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Farrar, Straus & Giroux presents us with Heaney’s Book VI. Here, it is the original poet who has been omitted. Usually translators complain that their own names have been left off the book jacket. The cover reads, Aeneid Book VI / Seamus Heaney. The publishers recognize this the presentation makes that clear. There are so many fine translations by distinguished poets around, and at least one more coming soon, that this publication fills no need, except in the currency of Heaney’s reputation. The text is so evidently, first, a fragment, and, second, an exercise in “classics homework,” that presenting it as a complete artifact makes little sense outside the larger context of Heaney’s œuvre. Caesar Augustus’s refusal to honor the dying poet’s wish has come to be considered one of the great editorial victories over authorial authority, and a boon to European culture.īut, I’m sorry to say, as a separate book, hardly more than a chapbook, Heaney’s Aeneid Book VI is an exploitation of the poet’s name. The whole Aeneid as we have it from Virgil is also a posthumous work, one which the poet is reported to have left unfinished and wanted destroyed at his own death. Now Heaney’s translation of Book VI, the narrative of Aeneas’s descent into the Underworld, has been published posthumously in its own slim volume. Clegg’s, passages to translate as part of the pedagogy. In Father McGlinchey’s class he was set, as I was set in Mr. The Aeneid was standard fare for a Latin student of Heaney’s generation. In Station Island, Heaney came close to employing Dante as his own Virgil. Many of his own poems confront the dead who passed through and out of his life, just as Aeneas eternally confronts those in his regnum inferni. Heaney descended into the Underworld time and time again from the very beginning of his writing career. I am certain the poet needed little encouragement. Columb’s College, Father Michael McGlinchey.” Seamus Heaney introduced his translation of Beowulf with these words: “When I was an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast, I studied Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems and developed not only a feel for the language but a fondness for the melancholy and fortitude that characterized the poetry.” His introduction to Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid begins in both a parallel and yet a very different fashion: “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.