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Title: Aristophanes 1: Clouds, Wasps, Birds by Aristophanes, Peter Meineck, Ian C. Storey, Gregory Dobrov ISBN: 0-87220-361-1 Publisher: Hackett Pub Co Pub. Date: January, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $37.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Three classic plays translated for performers and students
Comment: Better known for translating the great Greek tragedies, Peter Meineck has now turned his pen on the comedies, with generally positive results. Like other translations published by Hackett, this one is aimed squarely at today's college students. It has plenty of historical background for those who want it, or can be read just for the plays.
Translating comedy is trickier than tragedy, because jokes are so fickle. What one society finds hilarious, another might find distasteful. Meineck does his best to render the old Greek jokes and still be funny. He doesn't always succeed. His skills at punning are not as great as Aristophanes', nor do the jokes about minor Athenian figures like Theorus and Cardopion add much to a performance text.
And these are performance texts. No matter how faithful to the original, no matter how many footnotes and endnotes the translator provides, a student should still be wary of changes made for modern performance. Today's theater operates under an entirely different set of conventions.
The plays themselves are three genuine classics, WASPS being less known than CLOUDS and BIRDS, but in this book, perhaps the best. Procleon's obsession with jury service and the headaches it causes his son translates very well, and Meineck is surprisingly adept at rendering the political understory that subliminally critizes the Athenian leader Cleon.
BIRDS is the story of two friends who come up with one of the great comic plans: a utopia named Cloudcuckooland where they, with the help of the birds, rule both the gods and men. And it works!
CLOUDS is read most often because it features a comic version of Socrates and his 'Pondertorium.' While Meineck and Introduction writer Ian C. Storey conclude the portrayal of Socrates is entirely innaccurate, it sure is funny. CLOUDS is really more of a father-son story, a father convincing his profligate son to get an education in order to argue the father's way out of the accumulating debts. What the father doesn't bank on is his son using new-learned rhetorical skills to argue that a son has the right to beat his father.
Meineck is British, so the slang in the plays is full of 'poofters' and 'arses.' I will say this much, only recently have translations of the Greek comic playwrights begun to reflect how genuinely bawdy they were. Some of Meineck's best footnotes let you in on the double-entendres.
It's all a lot of silly mischief, and in the final reckoning Aristophanes comes through loud and clear, despite such devices as rhymed doggerel passages (no rhymes in classical Greek) and confusing name translations like Makemedo. The title of this book is ARISTOPHANES I, and let us hope that professor Meineck is at work on an ARISTOPHANES II that will include some of Aristophanes lesser-known works as well as perennial favorite LYSISTRATA.
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Title: Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas R. Martin ISBN: 0300084935 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Classics of Western Thought: The Ancient World by Donald S. Gochberg ISBN: 0155076825 Publisher: International Thomson Publishing Pub. Date: January, 1988 List Price(USD): $52.95 |
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Title: The Oresteia by Aeschylus, Robert Fagles, W. B. Stanford ISBN: 0140443339 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1984 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Republic by Plato ISBN: 0486411214 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 18 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
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