Aristophanes : Four Plays

de Aaron Poochigian

"The first translation to capture the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity's greatest comedies. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright, Aristophanes. His plays, many of them immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes's satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet- classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life Aristophanes's wickedly crude and frequently beautiful lyric comedies, finally giving contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure his original audiences felt when these works were first performed on the Athenian stage"--