November 2016
CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
Seamus Heaney and Virgil at UCC
John Barry, Carmel McCallum-Barry, Catherine Ware, Alex Davis, Bernard O’Donoghue, Jason Harris, and Peter Fallon (Photo: Patrick McNally)
To honour the posthumous publication of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid 6, a conference on ‘Seamus Heaney and the Virgilian Tradition’ was held at UCC on September 24, 2016. The conference was organised jointly by the Classics Department at UCC, the Schools of History and English, and with the generous help of the CAI. The overall aim of the day was to celebrate Heaney and Virgil by bringing together speakers from different disciplines within UCC who would reflect on the many aspects of Heaney’s involvement with the classical tradition. We were honoured to have as guest speakers Bernard O’Donoghue and Peter Fallon, who were friends and fellow poets of Seamus Heaney. In spite of the rain and winds outside, the conference was very well attended and the day was a tremendous success. Professor William O’Brien introduced proceedings by reminding the audience that Heaney’s translation was the result of a lifelong desire to honour the memory of Father Michael McGlinchey, his Latin teacher at St Columb’s college. In Heaney’s year, Aeneid IX had been the set text for A levels and Fr McGlinchey used to sigh: “Och, boys, I wish it were Book VI.” Setting the scene and giving a foundation for the papers to come, Carmel McCallum Barry gave a virtuoso introduction to the Aeneid as a whole in her paper ‘Back to the future: before and after Aeneid Book 6’. The next two papers focused on different aspects of Heaney’s engagement with Virgil. In ‘Poetry and the creation of idiom, the linguistic legacy of Aeneid 6’, Jason Harris (History, UCC)
examined the language of the Aeneid and how Virgilian phrases became commonplaces. Catherine Ware (Classics, UCC) investigated the intertextual presence of Joyce in Heaney’s translation of the Virgilian Daedalus. In ‘Virgil and Heaney in Florence, Dante and Dead Poetry’, Daragh O’Connell (Italian, UCC) moved beyond the classical period to consider another of Heaney’s guides to the Underworld, the poet Dante. After a break for lunch, proceedings resumed with Alex Davis (English, UCC) who explored the Irish poet’s perspective on empire in a politically challenging environment in ‘Heaney’s difficulty: Virgil, imperium, and the Irish poet’. John Barry brought this session to an end with ‘Sound and fury: another Irishman’s translation of the Aeneid’. The Irishman in question was Richard Stanihurst and his very idiosyncratic translation of Virgil provided the audience with a markedly different and very entertaining version to that of Heaney. The final section of the conference featured our two guest speakers. In his insightful and sensitive discussion of Heaney’s poetry, Professor Bernard O’Donoghue (Wadham, Oxford) brought together many of the themes which had emerged during the conference. The last presentation of the day moved away from the academic as Peter Fallon read from his work and Virgilian translations, and spoke very movingly about his friendship with Seamus Heaney. The day closed with a drinks reception and dinner at La Dolce Vita. Dr Catherine Ware 7