Aristophanes: Frogs and Other Plays: A new verse translation, with introduction and notes (Oxford World's Classics)

The great British actor David Garrick is supposed to have said on his deathbed that "dying is easy; comedy is hard." Well, that goes for translating Aristophanes. Though there are aspects of Aristophanes' humor that are funny at all times and places, there are also aspects that are "topical"--i.e., Aristophanes is making jokes at the expense of politicians and other people of his time. Thanks to people who, in ancient times, wrote "footnotes" to the plays and who may or may not themselves have known what the humor was about (as they were usually writing a couple of centuries after the situations in question), we sometimes know, in a general way, who the people were and what kind of fun Aristophanes was poking at them. But, notoriously, any joke that has to be explained is not a funny joke. In addition, there is the problem of what to do about the fact that Aristophanes wrote his plays in verse form. Obviously there are plays in modern times, and even comedies, that have been written in verse (some of Moliere's, for instance), and some of those who have translated Aristophanes into English have resorted to using a kind of doggerel. It usually comes across as trying to be like the poetry that W.S. Gilbert wrote for the Gilbert-and-Sullivan operettas, though not quite making it. The upshot is, it's really hard to craft a translation that's really funny, in the way that the plays presumably were funny, without having to count on the reader making allowances for 2,400 years having gone by since the jokes were first cracked. I have also seen stage productions of Aristophanes' plays that attempt to come up with 'modern equivalents' of the humor, so that people sitting in a theater, who aren't in a position to read footnotes, can at least 'get' some of the humor without its having to be explained to them. For the average theater audience this is probably necessary, but it takes the reader at home too far away from the original Aristophanes for that reader to feel like the translation is really providing a closely equivalent experience. Ultimately a translation of Aristophanes has to take its place somewhere on the continuum between a translation that 'hands you everything on a platter' but isn't really what Aristophanes wrote, and a literal translation in which you have to do a lot of heavy lifting to figure out, in places, why what Aristophanes is doing is funny. Halliwell finds a place on that continuum that satisfies me. My only source of unhappiness is that only two volumes of his translations of Aristophanes have yet been published--I hope a third volume to complete the series is in the works.

As described, highly recommended.

Aristófanes es único y esta traducción así lo refleja. Tal vez sea un poco lioso el mundo de las notas, remisiones a los índices etc. Pero eso es siempre un debe en este tipo de ediciones de autores clásicos. En nada desmerecen de la traducción.