UCL Houseman Lecture: Bernard O’Donoghue (Oxford) on ‘Chosen Ancestors: Seamus Heaney and Virgil’

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid VI had long been rumoured, so its posthumous appearance in 2016 was a major event. Heaney had said that he wanted to produce a ‘poetic remaking’ of Book VI, by contrast with his more dutiful translation of Beowulf which he said he did ‘not know or love enough’ to remake. I will look at Heaney’s version of Book VI, side by side with the book’s influence on his last volume of poems, Human Chain, to examine why he felt so much at home with it, arguing too that Heaney was a great but selective venerator of previous poets: for example Dante, Mandelstam, Yeats and Hughes as well as Virgil. By ‘chosen ancestors’ I mean to invoke familial progenitors, as Anchises was for Aeneas, as well as poetic predecessors.

Anatomy G04 Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre (entrance on Gower Street), followed by a drinks reception in the foyer