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Theatre Complet Aristo
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Theatre Complet Aristo
by
Aristophane
A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict, and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known.' Includes The...more
Paperback
Published
February 1st 1987
by Gallimard Education
(first published -388)
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Apr 19, 2009
Matt
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
great-books-of-the-western-world
What I appreciated most about this version of Aristophanes was the effort gone into the translation by Paul Roche. The Introduction briefly lays out Roche's difficulties in maintaining the subtilties from a polysyllabic language into one seldomly so. His attempt to faithfully translate the Greek results in a deliberate recreation of the assonance, consonance, alliteration and rhyme found in the original text. Roche's numerous footnotes help assure the reader that the spirit and content of the tr...more
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 requir...more
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 requir...more
Jan 08, 2013
Rebecca Manor
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
the-harvard-classics
Reading Aristophanes, the father of comedy, is so much fun. He’s earthy to the point of crudeness, hilarious, and utterly human. I didn’t read the entirety of The Complete Plays of Aristophanes by I did read Birds, Clouds, Peace, and Frogs. It was the perfect selection to begin to encapsulate Aristophanes’ worldview as Frogs takes place in the underworld, Birds is a world created between Mount Olympus, home of the gods, and earth, while Peace is the story of one all-too-human hero who makes his...more
My puppet-show creating partner and I have been reading through several of these 2400-year old plays for source material for a new show. They are still quite entertaining after all this time. Aristophanes, like Shakespeare, can write great comic dialogue with lots of clever back-and-forth, usually in the first scene of his plays to warm up the audience. Then, he attacks the issue at hand, generally his problems with the Athenian government or with society in general. Whether he's inventing liter...more
(This review is written after reading The Acharnians, The Knights, The Clouds, and The Wasps. I’ll read the rest after a break.)
These plays are guilty pleasures, but awfully important ones. Sure, you can analyze the elements of Old Comedy and how Aristophanes puts them to use, but it feels like you are spending more time analyzing the nice frame a painting is in, instead of the actual painting itself. The The Wasps and Old Comedy section on the Wikipedia page for The Wasps misses the joy and hum...more
These plays are guilty pleasures, but awfully important ones. Sure, you can analyze the elements of Old Comedy and how Aristophanes puts them to use, but it feels like you are spending more time analyzing the nice frame a painting is in, instead of the actual painting itself. The The Wasps and Old Comedy section on the Wikipedia page for The Wasps misses the joy and hum...more
There are two strains of comedy: the comedy of situations and stories, and the comedy of satire which lampoons people and institutions. The first strains comes down to us from the New Comedy of Menander and the Roman playwrights through Shakespeare to the TV sitcoms of today. The second strain comes from Aristophanes and descends directly to the political comedy of Jon Stewart. As political comedy is often topical and ephemeral, reading the satires of earlier eras can be daunting and more work t...more
This collection contains all eleven of Aristophanes' surviving comedies. Nowhere else are you likely to discover what the Athenian Man in the Street is thinking during the Peloponnesian War. At one point, in Plutus, we have a list of the things that the average Athenian craved the most. They included, in order: loaves, literature, sweets, honor, cheesecakes, manliness, dried figs, ambition, barley meal, command, and pea soup.
The two main themes that run across the comedies are a strong desire f...more
The two main themes that run across the comedies are a strong desire f...more
Apr 07, 2013
Nathan Jerpe
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
ancient-literature,
humor
This is a review of the Bantam edition from the 80s, which contains all eleven surviving plays with translations by -
B. B. Rogers (1829-1919) x 4
R. H. Webb (1882-1952) x 3
Jack Lindsay (1900-1990) x 2
Moses Hadas (1900-1966) x 2 (also the editor)
First off, GR friends help me out here, where can I find more poetry like this? I've never seen anything like it. Does Aristophanes have any heirs in English? The editor cites Rogers as the first English translator who does him justice, but as far as I can...more
B. B. Rogers (1829-1919) x 4
R. H. Webb (1882-1952) x 3
Jack Lindsay (1900-1990) x 2
Moses Hadas (1900-1966) x 2 (also the editor)
First off, GR friends help me out here, where can I find more poetry like this? I've never seen anything like it. Does Aristophanes have any heirs in English? The editor cites Rogers as the first English translator who does him justice, but as far as I can...more
1 like · like · see review
Aristophanes is the great comic playwright of Ancient Greece, and set the standard and form of comedy in the Western World. Moreover, his plays are often cited in discussions of what ordinary life was like in the city of Athens in the times of Socrates. No less a figure than Plato accused Aristophanes' play The Clouds of contributing to the prosecution and death of Socrates. Aristophanes even appears in Plato's The Symposium as one of the guests. From The Birds we get the concept of Cloudcuckool...more
Aristophanes is funny, sometimes outrageously so. In the Ecclesiazusae ("The Assemblywomen," a.k.a. "The Women of Parliament"), for example, a group of women sneak into the Athenian Assembly (Ecclesia) disguised as men and succeed in getting a measure passed that allows women to run the government. Man can sleep with any women they please as a part of this new regime, but they must sleep with an ugly women first. Aristophanes then plays this comic premise for all it's worth, and the result is hi...more
I hate ass humor so Aristophanes and I were at odds from the first fart. The last in the litany of Greek playwrights I am reading through, my friend Matt best captured how I felt about most of these plays when he called them "bawdy." I admit to blushing. I admit to feeling prudish. I admit to several re-reading of lines followed by "Oh my god!" and then quick glancing around the apartment to see if anyone had caught me reading this. No one had. I live alone.
But getting past my nervous prudish w...more
But getting past my nervous prudish w...more
Jul 11, 2009
Michael
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Philosophers, Pagans, drama students
Recommended to Michael by:
serendipity
Well, at first I was thinking of only giving this two stars, but it did grow on me. Other reviewers have commented on the weakness of the translation, and as they are familiar with Greek and I am not, I tend to defer to them. The main problem I had was Hadas' insisting on picking translations that rhymed, which may retain the sound of an original Greek play but sacrifices the meaning and context - in general the rhyming comes out sounding very amateurish also, although some of the translations a...more
Apr 05, 2009
Erik Graff
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
everyone
Recommended to Erik by:
no one
Shelves:
drama
At the end of junior year in high school a number of us were taken on a field trip to the University of Chicago by, I think, Eric Edstrom, sponsor of my club, Tri-S (Social Science Society). At this point I had already had some contact with the university, having attended my first political demonstration there over a year before and having gone to a Phil Ochs concert on campus, not to mention innumerable visits to the Science and Industry Museum on its east end. The ersatz Gothic look and the wa...more
Aristophanes was the master of ancient Greek comedy writing between 427 BC and 388 BC. The first thing that struck me was the bawdy humor. I was also surprised at some of the radical ideas in his plays (even if he is ultimately warning against some of these trends). There are the anti-war sentiments of "Acharnians", "Peace" and "Lysistrata". (Aristophanes like his heir Swift was a conservative arguing against war because it disrupted traditional society and trade. Quite the opposite of our moder...more
I loved this. The translators did a terrific job. It must have been incredibly difficult and I'm sure I have missed something like 90% as so much is word play.
But I laughed out loud and that's pretty darn good for a 2500 year old joke! On top of that is some really terrific insight.
As I read these plays, which are downright filthy, I kept wondering about the Greek mind-set. What were they thinking? There is a kind of innocence about bodily functions yet they are still considered funny. At times...more
But I laughed out loud and that's pretty darn good for a 2500 year old joke! On top of that is some really terrific insight.
As I read these plays, which are downright filthy, I kept wondering about the Greek mind-set. What were they thinking? There is a kind of innocence about bodily functions yet they are still considered funny. At times...more
1 like · like · see review
Also read this for my ancient Greek history class, and it's surprising what bawdy humor there was for such an old playwright. Puts Shakespeare to shame in terms of the sexual innuendo. I actually laughed out loud several times reading these plays and expected them to be a snooze.
admittedly i've only read clouds, wasps and lysistrata from this and i have no desire to read anymore aristophanes ever again. i can appreciate the significance of his works and what they reveal about athens and greek culture but i just find that this kind of humour is insulting to my intelligence. not only does this kind of humour irritate me but it makes me sympathize with the aristocrats - what a nauseating person aristophanes seems to have been and really, if the demos loved this stuff, i wo...more
This is definitely a case of poor translation making ancient stories completely unreadable. I could hardly follow what the heck was going on. This was terrible.
Jun 11, 2008
Brendan
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Ben
Shelves:
currently-on-my-shelves-in-brooklyn
Many years ago when I DJ'd at the worst club in Williamsburg a bummed out writer was in a conversation where he said, "Every literary agent in the world is less than scum." I started talking to him about life and comedy. At the time I was working back and forth with Ben as a comedy duo and he said, "So who's the Irishman and who's the Jew?"
Wow.
He had a book out at the time and he said that if I have any interest in comedy I needed to read Aristophanes. That was almost 3 years ago and I'm just no...more
Wow.
He had a book out at the time and he said that if I have any interest in comedy I needed to read Aristophanes. That was almost 3 years ago and I'm just no...more
Not only is this on the list of must-read classical literature, these plays are extremely funny and many are still quite relevant. Euripedes was a keen observer of human behavior.
Read Clouds.
This edition is atrociously bad. No line numbers, references to things that happened after Ancient Greece, and the "bottom stretched".
This edition is atrociously bad. No line numbers, references to things that happened after Ancient Greece, and the "bottom stretched".
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes by Aristophanes (1968)
He is a classist snob with a touch of xenophobia but his stuff is damn good.
You'll need this for theatre history.
None
Nov 22, 2009
Mary Johnson
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
freshman-year-sjc
Read Clouds, will read more in the future
I read Acharnians, Clouds, Birds, and Lysistrata. Hilarious! Dirty and witty.
Jun 09, 2012
Courtney
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
library,
fiction,
chunkster,
y-ancient-to-medieval-period,
author-omnibus,
compilations-anthologies,
opera-omnia,
cozy-cup-of-tea,
full-of-light-and-whimsy,
odyssey-of-the-mind,
step-back-in-time,
bawdy,
comedy-humor-wit,
drama,
greek-authors,
literature-classic,
mythology-folklore-fairytales,
plays,
satire-and-parodies
1) Acharnians
2) Knights
3) Clouds
4) Wasps
5) Peace
6) Birds
7) Lysistrata
8) Thesmophoriazusae
9) Frogs
10) Ecclesiazusae
11) Plutus
2) Knights
3) Clouds
4) Wasps
5) Peace
6) Birds
7) Lysistrata
8) Thesmophoriazusae
9) Frogs
10) Ecclesiazusae
11) Plutus
More so for the bashful and retiring translation of Hadas was this given a low rating.
Jun 03, 2011
David
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
drama,
classical-literature
This was great but I'm not sure of the translation. Definitely a must read.
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May 12, 2011 09:13am