Customer Reviews

Lysistrata (Signet Classics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having read several different translations of Lysistrata, I can report that the one you select may make all the difference in your opinion of this early comedy. Roche's translation is very vulgar but has good footnotes: get ready for cockney Spartans, however. Jack Lindsay's translation, done in 1925 (included in the Bantam edition of Aristophanes) seems to be overly literary in comparison to the original but lacks notes. It reads well, though sounds a little old-fashioned. The bawdry is present but made less direct; in this one the Spartan dialect is Scottish.

I found Parker's translation to be the least satisfactory. The "hillbilly" dialect he gives the Spartans is painfully overdone,not to mention inaccurate, and the speeches are awkward and pedestrian. An excellent edition overall is Alan H. Sommerstein's in the Penguin Classic "Aristophanes: Lysistrata and Other Plays." The introduction and notes are extremely informative, and the translation itself strikes the right note to represent Aristophanes' style in English. (Once again, though, the Spartans are Scots.)

But perhaps the best choice is Sarah Ruden's 2003 edition. Her dialogue is unusually funny without straying too far from the original. Added value comes from her four very readable essays on Greek democracy, warfare, women, and comedy. It's also printed on quality paper and comes with a great cover!

Lysistrata is perhaps my favorite of the Greek plays-it's never pompous or overbearing, and it never overwhelms itself with flowery prose. In addition, it's one of the few Greek plays I've read that portrays women as genuine human beings rather than murderers, decorations, or idiots. They're smart, sexy, and socially aware, especially in a time when they were very seriously repressed.

Lysistrata is an intelligent Athenian woman who is sick and tired of the Greek city-states warring against each other. She calls all the women she can round up and comes up with a strategy to end the wars: Keep away from their husbands' beds, and the men will make peace with other cities to make peace with their wives. After a great deal of whining, the women agree to deprive their husbands of sex until peace is achieved. But that's only the beginning of what Lysistrata has planned...

Too many feminist tales end up being heavy-handed-though women are on the side of peace and right in this, it doesn't bang you over the head. The men are human as well. The comedy is sly and witty (though full of mild sex talk--nothing too raunchy) and the scene where one young woman unmercifully teases her love-hungry husband will have you rolling.

I can see someone making this into a movie-in modern or ancient settings, the dialogue can still be deciphered without a translation program *wink*. It's a story about the power that women can wield and the lengths that they can go to.

Read, laugh, guffaw! You won't regret it!

". . .Here's how it works:
We'll paint, powder, and pluck ourselves to the last
detail, and stay inside, wearing those filmy
tunics that set off everything we have-
and then
slink up to the men. They'll snap to attention, go
absolutely mad to love us-
but we won't let them. We'll abstain.
-I imagine they'll conclude a treaty rather quickly"

I picked this up when I saw that many peace groups were putting it on as sort of an answer to the warlike nature of our times. Apparently, it's a timeless notion- The women of the city were tired with wars, so they decided to collectively cut their husbands off. Of course, this leads to man funny incedents, as neither men or women find it easy to deal with this.

I wonder what everyone is suggesting today? The Great American Poke Out? This is a wonderful, short play, and the translation preserves all of the puns and metaphors that color this comedy with innuendo.

In a warlike world, it's fun to be able to sit back and enjoy a llittle comic fantasy. And at the price, you're paying less than the average movie: for something far better, in my humble opinion.

Get this book!

I wholeheartedly disagree with the review of LYSISTRATA (Douglass Parker translation) as left by Mr. Russell A. Potter. As a theatre practicioner (a stage director), I have read and studied a number of versions/translations of this work. By far, Mr. Parker's translation is the funniest, the most accessible, and the most entertaining.

As for the use of what Mr. Potter refers to as "poor white trash" dialects, this technique (convention) is not exclusive to Mr. Parker's translation. Many of the translations that I've read present the Spartans as perhaps extremely southern or even "hillbilly"-like, as does Mr. Parker's translation. It seems unfair to refer to the dialect as "poor white trash." That statement appears to reflect more of the "prejudice" that Mr. Potter refers to than does the text itself.

The use of the dialect is purposeful. It is one of the things that helps make the work more accessible to modern audiences. The war in the play is between Athens and Sparta - the north and south of Greece, much like our US Civil War. There is much logic in presenting the Spartans as southern, albeit in a distorted fashion; after all, this play is a burlesque. It is not meant to be taken literally. I will concede that the dialect does make the Spartan characters seem much less cultured and sophisticated than the Athenian characters, but that too is an accurate portrayal of how the Athenians at the time of the writing viewed the Spartans (mostly brawn, little brains); after all, Aristophanes was an Athenian.

The Spartans were not seen in their society as being very culturally evolved as compared to the Athenians (much in the same way that a New Yorker might view a "hillbilly" as being less sophisticated). A prejudice? Perhaps. But more importantly, it is an accurate portrayal of societal perceptions. Mr. Parker presents this societal view effectively. The Spartan women are every bit as strong and wise as the Athenian women; the Spartan men are no more buffoonish than the Athenian men.

Overall, the translation works very well. Its dialogue is the least stagey and contrived of the various translations I've read. It is not a "literal" word-for-word translation (as Mr. Parker himself admits), but it fully captures the essence of the original work and puts it in a perspective that allows the play to make greater sense to the modern audience. Rather than avoiding this translation "at all costs," the reader might do well to embrace it as a witty, clever, and in its own way very sophisticated translation of the ancient Greek classic.

Sex, war, peace, the ingredients to a great play. Lysistrata is about women who are tired of losing their sons in battle. The women band together to bring peace by forming a pact, they refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands unless the war is brought to an end. However, that is only the beginning of the bag of tricks she has up her sleeve.
The play is an absolute riot. I've seen this play performed live and while there were some good moments, I liked the book better. The book has a lot more witty humor and a sense of building frustration that the play lacked. The sexual innuendos are nothing too rash as to be insulting or offensive but rather appropriate, something college students can well appreciate. The "love scene" between Myrrhine and her husband Kinesias will leave you rolling on the floor. The use of props such as the "phalli" and towels are brilliant in accompanying the humor. It's funny to read (and picture) how the women "man-handle" their husbands to try to bring peace to the land. As a college student I've read and studied this book and found many interesting values covered that are appropriate for a Rhetoric or gender studies course. The theme of women suffrage, rising up against the men in a time when women need to be heard, is dominant in the play. Women banding together to fight for a common cause is something I have not read before and was pleasantly surprised of. For a Greek play, the women are portrayed as being very human, rather than being serial killers and jealous lovers and the sort. The women are characterized as being very sleek and sexy, something always to look forward to! The men aren't desensitized either; rather the men are just as human as the women.
I recommend this book for any college rhetoric course or even an Interpretation of Literature course. It's the best of both worlds in terms of being very entertaining and having a fair share of educational value.

"The Lysistrata" by Aristophanes is probably one of the earliest pieces of litereature demonstrating the free will and power that women inherently posess, but have historically seldom used. In this comedy, the women of Athens, and then throughout Greece, bond together under the common goal of ending the war between the Athenians and Spartans, so that their husbands will return home. Knowing their physical limitations, the women decide on a plan of attack recomended by their leader Lysistrata. She convinces the women that, in order to get their husbands back, they must abstain from the joys of love. Lysistrata insists that everything the women do must be executed with the purpose of arousing their husbands, however, once they have their man's interest they are to act coy.

"The Lysistrata" was written during a time when the Greek city-states where in a constant state of quarrelling. Aristophanes' use of comedy mocks the pointless wars of the time, while trying to focus attention back to the things that should matter most in a man's life. Like Shakespeare, Aristophanes is trying to deliver a political message to as many people as possible; so, to keep the interest of the common man, he has masked his political agenda with a delightful comedy.

Until now, I had known Lysistrata only by reputation. What can I say - I should have read it myself long since. This play seems to offer everything. It goes beyond just bawdy, but never turns salacious. It's got silly wordplay, but real social commentary. The battle of the sexes is about real battle this time, and Aristophanes fires a few well-aimed shots at both the men and the women. It's a classic of the Western canon, but amusing and readable. Also, for those who dread literature that's "good for them," it's short. The script comes in under 100 pages, and they're not dense pages.

As I said, this is a modern rendering full of wordplay and chants for the traditional Greek chorus. I'm afraid that the easy, humorous style puts me on edge, though. If a play starts in classical Greek, then ends up in modern English with proper rhyme, scansion, and dialect(!), I know the translator has taken some serious liberties with the libretto. Still I'm torn. Which is more important, academic integrity in creating a version for English readers, or being true to the popular, funny, bawdy tone that Aristophanes intended? I really can't answer that question.

It's a great play in a readable translation. There's a good bit of explanatory material, but not the kind that interferes with the flow of the play. I recommend this Lysistrata if you want the fun in the play, but I have reservations about the rigor of the translation.

//wiredweird

I took a class from Parker over ten years ago during my dark days at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught a course in the Classics department called "Parageography," which was about the geography of imaginary lands. I think it was an excuse for him to really get into the literature that he loved. It was a fun class, made all the more so because Parker allowed me to do the class project, wherein we created our own imaginary land, in hypertext (this was, obviously before the WWW, and hypertext had not gotten much play--I can't even remember the program I used on the Mac to create it).

Parker's claim to fame as a scholar of classics, however, was his modern translations of Aristophanes, including this famous satire on how women could stop war by withholding sex. The translation is good, but still somewhat problematic for today's audiences--many of the assumptions of the story are based on the Greek and Trojan cultures, so a modern reader must check the notes every once and awhile to get the full nuance of the poetry. On the other hand, Parker's goal was to not censor the ribaldry, and so there's plenty here for an audience to realize that, even in 2,000+ years, some things really never change.

I had to read this book for college and expected a dull dry read, instead i was delighted with the amusing lines and womans life beyond the painting on a vase.

This review of "Lysistrata" by Matthew Neuburg, a brilliant Yale- and Cornell-trained classicist who later abandoned his teaching career and begin writing programming guides for Appple OS. He is, for example, the author of the highly regarded Frontier: The Definitive Guide and AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition.

But I wouldn't recommend his translation of this Greek classic (Chicago: 1991). It was meant to be, I assume, a translation for students of Greek, since it's highly nit-picky and literal. Heck, the guy is parsing the Greek (complete with diacritical marks) in the middle of the text! But I guess you're given a fair heads-up there in his subtitle: "A New Translation for Performance and Study."

I sought out this particular one because I had on several occasions been blown away by Professor Neuburg in person, but unfortunately, his "Lysistrata" is just not readable -- although I'm sure it's worth its weight in gold if you're also studying or performing the play in Greek and will be asked questions about scansion, stress, and iambo-choriambic tetrameters!

For the layman, then, I would recommend the Signet Classics edition, which also contains three other plays: Four Plays by Aristophanes: Lysistrata, The Frogs, A Parliament of Women, Plutus (Wealth). That translation (not to mention the typeface) is much more conducive to a non-academic read.