Dido & Aeneas

(Translation: Matthew Lorenzon)

Dido	Aeneas	Choir
		Listen! Listen to Dido the unfortunate, this furious woman! Her love has just darkened. Spite and fury only remain. On what reef, such a shipwreck?
Traitor! Do you hope, traitor, to hide your crime and sneak away from this land? Nothing holds you back, neither our love, nor our alliance, nor Dido condemned to death? In the depths of winter, you rush to cast off and confront the high seas with its hostile winds, cruel Aeneas! If you did not seek a new place and an unknown land, if ancient Troy were still standing, if you did not wish to return to the fold, could you dare to so defy the raging sea? So you flee from me?
I pray you: by my tears and your promise, since, in my misfortune, I have recourse only to these, by our union and the first steps of our passion, if you have ever accorded me merit, if you have ever found some sweetness in me, by all this, take pity on an existence that flickers and, if you are still sensitive to these prayers, renounce your ideas! Because of you, the nomadic people and their tyrants who surround me have risen, hostile. Because of you, my modesty has faded, and this renown of yesteryear that equalled me to the stars is now soiled. You who were my host, to whom do you abandon me, almost dead? What must I now await? Ah, if at least you had left me a posterity before you cleared off ! Ah, if at least a little Aeneas played in under my eyes in my palace recalling your traits, I would consider myself less abused and forsaken!		In front of his own, Aeneas denied the shared intimacy. And the interior of a woman, lovingly explored night after night, is seen scattered on the rocks, exposed to any sun. See here a woman flouted, a glove turned inside out, organs in the air, soft foam become slime. The tensions that made this body tender by possession are no longer contained in any weave. See Dido distraught, whirling feverishly in the chaos of her rages. What was this love of a Phoenician for a Trojan, this suturing of an accomplished woman and an inexperienced young man? Do they deserve this disaster? Listen to them!
What should I hide? Could the future hold the worst for me? Are my tears affected? Has he only turned his eyes towards me? Has he, vanquished, cried in his turn? Has he had pity on she whom he loved? What worse is there to suppose? No confidence anywhere! When he was shipwrecked and destitute, I welcomed him and, madly, I shared my kingdom with him. I saved his shipwrecked fleet and companions from death. Alas, the Furies seize my spirit and carry away my body!	I am passing through, coming from Troy, going I know not where to restore a Justice that a fate has entrusted to me. My quest is not complete: I must learn from my father what is lacking in my charge. An encounter awaits me in the cave of the living dead, beyond Charon and the Styx. Carthage is only a resting place. I know courage, learnt from the Greeks. From my odyssey I know the intelligence of unforeseen situations. But I also know without knowing it, that justice is yet more. And see here Dido adds her love, and prepares an encounter in this corner of Africa.
No, I do not hold you back! No, I do not refute your words! Go, pursue your chimera as you wish, search for a kingdom beyond these seas! If there is still justice under the heavens, I hope — yes, I hope — that when you will be on the reefs, you will draw misfortunes by the bucketload and that you will often call “Dido!” Absent, I will pursue you with dark fires, and when icy death will have broken down my body, I will remain there, lurking in the shadows. And you will be thus chastised, oh cruel one! And I will know it by the great, rolling rumble of hell.	You have taught me, Dido, the love of mouths and of voices, of overlapping breaths, of searching fingers and the languages of palms. But what have you murmured in the cave of our nights? What have you whispered to the cradle of my eyelids? With what secret have you dressed yourself, opaque compass for the temples of a man?	“Great minds against themselves conspire.”
“There is no love other than ours. There is only our love to support the world.”	“There are only, there are only us. There are only the lovers.”	She murmured to him: “There is no love other than ours. There is only our love to support the world.” There are only our intertwined bodies to welcome what comes to the edge of our lips from the bottom of the seas, from the sandy horizon and from the scattered stars.” She whispered to him: “To revive it suffice that I borrow from your lips / the breath of my name murmured all evening.”
Why does he turn his leaden ears to my words? Where does he dash off to? Let him expect at least some favourable wind for his cowardly flight! But I will no more invoke this ancient alliance that he has betrayed. I ask only for a short respite, only a brief moment to mop up my fury, the time to learn to bemoan my defeat. I implore this final favour.		Unfortunate Dido! “Even here, tears flow at the spectacle of the world and the destiny of men strikes the spirit. ”
	You have revealed to me, Dido, dual life, double passion, love doubled with silk and spit. But justice, Dido? This cause that urges me since the Greeks razed Troy and swore to the world: “Let none remember it!” How to attach our nocturnal meetings to this beyond?
What can I do now? Will I rally their vessels and bend myself to the latest requirements of the Trojans? Are they not indebted to me for having rescued them and have they no memory of this ancient benefaction? Supposing that I wish it, who will let me board and who will welcome on his proud ship a woman now detested? But what else to do? Will I accompany these triumphant sailors alone, fugitive? Or, surrounded by the crowd of my people, will I cast away the same people whom I uprooted from the seas? Will I deliver their sails to the storms?	“Justice? A virtue! Love? A passion! Virtue protects passion, without adopting it.” Words of Troy!	“He is not wise, he who plays the sage!” “He is not just, he who shirks a love! Virtue cannot be nourished with contraries!” Wise words!
Oh, God! Will the foreigner so go in having deluded our country? Will not the city take arms to pursue him? And will not our fleet set sail to combat him? Hurry yourself, burn, launch, pull, row! But what am I saying? Where am I? What folly carries away my reason? Unfortunate Dido, is it now that you discover your errors? It is on giving him your throne that you should have reflected.	I am still too young, Dido, to weave passions and marry virtues. I do not know how to respond to your love - a supplement that overflows and diverts - other than by subtraction.	This measured young man is a bundle of straw in the face of Dido, assured in her excessiveness! See the deaf energies liberated by the earthquake; see what crosses this woman and is engulfed between a barred love and the prohibited departure.
See what words are worth to he who issues from a high lineage! Was I not able to seize his body and tear it to pieces, to cast it to the waves? And was I not able to exterminate his companions with iron, was I not able to offer his son as a sacrifice on the altar of the father? The result of such a combat would have been indecisive, fine! But whom shall I fear, since I will die? I myself could have set fire to his camp, I myself could have ignited the decks of his ships, I myself could have annihilated the father with the son by immolating them with the same brazier! If it is truly necessary that this despicable head reaches a port and sets foot on land, let it be so! But at least, tormented in war by a fierce people, banished from his homeland, Aeneas, being reduced to beg for help within view of his projected right, delivered to the laws of an iniquitous peace, may he enjoy neither his kingdom nor his expected glory but let him fall before his time and remain without a gravestone amongst the sand. Such is my prayer and the ultimate desire that I seal with my blood.	I must retie the thread of the seas, and of the capricious winds. I must leave, Dido, and resume my wandering. The courage that I learnt in the face of the Greeks fails me in the face of a woman. I ask your forgiveness, I barely have the strength. I cannot make an alliance. I remain weak, and I flee from you. I carry my flight like a fault. I pass my turn. I am sorry, Dido! “Remember me!” I sought a sister, I fell upon a wife…	Between the certitude of a love here and the promise of a justice elsewhere, who will have been justified? On the one hand this mature woman pitching her tent where chance has led her; on the other hand this young, uncertain man who wanders from shore to shore. To the right a woman who pushes back, camped on the base of a loved present; to the left a man drawn forward by the magnet of a future.
		And nothing between the two, nothing to conjure the disembowelling of this love! Nothing but us, participants in this dismemberment.