Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Summon the Presbyterians’
- 1 Finding Principles, Finding a Theory
- 2 Historical Perspectives: Lumley to Lennox
- 3 Aeschylus and the Agamemnon: Gilding the Lily
- 4 Translating the Mask: the Non-Verbal Language
- 5 Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: Words and Concepts
- 6 Text and Subtext: From Bad to Verse
- 7 Euripides' Medea and Alcestis: From Sex to Sentiment
- 8 The Comic Tradition
- 9 Modernising Comedy
- 10 When is a Translation Not a Translation?
- Appendix: A Comprehensive List of all Greek Plays in English Translation
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Translators
- General Index
9 - Modernising Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Summon the Presbyterians’
- 1 Finding Principles, Finding a Theory
- 2 Historical Perspectives: Lumley to Lennox
- 3 Aeschylus and the Agamemnon: Gilding the Lily
- 4 Translating the Mask: the Non-Verbal Language
- 5 Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: Words and Concepts
- 6 Text and Subtext: From Bad to Verse
- 7 Euripides' Medea and Alcestis: From Sex to Sentiment
- 8 The Comic Tradition
- 9 Modernising Comedy
- 10 When is a Translation Not a Translation?
- Appendix: A Comprehensive List of all Greek Plays in English Translation
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Translators
- General Index
Summary
Translation is a quite specific job, to make a version which is true to the original and doesn't bore the tits off everyone.
(Pam Gems, 1990)Until comparatively recently all translations of Aristophanes were adaptations or condensed versions, if not always as extreme as the Thomas Randolph Plutus (see p. 145–6). William Arrowsmith, perhaps the most enduring of all twentieth-century translators of both comedy and tragedy, identified why this should be so in an essay entitled ‘The lively conventions of translation’ in the series of essays on stage translation which he edited with Roger Shattuck in 1961. He pointed to what he described as ‘the hard facts of culture’, complex enough in Greek tragedy but multiplied in comedy because:
comedy dumps into the translator's lap an intolerable profusion of things – odd bits of clothing, alien cuisine, unidentifiable objects, pots and pans and utensils of bewildering variety and function, unfamiliar currency, etc …. What the devil can a translator do with a culture in which women, for esthetic reasons, depilate their pubic hairs, or with a comedian who can build a whole recognition scene on the fact?
Mercifully, he provided an answer to his own question a little later, speaking for any translator of Aristophanes when he asserted that ‘Incongruity and craft make the obscene more obscene, truly obscene. And this is what the translator wants.’
Sir Kenneth Dover picked out a more fundamental issue that relates to reception:
the audience of tragedy tolerates a certain degree of obscurity and mystification, but an audience that has been told that Aristophanes is funny and therefore expects to be amused is less tolerant.
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- Information
- Found in TranslationGreek Drama in English, pp. 162 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006