Heaney’s Translation

The Riverbank Field

Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as

“In a retired vale… a sequestered grove”

And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola

By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill

Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank—

Which way, by happy chance, will take me past

The domos placidas, those “peaceful homes”

Of Upper Broagh. Moths then on evening water

It would have to be, not bees in sunlight,

Midge veils instead of lily beds; but stet

To all the rest: the willow leaves

Elysian-silvered, the grass so fully fledged

And unimprinted it can’t not conjure thoughts

Of passing spirit-troops, animae, quibus, altera fato

Corpora debentur, “spirits,” that is,

“To whom second bodies are owed by fate.’”
And now to continue, as enjoined to often,

“In my own words”:

“All these presences

Once they have rolled time’s wheel a thousand years

Are summoned here to drink the river water

So that memories of this underworld are shed

And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood

Under the dome of the sky.”

After Aeneid VI, 704-15 & 748-751

Seamus Heaney, “The Riverbank Field” from Human Chain (2010).


Some observations:

1.

Asked to translate a line from the Aeneid’s underworld scene—what Loeb renders as ‘in a retired vale . . . a sequestered grove’—Heaney answers with a journey down to the riverbank of Moyola. Translation, then, resembles an underworld journey, which I find fitting, perhaps because I am already persuaded that the translator’s work often is letting spirits speak. But this comparison between Heaney and Aeneas also draws attention to a dissimilarity. Aeneas descends to the underworld to learn about his future people and city (5.737); they are yet to come. Heaney’s journey leads him to the Irish landscape of his childhood, the summer riverside around Lough Neagh; It already exists. So what is Heaney’s goal? Why does a translator translate? If Aeneas’s learning consists of listening to Anchises point at spirits and name their future incarnation, then Heaney’s learning—if there is learning—seems to also consist of identification, albeit of the reverse order: pointing at familiar Irish landscape and allowing them to reincarnate foreign, Virginian counterparts. Can one come to learn about one’s home in this way, by imbuing it with classical resonance?

2.

The line from Loeb is preceded, in Aeneid VI, by a scene of failed connection. Aeneas tries three times to embrace the shadow of his father, but the imago escapes him like “a dream on wings.” This scene doesn’t appear in Heaney’s poem, but it’s worth thinking about perhaps precisely because it is left out. What one doesn’t say is as important as what one does. Anyhow, Aeneid’s attempt to embrace is personal, intimate, spontaneous, and it fails. The recognition of spirits that follows is national, distant, programmatic, and it succeeds. It’s as if the legibility of Roman glory comes at the cost of suppressing the personal: to make an entire people his own, Aeneas must let go what is properly and narrowly speaking his very own. As translator, does Heaney undergo the same kind of severance? Must he let go of his own?

3.

The answer hinges on how one interprets the last three stanzas. When often enjoined to continue his translation, which is of course reminiscent of the frequent divine proddings that urge Aeneas to continue his journey to the receding shore of Italy, translator Heaney finally relents and does so “in [his] own words.” These four words are set off in quotation marks, and the question is whether that indicates sincerity or irony. On the ironic reading, these words are not really Heaney’s own, because they are partly Virgil’s and entirely in English. So to speak Virgil in one’s own words, for Heaney, would come at the cost of submission to the author and to the colonizer’s tongue. These words, his own only if he abandons the more intimate notion of ownership, gives in to the legacy of two empires. But this reading may be too simple-minded. Ireland does not sit neatly on one side of the colonizer/colonized binary. It has been both dispossessed and, at times, a beneficiary or even colluder in England’s imperial reach. Likewise, Heaney’s English is not only inherited, but exported. His translation, continued, participates in the global authority of the language it subtly resists. So the Irish poet is not simply dispossessed when he speaks English—his relation to it is ambivalent, enabling, uneasy. Then, on a more literary consideration, when we compare the last two stanzas with a more literal translation of 6.748–751 in Heaney’s 2016 translation of Aeneid VI, published posthumously:

The rest, when they have trod
Time’s mill for a thousand years, the god commands
Wave upon wave into the Lethe river, so at that stage
Their memory is effaced and they go once more
To dwell beneath sky’s dome and start again
To long for the old life of flesh and blood.

We see that the words in The Riverbank Field, while inspired by Virgil, are in serious ways original. Crucially, in this poem, what’s forgotten is only memory of the underworld; in the 2016 translation, which is true to Virgil, what’s forgotten is memory. If in Virgil’s Aeneid, rebirth requires total erasure, then in Heaney’s poem, rebirth seems to only require selective forgetting. In fact, here, rebirth might even require memory. I say so because in this section the poem omits the name Lethe, speaking instead of “river water.” And since earlier in the poem Heaney had “confounded the Lethe in Moyola,” it is hardly a stretch to read this omission as a subtle resistance to the imperative of forgetting, which Lethe embodies. On this reading, the words are Heaney’s own not because they originate with him, but because they are spoken through a landscape where the presences remember. In Heaney’s own words from Stepping Stones: “The point about dialect or hearth language is its complete propriety to the speaker and his or her voice and place. What justifies it and gives it original juice and joy is intimacy and inevitability. I've always confined myself to words I myself could have heard spoken, words I'd be able to use with familiarity in certain companies” (129).

4.

This sincere-r reading is attractive because on this reading Heaney models an ethical, imaginative inheritance of the classical tradition. And that might be valuable to readers—especially those shaped by colonial histories, hybrid languages, or cultural dislocation—who feel as if they are not traditionally positioned as heirs to the canon, and therefore less tempted to pretend the inheritance is seamless.