s poem, after all, stems not simply from its subject, but also (and principally) from its language. Heaney’s own language, in turn, is heavy with experience even as it expresses fortitude in the face of what may still come. It looks to the past so that it may continue onward.
