Derrida, Heaney and the Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI

Abstract

This article focuses on Seamus Heaney’s posthumously published translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI. It does so through the lens of what the post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida terms hauntology. In this sense the repetition and return of the past is discussed in relation to the translation in a political and social sense, but also in the context of how Heaney’s earlier works often haunt the later works in terms of imagery, thematic output, and word choice. The article examines how the poet pluralises notions of identity through this translation and how this text is one that is haunted by the past in both a historical and literary sense.