Customer Reviews

Lysistrata (Hackett Classics Series)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Neither the creaky and surprisingly prudish anonymous translation published by Dover Thrift Editions nor the profanity-laden, anachronistic but highly readable translation by Sarah Ruden is the perfect classroom edition of Lysistrata. Between the two, I guess I'll start teaching Ruden's version, especially since the footnotes and other apparatus are genuinely scholarly and indicate where liberties are taken.

But is the language Ruden chooses really the modern equivalent of how Aristophanes would have sounded to 5th-Century BCE ears? Visually, the play is inescapably bawdy, but is Aristophanes' dialog really so much the equivalent of today's stand-up comedians who "work blue" and use strings of low-minded profanity instead of clever innuendo to be amusing?

Personally, I prefer the Dudley Fitts translation, which seems to strike just the right balance between high-tone literal and "urban" street-talk. Unfortunately, the Fitts translation seems to be unavailable in an inexpensive, single-title edition. Any chance Dover might get the rights to it and retire their stilted anonymous translation?

[...].

I loathed Sarah Ruden's translation of the Aeneid (see my review of Frederick Ahl's magisterial translation for the nitty gritty), but this was much better. I'm sure it's because Aristophanes is more along Ruden's métier. Early blurbs for her Aeneid translation went on about how Ruden had gutted the "machismo" of Virgil's epic; hardly what you'd want for an accurate or even an enjoyable translation of the Aeneid. (It would be similar to a bunch of Hollywood hacks planning a film version of the Iliad: "Hey guys, this thing's been around for millennia, it's a founding stone of Western culture, but you know what, we could do it better - let's remove the gods from the story!...And Brad Pitt can star in it!")

Ruden's translation of the Aeneid sacrificed Virgil's grandeur and "machismo" for brevity and glibness. I found it a failure, but here she applies the same principles more successfully. No doubt because Aristophanes himself is glib, not to mention vulgar - something Ruden does not shy from, thankfully. I did find some of her translation-choices a bit strange; several times the more literal reading of the text Ruden provides in the footnotes works better than her actual translation. It seems Ruden has at times "dumbed down" the text, perhaps in the hopes that it could be read by the general audience. This is madness. What "general" reader in today's day and age would just happen to pick up Lysistrata? This sort of material is only read by those with a hearty interest in history or the classics; translating with the unwashed masses in mind is foolishness.

With that said, Ruden strives to retain Aristophanes' biting humor and R-rated dialog. To further compound her "general reader" aim, Ruden does not shy from dropping F-bombs and other sexually-graphic lines into her text; there goes the idea that this publication might be intended to grab the interest of high schoolers, who would otherwise yawn through the play. The graphic language would have it banned from any school. Beyond that Ruden does a good job explaining the esoteric jokes in her footnotes. Aristophanes wrote and lived in a different world than ours, so most of his jokes and references are nonsensical for us in the modern day. Ruden capably holds our hand through the more arcane sections, providing useful suggestions and interpretations for scenes that still have scholars scratching their heads.

As for the play, the setup is promising: tired of the endless war between Sparta and Athens, Lysistrata, a young Athenian woman, talks her fellow women (both in Athens and in Sparta) into withholding sex from their warring husbands. The objective: the men will become so sexually frustrated that they will agree to any terms their wives demand; the terms, of course, will be instant peace between the two countries. Any writer could come up with a wealth of plots from this idea, but again, Aristophanes was writing long in the past. Rather than the wacky comedy a modern-day audience would expect, the play instead consists of protracted arguments between the men's chorus and the women's chorus. Only one setpiece seems to me modern: when Lysistrata and her fellow conspirator Myrrhine tease and toy with the already-about-to-blow Cinesias, Myrrhine's husband.

Ruden rounds out the book with a few essays on Greek history. Again, these are written with the "general reader" in mind, and again it's a poor idea. Most who would pick this up will already have a grounding in the history and culture in which it was written, so Ruden's essays don't offer much new food for thought. The book itself looks good though, an eye-scalding pink, with a reproduction of a Norman Lindsay illustration for the cover (taken from his series of illustrations for Jack Lindsay's 1920 Lysistrata translation).