Heaney’s last translation will be published posthumously in March. Here he introduces Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, a childhood favourite and the work he turned to after his father died and when his first grandchild was born
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. 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. But the impulse to go ahead with a rendering of the complete book arrived in 2007, as the result of a sequence of poems written to greet the birth of a first granddaughter.
The autobiographical sequence in 12 sections, published in Human Chain (2010), was entitled Route 110 and plotted incidents from my own life against certain well-known episodes in Book VI: thus a bus inspector’s direction of passengers to the bus for Route 110 – the one I often took from Belfast to my home in County Derry – paralleled the moment when Charon directs the shades on board his barge to cross the Styx; and a memory of the wake of a drowned neighbour whose body was not retrieved for three days shadowed the case of Aeneas’s drowned, unburied helmsman Palinurus. It was a matter, in other words, of a relatively simple “mythic method” being employed over the 12 sections. The focus this time, however, was not the meeting of the son with the father, but the vision of future Roman generations with which Book VI ends, specifically the moment on the bank of the River Lethe when we are shown the souls of those about to be reborn and return to life on Earth.
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