Reading Seamus Heaney''s Aeneid Book VI : Keeping in Step

The journey into the underworld depicted in Virgil's Aeneid Book VI occupies a uniquely important place in Seamus Heaney's writing. In this volume, nineteen specialists engage closely with his translation of it, to gain insight into his poetic and translational practices, and to understand much more clearly his dialogue with Latin literature.

In this study of Seamus Heaney''s Aeneid Book VI, nineteen specialists in Latin literature and modern poetry in English assemble to close-read Heaney''s remarkable rendering of Virgil''s Aeneid VI, which recounts the Trojan hero Aeneas'' descent into the underworld and return. In a translation that discovers fresh resonances and parallels between Virgil''s poetry and the island of Ireland, and between Roman and modern times, we gain new perspectives on Virgil''s familiar katabatic motifs such as plucking the golden bough, crossing the Styx on Charon''s barge, encountering the souls of the dead—Palinurus, Dido, Anchises, and more, glimpsing a vision of future Rome, learning the fate of souls in the afterlife, and returning via the gates of Sleep. With each chapter focusing on some 50 lines of Heaney''s translation, we demonstrate how Heaney''s ''settlement'' with Virgil leads him to meditate richly on the importance of funerals and burial rites in Irish culture, the experience of living between different cultures and languages, the relation between fathers and sons, the enduring legacy of the Troubles, and the ongoing work of describing and affirming a stance through translation. Heaney''s translation of Aeneid VI can be seen as a key to his major preoccupations concerning a poet''s relation to his home ground, his literary predecessors, and his particular historical moment.