- Title
- Risk-taking and transgression: Aristophanes' Lysistrata today
- Creator
- Ewans, Michael; Phiddian, Robert
- Relation
- Didaskalia Vol. 9, Issue 1
- Relation
- http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/9/1
- Publisher
- Didaskalia
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BCE, is an Old Comedy about a fictional sex strike by the women of Greece designed to stop the Peloponnesian War. At a dark moment, when defeat appeared to be looming for Athens, the play provided a fantasy of peace. In recent decades it has been the most often revived and taught of Aristophanes’ plays, with 119 performances worldwide in the years 1990–2010, according to the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. This piece, a collaboration between a translator and theatre researcher (Michael Ewans) and a Greekless literary scholar (Robert Phiddian), recounts a small part of that performance history, a part that sheds light on how this play translates (both literally and culturally) from fifth-century Athens to twenty-first-century Australia. The performances examined are a full-scale production designed to test and perfect Ewans’s new translation of the play at the University of Newcastle (New South Wales) in 2005, and a series of dramatised readings of the play (in the context of a course on comedy and satire) performed at Flinders University in Adelaide between 1998 and 2009, initially with Alan Sommerstein’s translations published by Penguin and subsequently with Ewans’s translation. Lysistrata remains popular not just because it is good, but also because it remains topically significant for its antiwar message and the apparently feminist premise of women taking over public affairs. These causes of popularity are potentially a two-edged sword for understanding the play, as relevance can be bought at the price of anachronism and distortion of meaning. Our experience of differing translations in performances and dramatised readings suggests that an antiwar interpretation of the play’s ‘message’ is very sustainable in both text and performance, while a feminist reading is less so. We also found confirmation of James Robson’s comment in a recent overview of Aristophanes’ work: ‘It is often said that new translations of works are needed every generation, but in the case of Aristophanes the immediacy of some versions and adaptations (above all those written for the stage) can evaporate within a far shorter time than that’ (Robson 2009, 217). The challenge for a prospective new translator lies in attuning his or her new version closely to the time of performance and publication, without including elements which will date the translation too rapidly. Our observations will focus particularly on one scene, the raucous peace negotiation which Lysistrata orchestrates between the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors over the beautiful and naked body of Reconciliation. While the Sommerstein and Ewans translations have much in common, this piece will focus on their differences.
- Subject
- Lysistrata; Aristophanes; modern translation; drama
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1065347
- Identifier
- uon:17792
- Identifier
- ISSN:1321-4853
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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