A gift from beyond the grave

When Virgil died at Brindisium in 19 bc, on his way back to Rome from Greece, he left the Aeneid unfinished. When Seamus Heaney died in Dublin in 2013, his translation of Book VI was also unfinished, but like the whole of the original, his 1,222 lines were found to be in a publishable condition (‘final’, he wrote on the last draft, which allows for it not being ‘complete’).

The coincidence is touching. So too is the fact that this book is concerned with news from the afterlife. Aeneas descends into the underworld to visit his father, Anchises, and receives there a history lesson that leads beyond the founding of Rome to the glories and struggles that lie in the future. Heaney’s version is also a kind of gift from beyond the grave. It is impossible to read it without feeling once more the sadness of his passing, as well as gratitude for this unexpected bonus.

Occasionally the unfinishedness shows. In the crucial encounter with Dido, for instance, where Aeneas discovers that the heartbreak caused by his abandonment of her has not been softened by time (and will not be in the near future, either, since it anticipates future wars between Rome and Carthage), the conversation ends with Dido sweeping off through the Fields of Mourning to rejoin the shade of her husband Sychaeus. ‘Is there someone you are trying to avoid?’ Aeneas asks in Heaney’s account — which sounds puzzled to the point of seeming obtuse. Compare this to the two other leading contemporary translators of the poem. Robert Fitzgerald (1983) has: ‘Am I someone to flee from?’ and Robert Fagles (2006) has: ‘Don’t withdraw from my sight.’ Both may sound a touch wooden, but both make better sense.