On Looking into Heaney's Virgil

On Looking Into Heaney’s Virgil

The Preface takes me back. The great poet, Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate, writes fondly of his “A” level Latin teacher in the 1950s, who was disappointed that the class’s set book was Aeneid Book IX – “Och, boys, I wish it were Book VI”. That was a signpost for Heaney, who came to treasure, and finally translate, Book VI.

In terms of set books, I was luckier. In my two goes at Latin A level (there were very obscure reasons for the duplication, which applied to everyone taking the subject), I was lucky to draw Book II – and Book VI.

Book II is perhaps the most vivid of all – telling of Aeneas at the Carthaginian Queen Dido’s court, relating the sack of Troy (with the sub-plot of the doomed love affair between the two). “Infandum, Regina, iubes renovare dolorem..”. “Queen, you order me to resurrect unspeakable sorrow..”. And then we are in for a tale of Greek trickery and horrible slaughter, with partisan intervention by the Gods, all in measured hexameters.

Book VI takes Aeneas and his Trojan survivors to Italy. They immediately encounter the priestess and Oracle of Apollo, the Sybil of Cumae, in her vast and intricate cavern. Aeneas questions the Oracle about his fate in this new land, and is assured, in between the Sybil’s frenzies of divine possession, that Aeneas will found a city, and a dynasty, but only after surviving wars, treachery and other assorted tragedies, altogether much shedding of blood.

Following some complicated but vivid manoeuvres, Aeneas (at his request, made to the relevant Gods) descends to the Underworld with the Sybil as his guide. Aeneas passes through various areas of the Underworld (less relentlessly detailed than in Dante’s adventure, by which time Virgil, as Dante’s guide, had obviously become much better informed).

The Underworld contains, as well as the hellish Tartarus (from which despots, imperial or otherwise, are notably absent – insurrection against rulers, rather, being deemed a premier mortal sin), the Roman equivalent of Heaven, the happy Elysian Fields. There the blessed continue in the afterlife to do the things they enjoyed in mortal life – with the substitution of vigorous martial games for battles, in the case of noble warriors.

Aeneas finds the spirit of his father, Anchises. Meeting him is the reason for his descent. Here, the character of Book VI changes from a poem of sweeping imagination to a bombastic essay in Roman propaganda. Heaney comments in the Preface:

By the time the story reaches its climax in Anchises’s vision of a glorious Roman race…, the translator is likely to have moved from inspiration to grim determination.

Virgil uses an interesting device to introduce the bombast – reincarnation. Anchises shows to Aeneas a crowd of souls waiting to go back to earth, after their memories have been wiped, or washed, clean in the waters of Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. Anchises is able to specify the future beings certain souls will become– the heroes, and sometimes the villains, of Roman history, mythological and actual.

Virgil was fulfilling his obligations as the unofficial poet laureate to the court of the Emperor Augustus. Augustus gets a suitably toadying passage praising his remarkable empire–building skills.

Virgil’s political philosophy is, perhaps wisely at the time, pretty sketchy, indeed platitudinous. He has Anchises exhorting Rome:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;

Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,

Parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos

Which Heaney translates:

But you, Roman,

Remember: to you will fall the exercise of power

Over the nations, and these will be your gifts-

To impose peace and justify your sway,

Spare those you conquer, crush those who overbear.

Nothing here about fairness in international dealings. The message is: rule well over those who surrender to you; smash those who hold out. A succinct blueprint for Roman imperial practice.

Heaney is a poet translating a poet. He describes his approach: first, “nowadays with the help of a crib”, he establishes the “literalist” meaning of Virgil’s words in English, like some “sixth form homunculus”. Then:

Yet nowadays too that… homunculus must contend with a different supervisor, a writer of verse who has things other than literal accuracy on his mind and in his ear: rhythm and metre and lineation, the voice and its pacing, the need for a diction decorous enough for Virgil but not so antique as to sound out of tune with a more contemporary idiom – all the fleeting, fitful anxieties that afflict the literary translator.

Well, indeed poetically, put. His translation triumphantly delivers. Here, for example, is the description of Charon, the Ferryman for souls that have to cross the River Styx:

And beside these flowing streams and flooded wastes

A ferryman keeps watch, surly, filthy and bedraggled

Charon. His chin is bearded with unclean white shag;

The eyes stand in his head and glow; a grimy cloak

Flaps out from a knot tied at the shoulder.

All by himself he poles the boat, hoists sail

And ferries dead souls in his rusted craft,

Old but still a god, and in a god old age

Is green and hardy.

Heaney died a month after completing the final draft of the translation, in August 2013.

July 2016