Music from the underworld

Aeneid: Book VI. By Seamus Heaney. Faber; 53 pages; £14.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May; $23.

DO GREAT poets much enjoy translating the work of other poets? Yes and no. Seamus Heaney’s spirited and acclaimed translation of “Beowulf”, published in 1999, made him feel like a man sentenced to hard labour, he later confessed. Now, three years after his death, we can read what he made of a fragment from Virgil’s “Aeneid”, a work by an utterly different kind of maker. The Roman poet, in contrast with the unknown Anglo-Saxon who wrote “Beowulf”, is mellifluous and silver-tongued.

Heaney had been nursing a fascination with the sixth book of the “Aeneid” since his days as a pupil in Father Michael McGlinchey’s Latin class. Its themes haunted him: the miraculous wresting away of the golden bough; Charon’s lugubrious barge; Aeneas’s quest to meet the shade of his talkative father, Anchises, by descending into the underworld. They were made all the more poignant for him by the death of his own father, a taciturn cattle dealer from Northern Ireland, in 1986.

In 2010, Heaney started to deal with this Virgilian fragment obliquely, publishing “Human Chain”, his last full collection before his death in 2013. It contained a sequence of poems entitled “Route 110”, written in celebration of the birth of a grand-daughter and consisting of a series of autobiographically rooted glancings off incidents from the sixth book of Virgil.

Heaney’s Virgil is quite unlike what he called “the physical brunt of the old tongue” of “Beowulf”. Virgil’s decorous Latin gets translated into a language which calls for eloquent Latinate polysyllables: the Sibyl flings the guard-dog Cerberus “a dumpling of soporific honey”. But this “Aeneid” is also driven by the pitch and the rhythms of the characteristic Heaney speaking voice. The words he uses often have a pleasingly home-spun, home-grounding feel to them: “an outlander groom” for a foreigner, for example, or “a payout of thread” that is let slip through the fingers bit by bit. He cleaves beautifully to the concreteness of things, describing, for example, how foolish Salmoneus sought to ape Jupiter’s thunderbolt-throwing by flourishing “smoky guttering pine-brands”. The reader can almost smell them, transported to the world of Aeneas and to Heaneyland too.

This is by no means a faultless translation. Heaney nods from time to time—there is a tiresome instance of needless repetition in “And then they saw him, Misenus, on a dry stretch of beach/they came up and saw the son of Aeolus”—and he would doubtless have continued to polish had he lived. And in the poem’s conclusion, Heaney noted in a preface, “the translator is likely to have moved from inspiration to grim determination,” as Virgil, through Anchises, offers up for admiration a catalogue of the names of great Roman generals to come once Aeneas has gone on to found Rome. Nevertheless, at its best—for example, the sections when he is witnessing, with the Sibyl, the various punishments that the gods have imposed upon those who have fallen short—the book is wonderful; a not entirely great work by Heaney is worth much more than the toilings of many lesser poets.