For 50 years, I’ve had a small, blue, clothbound book, held together with sticking tape turned brown with age, that has enthralled me ever since I had to study it for Latin O-level. Next to it is the English translation, with ink blobs and underlinings. This is Virgil’s The Aeneid, Book VI, in which a Trojan prince descends to the underworld to find the spirit of his dead father and learn of his destiny in the promised land, Italia.
Bloodless shades, fallen warriors, gorgons and harpies fill the pages, against a dark landscape of Stygian marshes, infernal caves, a golden bough, the bearded, filthy Charon ferrying souls across the river, a monstrous three-headed dog and — finally — the Elysian Fields. This is where Enoch Powell found his line about the Tiber foaming with much blood. A story for all time, it has influenced almost every other adventure story since, and, in its depiction of determined refugees fleeing from war, overcoming shipwreck and wandering the Mediterranean, full of prescience.
Someone rather more distinguished who was also inspired by Book VI was the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, for whom it took on additional power after the death of his own father in 1986. He spent years translating it, was still polishing at the time of his death in 2013, and his version of Book VI was his last work. It is posthumously published tomorrow, when it also arrives (happily uncut) as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Sir Ian McKellen, at his most commanding, is the reader.
Heaney’s translation is loyal to Virgil, vivid but precise, changing the lyre-playing Orpheus’s “ivory quill” in my version to “ivory plectrum”, “groan” to “lament” and “youthful crew” to “band of young hotbloods”. Sadly, though, there is no introduction to The Aeneid at the start, so when McKellen launches into “In tears as he speaks...”, you do not know who “he” refers to (Aeneas) or why he is weeping (his helmsman has just been lost overboard). This lack of context is a frequent defect in many BBC radio adaptations.
This week’s majestic poetry, however, is a reminder of just how much Radios 3 and 4 have done to keep alive the Latin and Greek classics, albeit, usually, much compressed. Radio 4 adapted the whole of The Aeneid in 1999 and 2013, the Iliad in 2002 and the Odyssey in 2004. In 2005, Radio 3 broadcast a programme based on Pliny’s wildlife observations in which all the speech was in Latin, helped by onomatopoeic music — the first and I believe only national speech-based radio show for a UK audience with not a word in English. Is it not time for another, and perhaps this time in Greek?