For the contemporary reader, it is the best of books and the worst of books. Best because of its mythopoeic visions, the twilit fetch of its language, the pathos of the many encounters it allows the living Aeneas with his familiar dead. Worst because of its imperial certitude, its celebration of Rome’s manifest destiny and the catalogue of Roman heroes …
With these words Seamus Heaney began what he may have intended to serve as an afterword to Aeneid Book VI. Marked “Katabasis, Eschatological” (the terms describe the final journey of the spirit into the underworld), it was the last element that he introduced to the text. He did not complete it and it remains a tantalising fragment; but he had, by then, completed a translation of Book VI in its entirety that, in July 2013, he marked “final” in preparation for showing to his publisher. That typescript was still in his keeping on his death one month later. It contained two full-length drafts, as well as pages of rough working; and although one draft was clearly more advanced than the other, the presence of a second version made necessary the task of confirming that the work was indeed “final” as Seamus intended. That search involved comparing a number of annotated and undated typescripts, as well as preliminary proofs for a limited, letterpress edition that he had been exploring with the Bonnefant Press in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the artist Jan Hendrix. From these documents and the accompanying correspondence, it has been possible to arrive at the text for this edition.
Seamus had largely settled the first 1064 lines of his translation by the time he saw a full-length letterpress proof from Bonnefant in 2011; that proof forms the basis of the text here, augmented by a small number of author amendments where they appeared as definitive instructions. The concluding sections of the poem, however—beyond line 1065—continued to be reworked in typescript after that proof had been corrected, and it is for this reason that the last typescript becomes the preferred text from this point onward. The Translator’s Note was prepared in two drafts of 2010.
This translation of 1222 lines is Seamus’s complete rendering of Book VI, which has 901 lines in the original Latin: it follows the author’s latest instructions, and contains no editorial interventions beyond the correction of literals. It seems likely that both poem and note would have received further revision had Seamus seen production through to completion, and in that respect, the author’s use of the word “final” may be considered a more precise description of the text than “finished,” as well as one in keeping with the Aeneid’s own halted composition.
On behalf of the family and the publisher, our heartfelt gratitude extends to those trusted readers who advised Seamus on his translation, and to those who helped to assure us of the virtue of posthumous publication. Our thanks go also to the Bonnefant Press: to Jan Hendrix and publisher Hans van Eijk, for what Seamus described as “an old friendship of artist, printer and poet.”
Catherine Heaney
Matthew Hollis