Aristophanes: Four Plays (Liveright), translated by Aaron Poochigian

Expand

What can Aristophanes say to us? The four plays collected here were written 2,500 years ago for a society that traveled by foot and sail; its citizens (men only) ran their city, Athens, as a tumultuous participatory democracy. It was a different world. Yes, Aristophanes and other ancient Greek playwrights set the stage—literally—for theater as we know it—but can the plays themselves hold our interest?

Aaron Poochigian set out to make sure that they do by speaking to us plainly. A good translator should enable contemporary readers to appreciate the text without falsifying it and in this, Poochigian does fine work. His renditions of Aristophanes are loose and vernacular but not dumbed down, and probably catch the sass of the originals. Some of the plays turn bawdy in the service of satire. In his introduction, Poochigian calls this “patriotic obscenity” directed at the obscenity of the powerful.

The four plays Poochigian chose share a characteristic—an “ingenious” scheme, a device still employed by comedy writers today. The set-up gave Aristophanes a broad brush to tar fools and miscreants of all sorts. He was a satirist, an Athenian Steve Cobert, who setup absurd situations to point out the flaws in his society. The great thing is that some of it still rings funny after all these centuries, and the funny thing is that the characters he spoofed are often recognizable today. Pompous intellectuals are targeted, along with feckless spender living on credit, religion peddlers, urban developers, bureaucrats eager to annex utopia and a society as litigious as our own.

Among the four selections, Lysistrata seems especially relevant with its story of Greek women calling a sex strike to force their men to stop fighting and make peace. Female empowerment was apparently not unknown in 411 BC. The way Poochigian renders it, Lysistrata reads like a screenplay a contemporary director should consider adapting for film.