Customer Reviews

Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata (Meridian classics)

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is physically constructed like a student edition -- i.e., cheaply. The paper is cheap and thick, the ink thick and sometimes blotchy, with that great newspaper smell. If you're looking for a lovely edition of Aristophanes to sit on the mantle with your nice books, this is not.

The text is also organized like a student edition. The translations are great, lively, readable and fun. Each of the four plays is followed by a commentary, with textual and contextual explanation (pointing out Greek jokes that couldn't be translated, explaining Athenian politics, etc.). The back of the book is a glossary of names, places and institutions. The aids are clear and very helpful, especially for first time readers.

If you're loooking for a good collection of Aristophenes for casual use or reference, this is it. These translations are excellent, far better than the so-so translations that Aristophenes usually recieves. Highly recommended.

Four Plays by Aristophanes / 0-452-00717-8

This edition features wonderful translations of "The Clouds", "The Birds", "Lysistrata", and "The Frogs". The humor and satire is well-managed within the translation, particularly within (my favorite) "Lysistrata". The bantering dialogue within the play is hilarious from the exhortations of the women to their fellow sisters to abstain from sex with their men (regardless of their own strong, womanly desires) to the tongue-in-cheek dialogue between a teasing wife and her impatient husband, to the final division of land to be 'presented' in the form of a nude lady acting as a visual aid.

The four plays are described in this edition as follows:

THE CLOUDS: The most controversial of Aristophanes' plays, it is a brilliant caricature of the philosopher Socrates, seen as a wily sophist who teaches men to cheat through cunning argument.

THE BIRDS: This portrayal of a flawed utopia called Cloudcuckooland is an enchanting escape into the world of free-flying fantasy that explores the eternal dilemmas of man on earth.

LYSISTRATA: In the twenty-first year of the Peloponnesian War, the women of Athens and Sparta, tired of the incessant fighting between their men, resolve to withhold sex from their husbands until peace is settled.

THE FROGS: Visiting the underworld, the god Dionysus seeks the counsel of the dead tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides on how to bring good writing back to Athens. A fierce debate - full of scathing insults and literary satire - ensues between the two dramatists.

~ Ana Mardoll

Irresponsible Trash

This review is for the `Readaclassic dot com' edition, which is what you're buying if you're visiting this product page. Note that the other reviews linked for this product are for different student editions, which are presumably legitimate. Don't suffer the same fate as this bleary-eyed customer. Just to be clear, Aristophanes the dramatist is fab. This edition is not.

Now, on to the review:

Essentially what you're buying here is an un-formatted, copy-pasted piece of trash with no acknowledgement of translator, nor any accompanying notes or critical readings. You get a table of contents, some margins and nightmarishly arranged plays. That's it. What do I mean by "nightmarish...ly"?

I'm glad you asked. It's impossible to address all of the problems, so here's a basic rundown of why this "edition" is, in a word, crap.

1. The spacing between speakers is utterly inconsistent. While this is mostly a cosmetic issue, it's a little disturbing to see one part of the speaker text bolded and double-spaced while another, maybe only a line away, is un-bolded and jammed up against the rest of the text. *The Clouds* commits this atrocity ad infinitum. To be fair, saying "cosmetic issue" is euphemistic in the extreme. An Italian sports car that's been run through a volcano and subsequently defecated on by a thousand furry birds has fewer cosmetic issues than this text.

2. In many places, multiple colons inexplicably appear behind speaker's names. The reasons for this decision (?) are baffling, unless the textual "editors" were deliberately attempting to drive readers mad. That, or they're really trying to associate what normally comes out of colons with this text. If so, "A" for effort.

3. The header and footer default at Calibri, but the body of the text is clearly not. Most undergraduates commit this sin until some bedraggled, booze-fueled instructor shrieks at him/her.

4. It's almost embarrassing to complain about there being no line numbers. Why should anyone expect them at this point? Really, that's like asking for champagne at a monster truck rally. Or, Axl Rose at a Guns n' Roses concert.

5. Clearly, this text has been independently published. Don't get me wrong. Independently published books are great for instructional materials, such as on making your own coffins and/or pornographic fan fiction. However, Greek dramatists (or any other for that matter) deserve better.

Ultimately, I wonder why anyone would pay money for this thing when the publishers clearly didn't. Go find a responsible student edition. Save your colon...er...coin.

I should first point out that I read a different edition of this book, and the one that I had had only two plays - The Birds and The Frogs. I will review only these two. Aristophanes has a "no holds barred" type of approach to controversial political decisions and actions. The Birds is a comedy that ridicules the disastrous Greek expedition to Sicily in 413 B.C. Arisotophanes is a wonderful writer and he uses similes and parables throughout his writing. Besides being comedic, The Birds pays tribute to man's eternal desire to achieve the freedom and beauty associated with birds.
The Frogs is a parody on the stupidy and culpability of persons afflicted with their own preoccupation with themselves. We see these types of "puffed up" personalities all around even in this day and age. So like the frogs we hear in our ponds and marshes chirping the same old songs. This is acually as timely as it was when it was written sometime around 400 B.C. Hard to believe.

Roche's Signet Classic "Four Plays by Aristophanes" provides good contemporary translations of Lysistrata, The Frogs, A Parliament of Women, and Plutus. On the negative side, the renderings are not terrifically inspired. The paper is too pulpy for a "classic," but that's a drawback of most (though not all) inexpensive classics nowadays. My printing of Roche, however, is not thick or blotchy, though I've noticed the Signet Classics sometimes tend in that direction.

Gone are the days, evidently, when the pages of a Signet Classic always looked crisp and stayed bright for decades. I've got some from the '60s that still look good.

Roche's introduction and notes to these four plays are brief but solid.

The reviews attached here seem to refer to another collection by another translator--the Arrowsmith edition, apparently. Instead of "Clouds" we have two lesser plays--"Parliament of Women" and "Wealth." The translation's lively, the notes very helpful, the glossary mentioned in other reviews is absent here. All in all, a very useful introduction to Aristophanes, and endless fun.

Aristophanes was to theatre what Socrates was to religion and politics--the funny, irreverent "bad boy." My favorite of these 4 plays has to be "The Clouds", which is in fact a parody mocking and making fun of Socrates (spelled or mis-spelled Sokrates). Very funny dialogue.

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"