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To weep for dead Dido: a queer translation of Aeneid books one and four
Thesis

To weep for dead Dido: a queer translation of Aeneid books one and four

James R. Legutki
University of Iowa
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), University of Iowa
Spring 2026
DOI: 10.25820/etd.008338
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Abstract

To Weep for Dead Dido is my translation of Books One, Four, and a short selection of Six, of Virgil’s Aeneid. This selection reports the story of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and her affair with the Trojan hero Aeneas on his way to establish the city of Rome. My goal in this translation was to isolate the story of Dido and to put it under a lens of queerness, both in understanding the relationship between her and Aeneas as well as in methods of translation. Though Latin poetry is not thought of as a hot bed of queer expression, when they meet each other, Dido and Aeneas begin their relationship with a reverse power dynamic, with Dido embodying powerful masculinity, and Aeneas suffering and grieving in feminine ways. Over the course of their ill-fated relationship, they are forced into their correct Roman gender roles, culminating with Aeneas leaving Carthage and Dido killing herself on a pyre—both the ultimate act of agency and of feminization. For my methods of translation, I employed my understanding of Andrew Chesterman’s causal model of retranslation, which considers the fullness of a retranslation in its socio-cultural context, asking why a retranslation comes to be. I argue that my translation event is one of change, where the traditions of English translations of ancient poetry are taking on more experimental forms, which gives me liberty to disrupt Virgil’s source text and engage with Dido’s suffering more directly, repositioning her as the central figure of my translation.
 Experimental development Queer Retranslation Roman Literature

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