![]() Here is Heaney's translation: "It is easy to descend into Avernus/ Death's dark door stands open day and night./ But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, / That is the task, that is the undertaking." ![]() sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, / hoc opus, hic labor est. When Aeneas remembers the ruse of the Trojan Horse and quotes Laocoon, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, "I dread the Greeks, yea, when they offer gifts." a literal translation can seem more powerful than anything else, right down to that quote "yea" which translates "et", here used as an intensifier, i.e., "and" in the sense of "and how".Įveryone tends to remember the plain sense of the words Kate Holden used as the epigraph to her memoir In the Skin: the way to hell is easy it's the way back that's hard. The trouble with Virgil is that like Dante not only is the language utterly memorable in its mellifluousness but so is the sense. ![]() ![]() Seamus Heaney, who left this final, not necessarily finished version of Book VI at the time of his death in 2013, says he was "an inner literalist", forever trying to get the exact sense of Virgil, even as he strove as a poet for a language "decorous enough for Virgil but not so … out of tune with our contemporary idiom". Aeneid: Book VI, translated by Seamus Heaney. ![]()
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