When Virgil died at Brindisium in 19 bc, on his way back to Rome from Greece, he left the Aeneid unfinished. When Seamus Heaney died in Dublin in 2013, his translation of Book VI was also unfinished, but like the whole of the original, his 1,222 lines were found to be in a publishable condition (‘final’, he wrote on the last draft, which allows for it not being ‘complete’).
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £12.49. Tel: 08430 600033. Andrew Motion was poet laureate from 1999 to 2009. His most recent collection is Peace Talks.
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