ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Translating Classical Plays on The line or the gag. Comedy depends on circumstances and circumstances include production. The more alien the society for which a comic drama was originally made, the greater the challenge to today's translator. Aristophanes' or Menander's themes may appear topical. It is the terms of reference, social, political and cultural, which are not the same. Aristophanes' fondness for anachronism, for absurdity, for the fantastic gives licence to a similar freedom in all but the most literal of translations. The problem is extended by the challenge confronting the translator of Aristophanes. In Aristophanes' Birds the two Athenians persuade the birds to construct a new city in mid-air between heaven and earth to be called Cloud cuckoo land. The scripts may look simple, but translating Menander is not straightforward. Then there is the offshoot of Greek New Comedy in the world of republican Rome in the third and second centuries bce.
