Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus

by Plautus, Amy Richlin (Translator/Editor)

Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays—originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens—tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a hilarious, inspired sampling of American popular culture—from songs to movie stars to slang. Matching the original Latin line for line, this volume captures the full exuberance of Plautus's street language, bursting with puns, learned allusions, ethnic slurs, dirty jokes, and profanities, as it brings three rarely translated works—Weevil (Curculio), Iran Man (Persa), and Towelheads (Poenulus)—to a wide contemporary audience.

Richlin's erudite introduction sets these plays within the context of the long history of East-West conflict and illuminates the role played by comedy and performance in imperialism and colonialism. She has also provided detailed and wide-ranging contextual introductions to the individual plays, as well as extensive notes, which, together with these superb and provocative translations, will bring Plautus alive for a new generation of readers and actors.

Genres: Classics, Plays, Nonfiction

306 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 2005

About the author

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest works in Latin literature to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.

Reviews

[Keeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more timely humor is, the more it digs its own grave. That is, unfortunately, the reason why this translation of plays by Plautus does not get more stars. Only 15 years past its publication, it gleefully inhabits a world where readers would have nodded sagely, knowing exactly what beats are favored by Public Enemy, able to quote the lyrics of "Berserker" or "Chewbacca."
Ok, so some of us are still able to quote the lyrics of "Berserker" or "Chewbacca," and some of the folks in this book's space when it was published wouldn't have known Public Enemy even then. But to more and more potential readers, Nineties music and comedy is as foreign as Plautus' original jokes. There's a reason why undergrads who find Aristophanes funny usually cite the scatological humor and not the digs at contemporary politicos.
All that being said, it's not like this problem was unknown to Amy Richlin when she published the book. Her introduction and endnotes deal with it in meticulous, well-considered, good-humored detail. She envisions a use for the book where, for live performance, a future director and performers use the cultural specificity of her translation as a sort of blueprint onto which they can map a new and fresh contemporary cultural comedic specificity. It's a heroic effort, but nothing is unfunnier than an endnote.
If I were teaching these days, which I'm not, I would be reluctant to assign this text. It's not that I can name a translation of these plays that would be better. I just think that they might be better consumed by students either in Latin or, for those not immersed enough in Classics to have fun with his original language, by reading short scenes and watching performances.
If, however, you happen to love both Classics and Jay and Silent Bob, you will continue to delight in this book just as much as the author intended on the day it was published!