nother thing Marlowe and Virgil share in common is that they both conceptualize death as a factor not only causing but also influencing monuments. The pictures on the walls of Carthage take their power from that they represent mortality in order to create and retain immortality. They are, for that reason, the center not only of temporality but also for the convergence of mortality and immortality. The same principle applies to the statue of Priam in Dido Queen of Carthage. The statue is erected as the representation of the actual human being who died at the Trojan War and whose heroic and gallant acts were immortalized. Thus, it, too, serves as a point where mortality and immortality meet. These monuments which depict dead people and mortality …show more content…
That is because the texts are not completely bound to their physical materials, unlike the monuments like the walls of Carthage or the statue of Priam. What makes Aeneid and Dido Queen of Carthage more permanent monuments is that they are not strict, solid or unchangeable; that they are reproducible. Such reproducibility stems from the adaptations, appropriations and translations of the texts. In other words, what monumentalizes Aeneid is that it is not limited to exist within only one culture in one specific language in one specific era. It is interactive, meaning that it is in constant dialogue with other stories and historical facts, which makes it translatable and appropriable by giving the text a voice to communicate with. Dido Queen of Carthage responds to Aeneid with its own voice as well by appropriating the story of Dido and dislocates Aeneid by introducing another version of a known story. In that sense, Dido Queen of Carthage establishes itself as a residual monument as well as the text it appropriates which finds a chance to engage in yet another conversation between texts and cultures. Hence, dislocation from the origin and the physical substance makes the texts less ephemeral and saves them from being simply “mute marker[s] of death” as Hui calls the material