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Aristophanes is a funny guy and he writes funny plays. Like all the best comedians, he manages to slip some serious stuff into the mirth and merriment (and abundant priapism), as he sharply critiques aspects of his society, his government and his fellow playwrights. I very much enjoyed the 'peace' theme in Lysistrata and The Acharnians - a somewhat daring point of view to take while your country is in the middle of a war. The mix of high and low comedy felt very Shakespearean, although from now on I should say Shakespeare's comedy seems very Aristophanian.
I do have a critique of my own for Douglass Parker's translations of three of the four plays in the book (Lysistrata, The Acharnians and The Congresswomen). Parker saw his job, apparently, as bringing Aristophanes into the present so a modern audience would get the jokes. He did this by substituting anachronistic 20th Century American idioms, references and puns for those of 5th Century BCE Greece. (Example: "We want to get laid," say the women in Lysistrata at one point.) It must be particularly frustrating for a translator because so much of Aristophanes' humor and wordplay is essentially untranslatable (the universality of poop jokes excepted, of course). I found this 'modernizing' technique often interrupted the narrative flow, and distracted me from my perspective. Admittedly, my perspective was this: imagining what it must have been like being in the Theater of Dionysus watching Aristophanes' new play for the first time. So when Mr. Parker has a character refer to something or someone that didn't exist then, or use an idiom or slang expression you might hear on SNL, it threw me out of my pleasant time-travel fantasy. (Are we in Ancient Greece or am I at Second City?) I think I understand the concept in theory (I guess the idea is that if Aristophanes were doing a revival of his plays on Broadway in 2013, he wouldn't treat them as museum pieces - he'd put in jokes the audience would understand), but in practice it could be annoying.
On the other hand, I did laugh quite a bit at the first three plays, more than at The Frogs, which was translated in a much more conventional style by Richard Lattimore. Adhering more closely to the original text had its drawbacks - it wasn't nearly as funny as the others, and I don't think that was Aristophanes' fault. Instead of substituting modern American slang, Lattimore explained all the Greek language puns in footnotes, which took all the humor out of them. As the old comic once said, "If you gotta explain 'em...."
I do have a critique of my own for Douglass Parker's translations of three of the four plays in the book (Lysistrata, The Acharnians and The Congresswomen). Parker saw his job, apparently, as bringing Aristophanes into the present so a modern audience would get the jokes. He did this by substituting anachronistic 20th Century American idioms, references and puns for those of 5th Century BCE Greece. (Example: "We want to get laid," say the women in Lysistrata at one point.) It must be particularly frustrating for a translator because so much of Aristophanes' humor and wordplay is essentially untranslatable (the universality of poop jokes excepted, of course). I found this 'modernizing' technique often interrupted the narrative flow, and distracted me from my perspective. Admittedly, my perspective was this: imagining what it must have been like being in the Theater of Dionysus watching Aristophanes' new play for the first time. So when Mr. Parker has a character refer to something or someone that didn't exist then, or use an idiom or slang expression you might hear on SNL, it threw me out of my pleasant time-travel fantasy. (Are we in Ancient Greece or am I at Second City?) I think I understand the concept in theory (I guess the idea is that if Aristophanes were doing a revival of his plays on Broadway in 2013, he wouldn't treat them as museum pieces - he'd put in jokes the audience would understand), but in practice it could be annoying.
On the other hand, I did laugh quite a bit at the first three plays, more than at The Frogs, which was translated in a much more conventional style by Richard Lattimore. Adhering more closely to the original text had its drawbacks - it wasn't nearly as funny as the others, and I don't think that was Aristophanes' fault. Instead of substituting modern American slang, Lattimore explained all the Greek language puns in footnotes, which took all the humor out of them. As the old comic once said, "If you gotta explain 'em...."
