Translator’s Note

Book IV is about an affair that barely outlives winter. It opens with Dido sitting and listening to Aeneas’s long-endured journey, his bella exhausta. All night, she leans towards him, her heart inflamed by his words. It ends on a high pyre, with his clothes torn and her face burnt.

The book concerns the relationship between speech and passion and, eventually, self-destruction. The alternation of confessions and confrontations, truths and lies, is how the lovers navigate their desire. The poem is a tapestry of sounds: curses, wails, prayers, and even silences, this deformed articulation. They weave and unweave desire, constantly asking whose language is in power.

Just as Alice Oswald names her translation of The Iliad as “an excavation that writes through the Greek,” my translation aims to unbury Dido, refusing to treat her as an instrument for epic development. Instead of translating the entire Book IV, I focus solely on Dido’s speech. My translation considers the erotic encounter between Aeneas and Dido as a site of gender violence and power struggle. In the Aeneid, what seems to be consensual sex turns out to be a deception (“I never hold out the marriage torch”) and exploitation of body and resources (one thinks of Aeneas’ crew recovering and enjoying resources in Dido’s kingdom). This shifting account allows me to think of the Dido-Aeneas dichotomy as a violation, a rape crime even, as opposed to a romance gone bad. It is also fruitful to contrast this relationship with that of Aeneas and Lavinia. There, the contract of marriage is agreed upon by two males, without the female’s involvement. The little intervention of women in traditional marriage makes the relationship between Dido and Aeneas all the more striking, underlining her otherness. One also notices how her extremity, if not barbarity, becomes increasingly strident as the book progresses. If Dido to Aeneas is first a ruler to a refugee, Virgil carefully reconfigures this power dynamics by turning Dido into the other. Drained by Aeneas’ economic and sexual exploitations, Dido eventually burns herself on the pyre, a death that is bitter and vengeful. A death so dark that Aeneas, on the sea, dares not to look back. My work is thus a radical imagining of a powerful woman in desire, in rage, and in grief. My concern is as much about dismantling the Virgilian hexameter as reconstructing an alternative understanding (form) of Dido. My translation does not intend to victimize a woman with powerful status and rhetoric but rather attends to the sexual violence and power struggle that are never said aloud in Virgil’s hexameter, dwindled into a romantic tragedy that refuses to hold the hero accountable.

One way to reclaim Dido’s agency is my translation of “son of a bitch” in “Dido confronts fleeing Aeneas.” Epic heroes often earn their own epithets. Aeneas, for instance, is famous for his piety and fidelity (Pius Aeneas). When Dido disparages Aeneas for escaping in lines 305-330, she pokes fun at this epic convention by calling him perfide (faithless) and improbe (wicked one). However, imagining myself as Dido, I find the diction too euphemistic to be a curse word. “Son of a bitch,” on the other hand, is outrightly colloquial, much like something to bark in a real fight. It is also a pun on Dido’s own words, nec tibi diva parens (line 365), meaning “your mother is not a goddess.” This is particularly powerful, for Dido not only strips divine power of its supremacy but also insults the Roman genealogy central to the epic's development (Jupiter-Venus-Aeneas). More importantly, to translate nec tibi diva parens as “son of a bitch” is to recontextualize this sexist term. Here, the latent critique of the female figure (the mother) is shifted to the very genealogy that produces the Roman patriarchal society. It is also worth noting that Greco-Roman goddesses such as Venus and Juno are not considered women in the social sense, for they enjoy free will and are not subjected to gender roles.  

Another way of radical reimagining is to recognize dactylic hexameter as a received form. As an imposed epic construction, the hexameter fails to recalibrate Book IV’s specific events and Dido’s emotions. My translation, however, does not attempt to replace the hexameter with another, presumably more “correct” form. On the contrary, just as Shklovsky describes defamiliarization as a “prolonged process of perception” (Shklovsky 160), here the grappling with form is prolonged through experimentation with different ways of representation. Aside from the more traditional poetic expressions, such as sonnet and haiku, I also play with media such as dictionaries and voice mails and visual elements like erasure. I believe that translating enables proliferation, not elimination. It is the act of approaching- not reaching- that keeps the text alive. That keeps Dido alive.

My very first attempt at translating Book IV resulted in a three-line poem titled “Dido and Aeneas had sex:”

We fuck in this cave.
Happily, happily, I
weave your fate with mine.

The work is a radical condensation of lines 160-172. Turning the 12-line dactylic hexameter into a syllabic haiku, I aim to subvert Virgil’s patriarchal paradigm of shame. As the only direct description of Dido and Aeneas’ erotic encounter, this scene is highly disproportionate. The lengthy environmental depiction reflects Virgil’s elusiveness of bodily desire. Amid the cry of nymphs and the iridescent gods, the only hint of intimacy is conveyed in line 165 (speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem). This effect is achieved by the proximity of the words Dido and dux (Chief Aeneas) and the narrow space around them, which is created by the separation of the words speluncam and eandem (the same cave). What immediately follows is the poet’s grave comment, “That day was the cause of the death and all the bad things” (Ferry 110). The part ends with a third-person description of Dido’s state of mind: “she covers this mistake in the name of marriage” (line 172). The assumption that the woman must bear the aftermath of consensual sex is not unfamiliar with patriarchal construction. In this regard, I must devise a narrative that does not strip Dido of her agency and that reclaims her sensual pleasure despite the tragedy to come. The choice of “weave” is thus deliberate, calling attention to the original verb praetexit. Though connoting “veil” or “pretend,” praetexit also refers to the act of weaving. In this respect, by returning the word to its elements, my translation acknowledges the body’s visceral experience, refusing to police Dido’s feelings.

Aside from shame, another term that I wrestle with is cura. One of the most frequent words in Book IV, cura embodies Dido’s complex relationship with Aeneas, herself, and the epic world. It also appears twice in the first five lines, setting up the structure and tone of the entire work (At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura…dat cura quietem). Writing in the pseudo-dictionary form, “a word I don’t know how to translate,” attempts to trace the development of “cura” in The Aeneid as well as in the history of translation. Without resolving the word, the piece ends with two equally opaque synonyms, “γλυκύπικρον” and “疼.” Sawako Nakayasu describes her translation of Chika Sagawa as “a promiscuity” (Jacobs 161), in which the seemingly one-to-one contract between two languages is constantly mediated and circumvented by other tongues. Just as Nakayasu challenges the exclusive transaction between Japanese and English by throwing bits of Chinese and French into her translation of “Promenade” (Jacobs 162), my translation of cura is enlarged to include Chinese and Ancient Greek, both of which feel personal to me. Moreover, by revealing my own entanglement with the languages I was born with/acquire, I foreground the tension for a Chinese translator translating a Western canon into her second language.

Acknowledgments

I have consulted the following translations of The Aeneid: the translation by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press, 2022), the translation by Shadi Bartsch (Random House, 2021), the translation by David West (Penguin Classics; Revised ed. edition, 2003), the translation by H.R. Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), and the seventeenth-century translation by John Dryden. 

My Dido translation is indebted to the following writers: “The Burning Haibun:” inspired by torrin a. greathouse, Winniebell Xinyu Zong, and Richie Hofmann. “Dido’s Sonnet Instruction for Breakup:” alludes to David Ferry’s translation. “Dido sings the night Aeneas flees:” after Louise Glück’s “Penelope’s Song.” An excerpt of this translation project was presented at Bread Loaf Translators 2025.

Works Cited in the Translator’s Note

Jacobs, Adriana Ximena, “Extreme Translation,” Chapter seven in Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Oswald, Alice. “Memorial.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, July 2024.

Shklovsky, Viktor, et al. From “Art as Technique.” 1987.