Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics

Irish versions of the Eclogues and Georgics serve as another salient example of how culture and nationhood define themselves through Virgil. This chapter explores how Virgil has provided a way of navigating Irish identity and looks at the language choices in Irish translations that lead away from British classically infused literature and towards an alternative classical tradition. In particular, by examining Seamus Heaney’s translation of Eclogue 9 and Peter Fallon’s translation of the Georgics, O’Hogan argues that both provide two aspects of Virgilian ‘repossession’: poets relocate Virgilian poems into familiar Irish landscapes replete with grim realities of rural life; and they make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English used in Ireland.