From Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid Book VI (lines 258-294) followed by a brief commentary from Rachel Falconer’s recent volume dedicated to Heaney’s decades-long engagement with Virgil – Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry
“procul o, procul este, profani,”
conclamat vates, “totoque absistite luco;
tuque invade viam vaginaque eripe ferrum:
nunc animis opus, Aenea, nunc pectore firmo.”
tantum effata furens antro se immisit aperto;
ille ducem haud timidis vadentem passibus aequat.
Di, quibus imperium est animarum, umbraeque silentes
et Chaos et Phlegethon, loca nocte tacentia late,
sit mihi fas audita loqui; sit numine vestro
pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas.
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna,
quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.
vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae,
pallentesque habitant Morbi tristisque Senectus
et Metus et malesuada Fames ac turpis Egestas,
terribiles visu formae, Letumque Labosque:
tum consanguineus Leti Sopor et mala mentis
Gaudia, mortiferumque adverso in limine Bellum
ferreique Eumenidum thalami et Discordia demens,
vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis.
In medio ramos annosaque bracchia pandit
ulmus opaca, ingens, quam sedem Somnia vulgo
vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus haerent.
multaque praeterea variarum monstra ferarum,
Centauri in foribus stabulant Scyllaeque biformes
et centumgeminus Briareus ac belua Lernae,
horrendum stridens, flammisque armata Chimaera,
Gorgones Harpyiaeque et forma tricorporis umbrae.
corripit hic subita trepidus formidine ferrum
Aeneas, strictamque aciem venientibus offert;
et, ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas
admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,
inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras.
Depart from the grove. But not you, Aeneas:
Take you the sword from your scabbard, go ahead
On the road. Now will spirit be tested,
Now, now your courage must hold.” So saying, rapt
And unstoppable, she hurled herself into the mouth
Of the wide-open cave, and he, without fear,
Kept in step as she guided him forward.
Gods who rule over souls! Shades who subsist
In the silence! Chaos and Phlegethon, O you hushed
Nocturnal expanses, let assent be forthcoming
As I tell what’s been given to tell, let assent be divine
As I unveil things profoundly beyond us,
Mysteries and truths buried under the earth.
On they went then in darkness, through the lonely
Shadowing night, a nowhere of deserted dwellings,
Dim phantasmal reaches where Pluto is king—
Like following a forest path by the hovering light
Of a moon that clouds and unclouds at Jupiter’s whim,
While the colours of the world pall in the gloom.
In front of the house of the dead,
Between its dread jambs, is a courtyard where pain
And self-wounding thoughts have ensconced themselves.
Here too are pallid diseases, the sorrows of age,
Hunger that drives men to crime, agonies of the mind,
Poverty that demeans—all of these haunting nightmares
Have their beds in the niches. Death too, and sleep,
The brother of death, and terror, and guilty pleasures
That memory battens on. Also close by that doorway:
The iron cells of the Furies, death-dealing War
And fanatical Violence, her viper-tresses astream
In a bloodstained tangle of ribbons. Right in the middle
Stands an elm, copious, darkly aflutter, old branches
Spread wide like arms, and here, it is said,
False dreams come to roost, clinging together
On the undersides of the leaves. At the gates,
Monstrosities brood in their pens, bewildering beasts
Of every form and description: two-natured Centaurs
And Scyllas, hundred-headed Briareus, the beast of Lerna,
Loathsome and hissing, and fire-fanged Chimaera;
Gorgons and Harpies too, and the looming menace
Of triple-framed Geryon. Faced with this rout,
Aeneas is thrown into panic, pulls out his sword,
Swings it round in defence, and had not his guide
In her wisdom forewarned him
That these were lives without substance, phantoms,
Apparitional forms, he would have charged
And tried to draw blood from shadows.
And the analysis, excerpts beginning on pg 247 in the Katabasis as Poetic Redress section
We have seen in Heaney’s previous translations and reworkings of Virgil that Aeneas’ mythic descent into the underworld and return is associated with the introspective journey into the otherworld of art, in search of redress (comprehension, perspective, resistance) to real-world suffering, whether from violent political conflict or personal loss. In the 2016 volume, although the shape of the katabatic journey, its threshold-crossings, encounters with the dead, trajectory and telos, are all laid down by Virgil, nevertheless Heaney’s translation continues this labor of seeking redress to historical adversity through the medium of poetry. These longstanding preoccupations of Heaney’s are evident not only in the orchestration of the tone and rhythm of the translation, but also in the weight he gives to particular, threshold moments, the careful phrasing of certain familiar motifs, and the elaboration of Virgil’s vision of a country at peace. The good of poetry that emerges from this dialogue with Virgil is ultimately its capacity to offer inner resilience, hope, and the memory or vision of a more just and peaceful society
…
Aeneas’ journey through the underworld begins in shadowy darkness and ends in warmth and sunlight, a trajectory that corresponds precisely to Heaney’s notion of poetic redress. Thus, he takes great care over the translation of two passages that mark the beginning and end of that Orphic ‘haulage’ from darkness to light. The first describes Aeneas setting forth into the realms of Dis (Hades), and the latter describes his arrival in the valley of Elysium. Virgil’s description of the hero’s setting forth is justly famous, with its rich alliterations, word order inversions and mysterious beginning with the imperfect verb ‘ibant’ (‘they were going’):
…
Heaney responds very expressively to Virgil’s evocation of underworld melancholy. His translation emphasises the psychological dimensions of Aeneas’ quest, while also giving a specifically Irish dimension to this universal realm of shadows. The infernal stretch of time implied in Virgil’s ‘ibant’ is conveyed here through word order inversion: ‘On they went then’, where ‘then’ carries the sense of causation as well as temporality (‘therefore’, as well as ‘at that time’). The line-end pause after ‘lonely’ encourages us to attach the adjective to the wayfaring Aeneas, as well as the ‘Shadowing night’ it modifies. Heaney’s idiomatic phrase, ‘a nowhere of deserted dwellings’, conjures the material reality of a Northern Irish town, post-military conflict. At the same time, both ‘a nowhere’ and ‘deserted dwellings’ are phrases that
posit, and cancel out, a sense of place. ‘Phantasmal reaches’ recall the ‘phantasmal comrades’ of Joyce’s Portrait, while draining away the presence of even companionable ghosts at the start of Aeneas’ lonely journey. Heaney begins the simile with uncertain syntax, so that it is at first unclear who is ‘following a forest path’. By the time we realise this must refer to Aeneas and the Sibyl, we have experienced their sense of disorientation on the dim-lit path. Virgil’s ‘atra’ is a blackness associated with funerals, for which Heaney’s ‘pall in the gloom’ is a perfectly apt translation. In Virgil’s lines 271–2, ‘Iuppiter’ and ‘nox’ are the subjects of the phrase, and they impose darkness on the sky and world. In Heaney’s corresponding lines 361–2, the subjects are the moon and ‘the colours of the world’. Both are overshadowed by ‘Jupiter’s whim’, but since they are active agents, they retain the capacity to restore the world to its full radiance. In other words, Heaney redistributes the balance of power between darkness and light, giving an equal weight to each in the line: ‘moon’
against ‘Jupiter’s whim’, and ‘colours’ against ‘gloom’. The possibility of the moon unclouding, and overthrowing Jupiter’s whim, exists only in the simile, since Aeneas at the start of his journey is in Pluto’s realm (his translation of the less familiar name, ‘Dis’), where the darkness and negation appear absolute.