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clockless 's review for:
Complete Plays
by Aristophanes
The plays were great, but some of the translations were awful. I'm not entirely sure who gets the credit for my rating, so I'll just split the difference.
The most offending translations, I think, were from Mosas Hadas (it's hard to remember since there were eleven plays by 4 different translators -- (Rogers, Webb, Hadas, & Lindsay)), but I think Hadas, the editor of my particular edition, was the worst offender. All of them attempted to translate in verse, which I appreciate, but that requires the translators to make broader interpretations, some of which were more successful than others. I should have taken notes while reading, but the most memorable example is from Hadas' translation of Clouds: "Chewing tobacco, revival meetings, chatauquas, Hoopskirts, fascinators, antimacassars!" I defy anyone to read that line and think, 'Ah, good old Ancient Greece.'
The real problem is that, while I will walk away with the general idea of the plays, I will have to reread each one (with different translators) if I actually want to get a sense of the real 5th & 4th century Greece, and any thoughts about Ancient Greece I might entertain now are potentially fraught with error. I resent that.
The most offending translations, I think, were from Mosas Hadas (it's hard to remember since there were eleven plays by 4 different translators -- (Rogers, Webb, Hadas, & Lindsay)), but I think Hadas, the editor of my particular edition, was the worst offender. All of them attempted to translate in verse, which I appreciate, but that requires the translators to make broader interpretations, some of which were more successful than others. I should have taken notes while reading, but the most memorable example is from Hadas' translation of Clouds: "Chewing tobacco, revival meetings, chatauquas, Hoopskirts, fascinators, antimacassars!" I defy anyone to read that line and think, 'Ah, good old Ancient Greece.'
The real problem is that, while I will walk away with the general idea of the plays, I will have to reread each one (with different translators) if I actually want to get a sense of the real 5th & 4th century Greece, and any thoughts about Ancient Greece I might entertain now are potentially fraught with error. I resent that.