“Everyone should know something of the Aeneid,” wrote the poet CH Sisson 30 years ago, introducing his own crisp translation of the Latin epic. Virgil’s poem is woven into the history of English literature. Blank verse — the metre of Shakespeare — was invented by the Earl of Surrey to translate passages from the Aeneid, which tells the story of how the fall of Troy led to the founding of Rome. Its vision of a civilisation has inspired poets with similar ambitions for their own times, from Spenser to Milton and Tennyson. TS Eliot called Virgil “our classic, the classic of all Europe”.
Admirers of Seamus Heaney will know already that Book VI of the Aeneid was a touchstone for the late Irish poet. In it, the Trojan hero, Aeneas, descends to the underworld to speak to his dead father, Anchises. Heaney’s 1991 collection, Seeing Things, written after the death of his own father, opens with the episode in which Aeneas is instructed by the prophetic Sibyl of Cumae to seek the “golden bough” that allows access to the land beyond the grave.
In a poem from his last collection, Human Chain (2010), Heaney made a personal allusion to Aeneas’s quest. Route 110, an autobiographical sequence, ingeniously plots memories of the poet’s youth against the imagery of Book VI. Virgil’s famous description of dead souls waiting on the banks of the River Styx like migrating birds, for example, becomes bus passengers who “flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks”.
Heaney left a draft version of this translation, marked “final”, when he died in 2013. In a short introductory note, he explains that he felt “inspired” to make a full translation of the book after finishing Route 110. He also sounds a more melancholy note, though, likening the result to “classics homework”, begun in memory of the Latin teacher who first stirred his interest and completed “with grim determination”.
Heaney’s Virgil is, in fact, as elegant and polished as we might expect from this consummate craftsman. He has thoroughly revised the “golden bough” lines published in 1991, and cast the whole book into a kind of loose blank verse, in which the English pentameter seems haunted by the longer hexameter of classical epic.
Advertisement
Compared to his prizewinning version of the Anglo-Saxon saga Beowulf (1999), however, which was written with alliterative vigour and relish (“Sinews split /and the bone-lappings burst”), Heaney’s Aeneid feels deliberately understated: a respectful homage.
There are verses that sing out with Virgil’s own musical inventiveness, shaping the sound to the sense. The god Jove is said to have “hurled his bright bolt from behind the cloud murk” — a thunderclap of a line. And the shade of Dido, Aeneas’s tragic lover, is delicately glimpsed as she “fled, implacable, into the dappling shadows”.
But there are also passages it would be hard to pick out as Heaney’s in a line-up of contemporary translations, and moments when you wonder whether he might not have made further revisions before publication. To have an embittered ghost refer to his rival and killer as “lover boy”, for instance, is an oddly colloquial choice.
This decorous translation largely sails above such vulgar flourishes, and might even be mistaken for a Victorian Virgil on occasion. Nevertheless, there are vivid Heaney-esque touches on every page (“The fling and scringe and drag / Of iron chains”), and the poet’s forceful simplicity of phrase strikes when it matters most, as when Aeneas finally greets Anchises: “Let me take your hand, my father, O let me, and do not / Hold back from my embrace.”
To read the first chapter click here or, if using the app, visit the Culture section of the site
Advertisement
Faber £14.99 pp64
Buy for £12.99, including p&p, from the Sunday Times Bookshop