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Unread 02-20-2021, 08:27 AM
Aaron Poochigian Aaron Poochigian is offline
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Default "Aristophanes" in Wall Street Journal

‘Aristophanes’ Review: Laughter on the Acropolis
The Greek comedian wasn’t afraid to challenge the powers that be. Or crack a dirty joke.

By Willard Spiegelman

The study of the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome—a discipline once considered so foundational it was simply known as “the classics”—has been under siege for decades. University enrollments in all humanities programs have declined; programs, especially in the classics, are imperiled. The idea of a Western canon deriving from the ancient world has been challenged by some left-wing educators even as it has been taken up by right-wing ideologues: its condition as a political football makes the field’s existence all the more fragile.

Although the times seem to be changing, the classics are still relevant today, perhaps more so than ever. “The glory that was Greece” comes in many flavors, shades, and accents. Students are often first introduced to its martial and tragic side. But, more than Homer or Sophocles, Aristophanes, the oldest of the comic playwrights, may be the man for our current moment. When political posturing and empty rhetoric cloud the air, the most vulgar hilarity feels like an antidote: Buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and the sort of comedy that turns on farts and erections all provide a welcome respite—and in the hands of Aristophanes are powerful tools to help us see our problems afresh.

ARISTOPHANES: FOUR PLAYS
Translated by Aaron Poochigian
Liveright, 400 pages, $39.95

George S. Kaufman famously observed that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” To which we may add that comedy is the most fragile and time-sensitive of all genres. Like the funnybones of audiences, jokes change, losing their zing through time. What survives? Broad strokes, dramatic situations and stock characters that can be accessed centuries after their first appearance. Many of today’s problems—war and peace, patriotism and xenophobia, sexual and power relations, gender issues—were around 2,500 years ago.

Seeing a play on stage is one thing, reading it quite another. The intellectual wit of Oscar Wilde—all that epigrammatic cleverness—does not require a mise-en-scène. Other kinds of comedy do. Luckily for us, Aaron Poochigian has re-animated Aristophanes, in glittering translations of four of his most 21st-century-appropriate plays. It will be interesting to see whether directors bring these versions to life.

In addition to their topical relevance—educational schemes, feminist plots, utopian visions, antiwar invectives—Aristophanes’ plays are virtually impossible not to translate well. They inspire their modernizers, encouraging flights of fancy. I once asked the late translator William Weaver whether working on Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” was difficult. “No,” he said, “because Umberto was so Rabelaisian in his linguistic extravagance that he welcomed all indulgence in the hands of his collaborators.” The same could be said for Aristophanes.

We know little about him other than what he tells us in his plays. Even as a teenager he managed to anger Cleon, the opponent of Pericles, but his career survived, lasting for almost four decades. Of his 40 plays, eleven remain. Mr. Poochigian has given us “Clouds” (423 B.C.), a spoof on Socrates, rhetoric, argument and education; “Birds” (414), the Utopian vision of a place that looks a lot like a perfected Athens, but in the air, with birds instead of Olympian gods in charge of the show; “Lysistrata” (411), in which the Real Housewives of Ancient Greece leverage desire in order to end the Peloponnesian War; and “Women of the Assembly” (391), in which women (the idea people and the moneymakers) establish free love, common resources and equality as the basis for a new society.

Mr. Poochigian suggests his choices were in part political: “as a citizen of a democracy, I felt the duty to make clear, in an era in which there are calls for ‘civility’ in political discourse, that there is such a thing as patriotic obscenity. . . . Crudity is appropriate in criticizing the crude.” Comedy should not be polite. He does not scant on the rollicking vulgarities in the plays, capturing the humor, often obscene, within the varied music of Aristophanes’ poetry. He brings the playwright’s multiple meters to life, wedding them to contemporary American lingo. He knows how to join ribaldry and idealism.

Of the quartet, “Lysistrata” is probably the most familiar: The Peloponnesian War had been going on (and off) for 20 years. Women decide to take charge. Under their leader (whose name means “disbander of armies” and also connotes the power of sexual desire to loosen a man’s limbs), they go on a sex strike. After six days, it works. The men are horny (so are the women), and the women have taken over the city’s Treasury on the Acropolis. Peace is restored.

Lysistrata is the first real comic heroine in Western literature. “I am a woman, / yes, but I have a brain,” she reminds the Athenian and Spartan men she is educating. And in a great speech to a commissioner, she weaves a metaphor that perfectly combines the motifs of woman’s work and public service: “When everything gets tangled up it’s like a mess of wool. / We women hold our wool like this and wind strands of it deftly / around the spindle, some in this direction, some in that— / so, if allowed, we’ll break this war down by untangling it / with envoys sent out, some in this direction, some in that.”

The translation feels pointedly relevant to present-day America. Lysistrata describes Athens as “a fresh-shorn fleece,” which she must then clean and card into “the Basket of Reciprocal / Agreeableness, mixing everyone in there together— / resident aliens and other foreigners you like / and those who owe the state back taxes—mix them in there good.” All are rolled into “one big ball, from which you weave apparel for the people.”

E pluribus unum? Melting pot? Take your pick.


In “Birds,” Peisthetaerus and Euelpides, tired of Athens, persuade their avian friends to establish a new city. The birds comply and build a 600-foot, guarded wall. When the goddess Iris enters without a passport, trouble brews, but all ends well because humans have become “ornithophiliacs” and flock to Cloudcuckooland. Everyone celebrates at a final wedding. Happiness, as we understand it, is not really a Greek subject, but here it is central.

This play, the longest ancient comedy that has survived, must have been spectacular during the Dionysia festival. It has a real unity and a spectacular chorus with 24 dancers representing different avian species. Its lyrics are elaborate, and Mr. Poochigian captures its melodies as elegantly as he does its messages.

The latest of the plays, “Women of the Assembly” (“Ecclesiazusae”), seems the most appropriate to our age. The women don manly disguises: These are male actors impersonating women who are now impersonating men, in order to persuade the Assembly to hand the city over to them. As in “Lysistrata,” Aristophanes reminds his audiences that the polis, the city-state, is really an extension of the oikos, the household. And if the women can reign successfully over the latter, they should do just as good a job over the former.

Mr. Poochigian tells us in the introduction to his collection—an excellent guide for the uninitiated into ancient Greek literature, history and customs—that even when all conflicts seem to be resolved (Athens vs. Sparta, men vs. women), and even when utopian dreams are made real, it’s possible only because slavery, the basis of all labor, will go on. Praxagora, the chief spokeswoman in this last play, limns her utopia, where “there will be no more / rich and poor, no more of one man owning lots and lots of acres / while another lacks sufficient land for his own grave; no more / of one man having slaves in great abundance, while another lacks / even a lone attendant. . . . Henceforth / there [will] be identical conditions of existence for us all.”

The classics are still speaking to us, loud and clear.
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Unread 02-20-2021, 11:35 AM
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RCL RCL is offline
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Wow! That's a review for the ages, and richly deserved. (Otherwise, I hate the Wall Street rag)
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Unread 02-20-2021, 03:21 PM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Con
grat
u
lations
and well-deserved, Aaron!
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