Oxford (World’s Classics 2022) p/b 359pp £8.99 (ISBN 9780198900221)
This is the third and final volume of H.’s translations of the complete (extant) plays of the 5th C BC playwright Aristophanes. The two preceding volumes have justly received high praise, including that by Colin McDonald on the second volume (https://classicsforall.org.uk/reading-room/book-reviews/aristophanes-fr…); the four plays translated here are Wasps, Acharnians, Knights, and Peace—all coming under the perhaps rather loose description of ‘political’ plays. It is remarkable that in the case of Knights there has been no full commentary since that of R.A. Neil (1901), who died as it was being completed (but see Sommerstein’s [1981] in the Aris and Phillips series; and it should be noted that the Oxford ‘Red’ of Peace by M. Platnauer [1964] is not included in H.’s exceptionally full and useful Bibliography or rather, catalogue raisonné).
H.’s long and outstandingly instructive Introductions to the three volumes naturally cover much of the same ground: here, as H. says, ‘the substance … remains much the same as in the previous volumes, though I have made numerous revisions and additions of detail’; though of course, in the Introductions to the individual plays, H. ‘attempts to develop critical perspectives of my own’. H. claims that a translation into prose (as in the Loeb editions) would involve ‘too great (and comfortable) an assimilation to the dominant medium of comic drama in our own world’. H. goes on to exemplify in helpful detail his varying approaches to the wide range of metres (including lyric metres) used by Aristophanes, notably iambic trimeters (on a line by line, Greek to English, basis), chanted ‘recitative’ in longer lines of various rhythms, and sung lyrics: see pp. lxiii-lxvii in this volume. In the case of speech in iambic trimeters, H.’s treatment successfully aims to maintain a tight verse structure, even when a line involves division between speakers, and/or colloquial language. For this reader, H.’s translations of passages written in trochaic tetrameter catalectic metre are also notably successful, as (for example) the two parabaseis of Knights---thus from 595ff:
‘Now’s the time, with inside knowledge, we’d like to praise our horses too.
They deserve a eulogy, for many the struggles they’ve shared with us,
Carrying us through thick and thin in raids and battles we’ve had to fight.
Nevertheless, our favourite thing is more than all their feats on land.
Once they leapt with manly strength aboard the equestrian transport ships;
Soldiers’ cups they’d bought already, and some had garlic and onions too.
Soon they started to take the oars exactly as we humans do.’
All four plays are preceded by Introductions. In the case of Acharnians (425 BC) this is of some length and complexity, as H. unravels the multiple absurdities and illogicalities with which the ‘hero’ Dikaiopolis goes about concluding a separate peace---while the parabasis ‘flies entirely in the face of any attempt to interpret the play as the vehicle of a coherent “message” about making peace’. (It will be remembered that the play was produced at the Lenaia, i.e. with no foreigners present; and that there had been some sort of serious disagreement between Aristophanes and Kleon, though no formal proceedings were taken against the poet. Kleon is mentioned by name only once in Knights, also produced at the Lenaia in the following year, though he is allegorized as an ‘unspeakably nasty Paphlagonian slave’). Knights, like Acharnians, took the first prize; H. comments that the play’s ‘linguistic fabric of intricate poetic inventiveness, used to depict “the debasement of political life”’ makes it ‘impossible to display successfully in a modern translation’. H. takes us through the play’s plot at some length, with sections on Flattery and Deception, Stridency and Slander (Kleon’s loud voice---but was he exceptional in this?), Intimidation and Agitation, Venality---a marked feature—and Oracles (rather odd, this: why the emphasis on Paphlagon’s portfolio of oracles? H. suggests ‘ludicrous fiction’) —War, Pylos and Imperialism. (The reviewer suspects that a theatrical entrepreneur would find this play to be very difficult to produce today, not only because of its ‘scabrous’ language, though the two parabaseis provide some welcome relief).
In his Introduction to Wasps, H. lucidly unravels the various complexities of the plot: his schematic presentation of the clash between the perspectives of father and son on pp.152-153 could not be bettered, and, as H. says, the two characters see things from such different angles that, to a considerable extent, ‘they are simply speaking past one another’. As the names of the two leading actors proclaim, the play has Kleon at its core—or does it? As H. says, the play both is and is not about the leading politician Kleon; although the politician lurks round the edges of the work’s field of vision almost throughout, his relationship to the judicial system never comes into clear and steady focus—and after all, the judicial system and the juries’ devotion to politicians is the ostensible subject of the play. Purely comic is the preposterous transformation at the end of the play of Philokleon from senile old buffer to a crazily rejuvenated figure afflicted with satyriasis: as H. observes, there is a paradoxical mixture of crudity and sophistication in Aristophanic humour (and for this reviewer, the play is far funnier than Knights).
Peace’s apparent point of similarity with Acharnians (a single figure seeking an end to the war in an unfavourable environment) is of course illusory: here Trygaios, like Dikaiopolis, is sick of war, but Kleon is dead and Athens is in course of long negotiations towards the peace of Nicias. The absurd premise—that Trygaios should fly to heaven on a dung-beetle, hoping to meet Zeus—is fully consonant with Aristophanic indifference to commonsense or logic; what a disappointment to learn from Hermes that the gods have decamped, allowing War to hide Peace in a cave! Is Aristophanes parodying Bellerophon, the hero of Euripides’s play of the same name? We do not have enough of the play to be confident about an answer, but, as H. points out, there is no need; this is a comic version of a peace-process and the second half of the play reverts to humour of an unabashedly sexual kind; we are in a ‘parallel universe of reality-defying comedy’. The play took only the second prize.
Translating Aristophanes is very difficult, as H. frankly admits. These lively and sometimes justifiably inventive translations by H. compare favourably with the accurate but earth-bound versions of Henderson’s Loeb volumes: H. does not shirk from tackling Aristophanes’s frequently obscene language head-on (perhaps mentally thanking K.J. Dover for his no-holds-barred commentary on Clouds [1970]). For the most part they do not need extensive explication of the real historical background, but there are (very) brief notes wherever needed.
The publisher plausibly claims that H. has managed to balance performability with faithfulness to the original, yet the question poses itself: where is the expected/intended readership to be found? Who will be found to produce H.’s versions for the stage? (University dramatic societies strike the reviewer as promising fields to be explored). The Introductions, both general and to individual plays, are of the highest standard, and should prove to be of lasting value. Recommended without reservation—to those who will be able to use and benefit from them. But non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
Colin Leach