ABSTRACT
Browning's Aristophane's Apology deploys a variety of devices related to translation, euphemism, innuendo, transliteration, to give readers a sense of what has not been translated: this stretches the boundaries of the English language and of respectability. John Dryden exploited the variety of semi-censorship existing in his time to pursue a comparison between translation and desire: both longing for oneness with another; both condemned to fail. Aristophane's Apology is one of a sequence of translations and works involving translation which Browning wrote in the wake of The Ring and the Book, itself a massive imaginative translation-and-expansion of a Latin and Italian source. In the fiction of the poem, his conversation is being reported by an invented character, Balaustion, a rather priggish married woman from Rhodes who is a great admirer of Euripides. The work probes the boundaries between Aristophanes and Victorian England and tests the varieties of translation that can link them, and of censorship, which hold them apart.
