quizais me gustou máis q as asambleístas aínda penso q por aparecer directamente máis personaxes mitolóxicos q é a merda q a min me gusta de vd

I was very pleasantly surprised at this one. I started reading this because the name of the fictional city, Nephelococcygia ("Cloud Cuckoo Land"), was used as the title of a recent book that I want to read soon. What I was not expecting was that for a comedy play that was created 2400 years ago, I actually understood and appreciated the humor therein. It's a silly tale of a group of birds uniting to overthrow the gods. It's a nice mixture of smart humor and dumb humor, political humor and universal humor, situational humor and wordplay humor. All around this was very easy and fun to read even over the course of time. Good to know that bodily fluid humor has always been in style.

Favorite passages:
_________________________________

EPOPS to two attendants
Here, you there, take all these weapons and hang them up inside dose to the fire, near the figure of the god who presides there and under his protection;
to PITHETAERUS
as for you, address the birds, tell them why I have gathered them together.

PITHETAERUS
Not I, by Apollo, unless they agree with me as the little ape of an armourer agreed with his wife, not to bite me, nor pull me by the balls, nor shove things into my...

EUELPIDES bending over and pointing his finger at his anus
Do you mean this?

PITHETAERUS
No, I mean my eyes.
___________________________________________

INFORMER
My friend, I am asking you for wings, not for words.

PISTHETAERUS
'Tis just my words that give you wings.

INFORMER
And how can you give a man wings with your words?

PISTHETAERUS
'Tis thus that all first start.

INFORMER
All?

PISTHETAERUS
Have you not often heard the father say to young men in the barbers' shops, "It's astonishing how Diitrephes' advice has made my son fly to horse-riding."—"Mine," says another, "has flown towards tragic poetry on the wings of his imagination."

INFORMER
So that words give wings?

PISTHETAERUS
Undoubtedly; words give wings to the mind and make a man soar to heaven.

I read William Arrowsmith's translation of this, and I enjoyed it more than I would have thought. I found myself drifting, as I often do with classical works that don't translate well into modern English, but Arrowsmith did a splendid job not only of translating it but also explaining his reasons for translating, giving very interesting insight into the process that I haven't had before. I had always thought that language translation was literal and word-for-word, requiring the translator basically to have a thorough knowledge of both languages and just substituting, but that's not it at all (and I should have known better). Arrowsmith has to sometimes reshape entire packages and create new wordplay to replace the old that wouldn't have translated from Greek to English, and endnotes detail each one. Were I reading this for class and actually pressuring myself to pay more attention to it, I would have found his endnotes endlessly helpful. Since I had no such accountability here, however, I must say that my constant drifting rendered them insightful, at best. I would say it's an entertaining read, and certainly not as opaque as you might fear, but as far as its relevance for me as a reader, I'm not sure.

2,5

Have you considered replacing your gods with birds? They're never far away - in some tree or bush - and while Zeus demands the sacrifice of a whole animal, you can appease birds with only a few grains of wheat. Also, they will give you wings (unless your reasons for wanting the wings are ridiculous. Then no. Obviously.) But what's really amazing is that many of Aristophanes' jokes are still funny over 2,400 years later.

This comedy ridicules the disastrous Greek expedition to Sicily in 413 BC. More generally, The Birds is a rollicking commentary on man's eternal dissatisfaction with his lot; his habit of ignoring the divinities which shape his ends; is crowded, evil-breading cities; and his tendency to disturb the equilibrium of the universe, Pisthetaerus, with his irresistible rhetoric, is a forebear of the men who sell salvation or the world's goods with equal glibness and ease.

Super Idee aus dem alten Griechenland. Herrschaft der Vögel. Kurzweilige interessante Geschichte für zwischendurch. Viel bleibt aber nicht hängen.

2.5 stars. Aristophanes’ conservatism is one full display throughout this work as he rails against philosophy, mathematics, the state, poetry, and just about anyone else who doesn’t respect the old gods. This wouldn’t be so bad if the play were a little less goofy. I sometimes wonder if stuff like this would be considered classic if any other works survived on which to compare it. The only Old Comedy we have is Aristophanes, and so Aristophanes is the author of these Masterpieces. While I can certainly understand that the reason the works survived is because they were considered classics, I refuse to accept that they were necessarily the best and/or deserve respect just because they happen to be the only works that haven't been lost. Surely the ancient world had better comedy to offer than this?

«خبرچین: پس، واژه ها بال پرواز می‌بخشند؟
پیسثترس: بی شک! کلمات به ذهن بال می‌بخشند و آدمیزاد تا عرش اوج می‌گیرد.»

A skillful translation of a hilarious play-- the translator was quite successful in carrying over the humour, puns especially (which are notoriously difficult to relay between languages, but abound with a clarity that's not cheap so much as accessible, here).

I've performed this translation twice now, and recommend it for complete or partial performances, fully staged or stripped down to plain audio.

Social satire meets bawdy farce. Cloudcuckooland is appropriately full of the tittle tattle of religion, politics, philosophy, poetry.

Skip this comedy and read Lysistrata instead would be my last word for it. This one gets 2 thumbs down.