FEBRUARY 2004

Translating Aristophanes' Humour
James Robson, The Open University

Introduction: Issues of Translation

Of all the challenges open to a translator, Aristophanes' plays are surely one of the hardest. Particular challenges include the rendering of topical allusions, dialect, verse and the different linguistic registers found in Aristophanes' work. Underpinning many of these difficulties are issues of faithfulness and distance, familiarity and strangeness which, while familiar to translators of most texts, are particularly acute in the case of Aristophanes. How is a translator to convey both the letter and the spirit of the text with all its allusions to the realia of late fifth-century life and contemporary individuals.

The subject of this essay is the translation of humour, an area which causes particular difficulty. In the case of a joke, for instance, does a translator aim try to convey the words of the original joke, although these will generally hold little power for a modern English-speaking audience? Or if the spirit of the text is more important, is this best conveyed by substituting for the Aristophanic dud a live piece humour that is in some way comparable? And how can two jokes be comparable? The writer translating for the lecture hall and the writer translating for the stage may arrive at different solutions, but neither is likely to be unaware of the dilemma.

Aims of the Paper

In the short space available, I shall aim to articulate some of the challenges which different categories of humour present the translator. The handful of examples I am able to consider are all taken from the Lysistrata , a play which provides us with a rich array of published translations from which to draw examples.

Double Entendres and puns

To begin with, let us consider an area of sexual humour: double entendres . The following passage, Lysistrata 404-13, is delivered by the Proboulos, who explains to the chorus of old men that men only have themselves to blame for their wives' cuckoldry. Sommerstein's (1990) translation reads:

MAGISTRATE: It's when we ourselves assist our wives in their wickedness and teach them to be licentious, that they spawn schemes of this kind. Like the way we go into the craftsmen's shops and say things like this: 'Goldsmith, that necklace you mended – last night my wife was dancing, and the pin's slipped out of the hole. Now I've got to cross over to Salamis ; so if you're free, could you without fail come over in the evening and fit a pin in her hole, please?'

An interesting comparison may be made between Sommerstein's translation of these lines and the version of an anonymous translator whose work was published by the Athenian society in 1912 in which at least some of the force of the double entendres is preserved.

MAGISTRATE

... We men must share the blame of their ill conduct; it is we who teach them to love riot and dissoluteness and sow the seeds of wickedness in their hearts. You see a husband go into a shop: 'Look you, jeweller', says he, 'you remember the necklace you made for my wife. Well, t'other evening, when she was dancing, the catch came open. Now, I'm bound for Salamis ; will you make it convenient to go up to-night to make her fastening secure?'

The relative lack of inhibitions which translators display in relation to double entendres is no doubt explicable in terms of the comparative obliqueness of the reference to the objects and acts they represent. The result is that in this passage the humour seems to have been preserved fairly well in both of the English versions above. This contrasts markedly with an instance of humour such as that occurring at lines 58-60, however. Here, Lysistrata is bewailing the fact that none of the women she has asked to come has yet shown up. Halliwell (1997) translates:

Lysistrata. Not a single woman has come from the coastal region,

And no one's here from Salamis yet.

Kalonike . I bet

That they were up at dawn for an early ride!

(all' ekeinai g' oid' hoti / epi tôn keletôn diabebêkas' orthiai)

Since kelês can signify either a 'riding-horse' or a 'fast boat', the phrase epi tôn keletôn diabainô can have the double meaning of 'going over on boats' or 'straddling horses'. Furthermore, kelês, when it signifies a horse, can have a sexual connotation – it is a word Aristophanes uses elsewhere with a double meaning – and the island of Salamis , too, has erotic connotations of its own. Here, then, we have a pun which relies on a nexus of cultural referents to allow it to be realized. And we should not let the effectiveness of Halliwell's translation disguise the difficulty which puns can cause a translator. The double entendre of Sommerstein's (1990) version, for instance, is less direct and the reference to horses lost. He has Calonice reply:

Oh as for them, they'll have been working over on their pinnaces well before daylight.

Henderson (1996), on the other hand, jettisons the reference to boats, but effectively maintains the pun nevertheless:

Oh them: I just know they've been up since dawn, straddling their mounts.

Perhaps Fitts (1959) has missed the joke altogether:

Lysistrata : ... There's no one here from the South Shore , or from Sálamis.

Kalonike : Things are hard over in Sálamis, I swear.

They have to get going at dawn.

Verbal and Referential Humour

These two instances of humour – the cuckold's double entendres on the one hand, and the pun concerning the women of Salamis on the other – would appear to represent quite separate challenges for the translator. To help us account for the differences in their translatability, it will prove useful to refer to a distinction often made by humour theorists, that between 'verbal' and 'referential' humour. This division of humour into two categories makes its first appearance in Cicero 's De Oratore , though is probably Greek – and perhaps Aristotelian – in origin. In the treatise, Cicero talks of jokes which rely on their effect de dicto , 'on what is said' and de re , 'on the thing'.

For the joke that, said in whatever words ( verba ), is nevertheless funny, is contained in the thing (res); the joke that loses its saltiness if the words are changed, has all the funniness in the words (verba). (Cicero, De Oratore , lxii, 252)

Because such jokes which, after the words are changed, cannot retain the same funniness, should be considered to rely not in the thing but in the words. (Cicero, De Oratore , lxiv, 258)

Cicero 's test, then, for deciding whether a joke is 'verbal' – de dicto – or 'referential' – de re – is whether it can be cast in different words and still retain its piquancy. And whilst Cicero is not talking about translation as such, we nevertheless have here a potentially useful distinction when considering the translation of humour into a foreign language. According to Cicero 's principle, a referential piece of humour ought to be straightforward to translate, since mutatis verbis – 'with the words changed' – its funniness is still apparent. This is the kind of humour we witnessed in the passage of double entendres just now – a passage whose humour is so hardy that even the most bashful of translators seems unable to kill it off. However, since the second instance of humour we looked at – the pun concerning the women of Salamis – belongs to the category of verbal – de dicto – humour, it seems reasonable that it caused problems for its translators, as this is the very kind of humour which, in Cicero's terms, is capable of 'losing its saltiness' when rephrased.

Whilst the distinction between referential and verbal humour is useful for our purposes, we should consider some potential problems that may be caused by taking this division as formulated by Cicero and using it to categorize the translation of humour into another language. We should first note, for instance, that verbal humour does not necessary resist translation into another language. Rather, its ability to transfer from source language to target language is largely contingent on historic and social factors which have influenced the vocabulary and syntax of the two linguistic systems. To take a simple example, let us consider the following English witticism:

How is he going to change the world when he can't even change trains?

Here there is a play on words, made possible by two potential meanings of the verb 'to change'. This example of a verbal joke fails to transfer into German, for instance, where the first usage of 'change' – to make a change in a person or thing – would be translated by 'ändern', whereas the second – to change trains – would be rendered by 'umsteigen'.

*Wie wird er die Welt ändern, wenn er nicht einmal umsteigen kann?

Happily, though, for the translator wishing to render the witticism into Romance languages, the two meanings of 'change' appealed to are also present in, say, the French 'changer' or the Italian 'cambiare'.

Comment va-t-il changer le monde, quand il ne sait même pas changer de train?

Come può cambiare il mondo, quando non può nemmeno cambiare treno?

So, a translator can sometimes be fortunate in finding that a verbal joke can be transferred from the source language to the target language relatively easily. When the translator is unfortunate, however, and no natural correspondence exists for the humorous phrase or word he or she is faced with translating, a decision must needs be taken. Verbal humour, and puns in particular, would appear to cause great anxiety for translators of Aristophanes – and for good reason, given both the difficulty they present in and of themselves and the added fact that, as Stephen Halliwell notes, it is 'the verbal details of the text ... which cumulatively create the flavour of Aristophanic humour' (Halliwell 1997, lii). In their introductions, translators sometimes proudly single out instances of puns they feel they have successfully transferred from Greek to English while preserving most of the letter and the flavour of the original. They are seldom as candid about their less admirable efforts, however, as Robin Bond, a New Zealand academic who has translated plays of Plautus and Aristophanes. Reflecting on his translation work, he says (Barsby 2002: 178):

... in comedy one has to adapt and change to a certain extent. As a matter of technique the hardest thing, of course, is puns. Occasionally translations of puns fly into your head but sometimes they don't. Sometimes therefore you ignore the pun in the Greek or the Latin and sometimes you import one which is not there, because whatever you've lost you can compensate for by invention.

Sommerstein makes similar comments in his 1973 article, 'On translating Aristophanes: Ends and Means'.

To give an idea of the verbal humour ... I have found it necessary to adapt his jokes, or, where even this is impossible, to compensate for their loss by adding something elsewhere. I have generally at such points given an idea in the notes of what the author wrote.

Here we come up against issues of the compromises which must be made to maintain something of the spirit as well as the letter. Both Bond and Sommerstein are forced to make the same pragmatic decisions, the difference being that Bond is translating for the stage and so does not have the option afforded to Sommerstein of appending notes to his text.

To finish, we should note that there is sub-category of humour which, while being referential, fails to transfer into the target language. This, of course, is where there is reference to objects, concepts or people which have a different or no resonance in the modern world. The extent to which such cultural transfer breaks down is naturally dependent on the audience – a scholarly translation can afford to assume some knowledge of Aristophanes' world in a way in which a translation for the stage rarely can. Thus at Lysistrata 928 , for instance, when Cinesias is being tormented by his wife, Myrrhine, with promises of sex which she keeps failing to fulfil, he says (Sommerstein 1990):

Well, is this Heracles' cock ( peos ) you're entertaining?

The joke only makes sense when we know that Heracles often features in Old Comedy as a character who was promised a meal, but either received it too late or not at all. Henderson 's (1996) device of including necessary information in the text of his translation is a common one. He translates:

Kinesias : Is this cock of mine supposed to be Herakles waiting for his dinner?

Questions of the cultural transfer of humour beg some of the biggest questions of all. The extent to which the original audience of Aristophanes' plays would have found a given instance of humour amusing can only be a matter of guesswork – and, indeed, ascertaining which parts of the text would have been perceived as humorous is often complicated by a number of factors. In addition, we have the difficulty of reconstructing stage business and the distinct possibility that there are jokes in the text that we have missed.

Concluding remarks

This has been just an initial look at the issues which translating Aristophanes' humour raises. Further close textual work will no doubt provide rewarding insights into the nature of the problems which conveying the humour and playfulness of Aristophanes text presents to translators as well as the range of solutions which has been adopted. And whilst scholarship on the original plays continues to inform our view of Aristophanes' text – and whilst our own language continues to change – it will remain the job of translators to bring his plays to life for modern readers and to provide audiences with a truly direct way of responding to his drama.

Bibliography

• Barsby, J. (ed.), Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance , Drama 12 (J. B. Metzler)
• Fitts, D. 1959. Lysistrata/Aristophanes: An English version (Faber and Faber)
• Halliwell, S. 1997. Aristophanes, Birds, Lysistrata, Assembly-women, Wealth: a new verse translation (Oxford World Classics)
• Henderson, J. 1996. Staging Women: Three plays by Aristophanes (Routledge)
• Sommerstein, A. 1973. 'On translating Aristophanes: Ends and Means', Greece and Rome 20: 140-154
• Sommerstein, A. 1990. The Comedies of Aristophanes, Volume 7: Lysistrata (Aris and Phillips)

RESPONSES

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, UK

Many thanks for your paper from which I learnt a great deal. I'd like to ask you to comment on ways in which you see the verbal dexterity of the translations working together with other aspects when comedy is staged. For instance, given the absence of masks and the associated body movements in most modern productions, are those changes ideally accommodated by other non-verbal aspects of the production or do they have to be 'written-in' to the acting script? And does the intimate studio environment that is so often the case in modern productions have an effect on the way that the jokes are translated and communicated?

Alan Sommerstein, Nottingham University, UK

I found James Robson's piece very enjoyable, and only wish I were able to contribute more at this reflective (if not, as yet, explicitly theoretical) level. I have, however, one suggestion and one postscript.

The suggestion is that it might be fruitful to compare translations for different markets by *the same* translator. For example, as it happens, both Jeff Henderson and I have now translated Lysistrata three times: Jeff in 1988 (Focus Classical Library) - a fascinating production that lost its Sitz im Leben with the collapse of the USSR - in 1996 (the one James cites), and in 2000 (Loeb), and myself in 1973 (Penguin), 1990 (Aris & Phillips), and 2002 (a new Penguin, billed as "revised", but in reality rewritten, with students on non-linguistic courses very much in mind).

The postscript is my all-time favourite rendering of an Aristophanic joke, by Henderson in, surprisingly, the Loeb. The joke is in Wasps 927-8, which in my Aris & Phillips edition of 1983 I translated, accurately if boringly, as "one spinny can never feed two thieves"; Ar. has modified the sentence from a proverb, "one spinny can't feed two robins" (robins being very strongly "territorial"). Enter Henderson: "one copse can't support two robbers." And only the specialists will get the full flavour of what he's achieved, because there's no note to explain the joke!

From John J. Taylor, Chair & Artistic Director, theatre odyssey, Teacher of Classical Studies, Lanark Grammar School, Scotland:

Not being a translator, but being someone who has adapted Greek theatre for a modern stage, I find this a difficult and troublesome business myself. Nonetheless, I feel certain issues override the difficulties.

In adapting, and indeed in directing any production, the transference of puns and/or other jokes from Classical to modern is difficult. I find this also in non-theatrical works.

For instance, with my Advanced Higher Classical Studies class, I am currently working on Horace's Satires . Some of the puns these satires hold within them are very funny and require little explanation. Others need more details attached, by which time, even if understood, then the joke is lost. My students are confused – their confusion is alleviated by my explanation – their faces lighten as the pin drops – a final disappointment sets in, as it is no longer funny. Is this the fault of Horace, the translator, or myself for explaining it? Either way, Horace's original intention – humour – is lost on them.

The thing, I suppose, about comedy in any medium, is that it's either funny, or it isn't. This is a deeply personal issue. If we all knew what 'funny' was we'd be millionaires. Indeed, this is impossible. Comedy does not easily cross cultural boundaries (think of Rab C. Nesbitt in the USA, when it was subtitled!), nor does everything appeal to everyone. Nor should it… that would make for a very boring and monstrously dull world.

When I directed Sommerstein's translation of Lysistrata in 2002, choosing the translation was difficult. I did decide to choose his, though, because I personally found it funny. I know it was not the most true to the original translation. I know it was deemed inappropriate by some in the light of the contemporary politics of the time. I know also that some Scottish people find his character-adaptation of Scots/Spartans offensive. However, my opinion of this is that those with such purist reservations should not be concerning themselves with modern adaptations or translations of comedy at all. The show sold out. One person, to my knowledge left. The rest enjoyed a slapstick festival of fun, and rib-tickling laughter I am proud to have been involved in creating!

A lecturer once said to me in my first year of University, when I was adapting the Odyssey , and I was concerned about making too many changes; If you were to make no changes, the play would be an epic poem and in Greek! That comment has stuck with me ever since.

In a classical climate which is way beyond hostile, it is not only our requirement, but it is also our duty, as a community, to continue to make Classical drama, and indeed Classics as a whole as accessible and as enjoyable to a modern audience as we possibly can. That means that if it was meant to be funny then, it has to be funny now. To worry too much about whether something is totally true to the original in translation or adaptation is to accept that it's ok to turn people off Classics, and that letting this subject of ours die off quietly is alright.

I suspect that this attitude to translation and adaptation may come from the fact that most Classicists are Grecists or Latinists who 'get' the jokes in the original, and who find them so funny in the original that to change them would seem like heresy. However, in a modern culture which is increasingly making non-Grecists and non-Latinists interested and enthused by Classics, the change has to occur. In a purist sense, also, not to make the change would be to deprive the audience of the writer's original intention … like my students are occasionally deprived of Horace's humour.

When adapting a play, or when someone else is translating, I believe one should go through the following routine;

•  Does the humour work in English and in the modern day?

•  If Yes, Keep it as it is – no change is needed, and no change should be made.

•  If no, try to adapt it, either by making a good English pun, or by making it funny in the current cultural context.

•  If you can't adapt it, discard it.

I guess in order to be staging things, we often have to be changing things. I very much enjoyed James Robson's observations, and hope that they helped in changing the views of those out there who did not previously believe that changing things was acceptable. It is not only acceptable, it is utterly necessary, keeping our subject, and the words of ancient writers, very much alive.

J. Michael Walton, Professor Emeritus, University of Hull, UK

Many thanks to James Robson for his keen observations on translating Aristophanes.  Excellent examples and a lot to pursue further.  A couple of comments.

1.      Lysistrata translations, not surprisingly, arrived late on the scene. I would be interested to know if  Robson has found anything earlier than Wheelwright's decorous 'familiar blank  verse' of 1837. Charlotte Lennox in her translation from Pierre Brumoy (1759), much of which is reduced to summary of individual plays but does contain some complete tragedies,  devotes no more than four pages in toto to Lysistrata , and quotes directly only fourteen lines of innocuous dialogue. 

In the first Loeb (Benjamin Bickley Rogers, 1924) lines 411-413 on Salamis are consigned to a footnote with a translation ending '...and fit in the peg' and the information that there is 'a play on the two senses of balanos '. Such coyness is not that surprising when you think that the play was still banned on the English stage between the wars and only accepted post-World War II with substantial cuts. I might add that Jeffery Henderson's The Maculate Muse  was for many  years kept under restricted access in my university library until I managed to get it released (on parole) to the open shelves.

More recent translations of the  double entendre in question, as I am sure Robson will be aware, translate it as  'fix her new clasp' (Patric Dickinson), 'put in the peg she needs' (Donald Sutherland), 'put in a pin for her' (McLeish) and 'stick a bolt pin into her opened clasp' (the heavy-handed - if one may use the term in such a context - Moses Hadas).

2.      This last translation brings me to my second and more substantial point. Despite the reservations of translation theorists about the term 'performability' on the grounds that it defies definition, there is a major difference between the gag that works on the page and the one that actors can use.  My example is not from Lysistrata  but from Birds.

English language translations of Aristophanes' Birds, 1143-46. with apologies for sticking with the variant transcriptions of proper names.

(i) 1812. Anonymous.

PISTH: And how did they apply the mortar to the stonework?
FIRST MESS:  This, my good fellow, was cleverly contrived: the geese made    shovels of their feet, and after having minced up the mortar loaded the hods.
PISTH:     Wonderful! what use cannot feet be applied to?

(ii) John Hookham Frere (1816) , the first verse translation.

PEIS: [ in a fuss which he endeavours to conceal]. Yes! yes! But after all, to load your hods,
        How did you manage that?

MESS:                                               Oh, capitally,
              I promise you. There were the geese, all barefoot
               Trampling the mortar, and, when all was ready,
          They handed it into the hods, so cleverly,
              With their flat feet!

PEIS: [ a bad joke, as a vent for irritation]. They footed it you mean -
            Come; it was handily done though, I confess.


(iii) William Arrowsmith (1961)

PISTH:         But how was the mortar heaped in the hods?

MESS:           Gods, now that  was a triumph of engineering skill!
             Geese burrowed their feet like shovels beneath

                and heaved it over their heads to the hods.
PISTH:                                                               They did?
               Ah Feet! Ah Feet! O incredible feat!
            What can compare with a pair of feet?


(iv) Kenneth McLeish (1991)

PEITH:            And how did they fill those hods?
MESS:          You'd have liked that.
          Geese stuck in their feet like this, and shuffled it.
PEITH:             What a feat.


(v)  Paul Muldoon (1999)

PEIS:              But how did they get the mortar into the hods?
MESS:            That was done by the geese. They shovelled it in with their feet.
PEIS:          No mean feat.

 

Hookham Frere goes mad with the stage directions (seldom a good idea in comedy, it seems to me). The Arrowsmith is essentially a reader's gag based on how the words appear on the page. It is virtually unplayable without more pantomime than it's worth.

Mcleish uses the same pun but adds a bit of implied business. So does Muldoon who is verbally the neatest. Both turn it into an actor's gag, rather than a reader's,  a throwaway even, but an actor's gag.

Now that's the real issue when translating Aristophanes.

Final Response from Topic Leader James Robson, The Open University, UK

My thanks to all respondents for their useful suggestions and comments. One of the issues that has emerged from the responses as a whole is that of the relationship between translations of Aristophanes and the performance of his plays on the stage (I wonder whether this issue is implicit in Alan Sommerstein's response, too). J Michael Walton raises a particularly interesting issue when he talks of the difference between 'the gag that works on the page and the one that actors can use' and provides some useful examples of translations of Birds 1143-6. I would tentatively suggest that there is another distinction to be made between gags that look performable and ones that don't: that is, I suspect that some translations, their gags included, work well for the reader whose instinct is to imagine the play in performance as s/he reads and/or to approach the play from a performance angle, but appear less performable when real actors actually come to speak the lines. I should be interested to know from theatre practioners (among whom I certainly don't count myself) whether my instincts are right.

I was interested to read John J Taylor's robust defence of the need to adapt and stage Aristophanes for modern, non-specialist audiences and delighted to hear of the success he had had with the Lysistrata , which serves so well to confirm his (and my) instincts. It is striking, I think, that Aristophanes' plays tend to be staged far less than those of the tragedians and to consider a point made to me recently by Lorna Hardwick, namely that there have been no productions of Aristophanes' plays in the UK which one could call 'iconic' (a situation not true of many tragedies nor, I believe, of Aristophanes' plays in post-war Greece). There are obviously many points of relevance here – Old Comedy is an odd creature and its humour no doubt plays an important role. The problem of topical references and puns aside, the modern British sense of humour is obviously far enough removed from that of Aristophanes' original audience as to make the humour often feel strained (as one example, think of the successive choral odes at the end of the Lysistrata all of which end with the same tired gag). An added complexity is that as 'comedy', Aristophanes' plays are generally expected to be found funny by an audience, whereas there are significant parts in all his plays where there is little evidence of humour ('comedies' of Shakespeare and Chekov seem less susceptible to being found disappointing on the same grounds).

And so in a round about way we come to Lorna Hardwick's questions about the interaction between the verbal humour of a staged translation and other performance aspects. I suspect that non-verbal humour will often make an effective substitute for verbal humour in modern productions for a number of reasons. First, the introduction of physical humour conveniently circumvents many of the issues of textual authenticity raised by John J Taylor: one could feasibly introduce a large amount of non-verbal humour into a production and still stay extremely close to the Aristophanic text. Thus one may not only appease Brook's 'deadly spectator' (of whom we should perhaps take little notice) but also maintain a degree of textual organicity which, for better or worse, runs the risk of being lost when the verbal jokes are changed and/or updated. Second, I think subtle physicality and facial gesture is such a central part of modern Western acting idiom that it takes a brave director to abandon these – especially given their key role in signalling a humorous 'frame', both in the context of dramatic productions and real life. My favourite production of an Aristophanes play to date is that staged in Greek at King's College London – in 1994, I think. Here, non-verbal humour was used to great effect both by the director and, often spontaneously, by the actors. The play 'worked' for its audience, which is a rare feat for Aristophanes, I think, but could justifiably be said to have done so through good use of modern slapstick and modern (mainly 1930s) music rather than the way in which the play's themes were conveyed to a predominantly Greekless audience! The 'writing in' of physical humour is no doubt necessary for the kind of text I began by taking about – namely a 'performance' translation which is, in fact, written to be read – but for a translation destined for the stage, I'm sure the physical humour (just like the final script) best grows from a combination of the text along with additions from the director and actors. Again, as I am no theatre practitioner myself, I should be interested to hear comments from those with more experience than I.