{"id":8192,"date":"2013-10-07T13:36:36","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T13:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-journals.internal\/?p=8192"},"modified":"2013-10-07T13:37:26","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T13:37:26","slug":"bringing-ancient-greek-drama-to-life-part-two-whats-knock-knock-in-ancient-greek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2013\/10\/07\/bringing-ancient-greek-drama-to-life-part-two-whats-knock-knock-in-ancient-greek\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Ancient Greek Drama to Life (Part Two): What’s ‘knock-knock’ in Ancient Greek?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As the second of two features marking Cambridge University Press\u2019 sponsorship of the Cambridge Greek Play 2013, Dr Oliver Thomas, incoming Editor of The Cambridge Classical Journal<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0considers some of the ways of translating (and not translating) an ancient Greek play to keep it amusing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second part of this year\u2019s Cambridge Greek Play will be a stripped-down version of one of the most famous of ancient Greek comedies, Aristophanes\u2019 Frogs from 405 BCE. The brief has been to produce 45 minutes of high-tempo humour from the play. As a classicist watching the creatives at work, I\u2019ve seen more clearly than ever quite how delicate a business translating comedy has to be.<\/p>\n

Of course, \u2018translation\u2019 can amount to different things. First, translating words. Aristophanes has plenty of situations which stay funny with in a fairly literal version. In the opening scene of Frogs, effeminate Dionysus and his long-suffering slave Xanthias visit the macho Heracles. The following exchange has a still familiar punchline:<\/p>\n

Heracles: So you were in the sea-battle?
\nDionysus: Yes, and we sank twelve or thirteen enemy ships.
\nHeracles: You two?!
\nDionysus: I swear to it.
\nXanthias: And then I woke up! (Frogs lines 49-51)<\/p>\n

The challenge of translation<\/h2>\n

Unfortunately, puns tend not to work when literally translated. One option here is to negotiate: I\u2019m going to lose a Greek pun at line A, but I can create an English one at line B. Frogs features Charon, the ferryman of the dead, giving various nautical instructions as he arrives in his boat. Aristophanes didn\u2019t know the phrase \u2018avast behind!\u2019, but he does pun on his actors\u2019 appearance, and so might have approved of a heavily padded-out comic actor saying this as he bends his vast behind towards the audience. In this method of translating, you win some, you lose some, and you can capture more of the spirit with a slight loosening of the relationship to what Aristophanes originally composed.<\/p>\n

Greek theatre involved not only words, but stage-business and music. The first thing Aristophanes\u2019 audience saw was two males, one wearing a long yellow dress with a lion-skin over it, and the other sitting on a donkey while carrying a massive knapsack. This incongruous sight is intrinsically silly. But a designer can also translate it, by finding the modern equivalents of sensuous, effete menswear (Dionysus\u2019 yellow dress), of Heracles\u2019 macho lionskin, and of the donkey used as transport for heavy loads. Now comes a further problem if you\u2019re performing the ancient Greek text with English surtitles, as we are doing: if you want to turn the donkey into an airport trolley, which lines containing the word for \u2018donkey\u2019 do you have to cut, and are those deviations acceptable for the benefits reaped?<\/p>\n

The latter half of Frogs involves a squabble between two dead tragedians \u2013 bombastic Aeschylus and the younger, glibber Euripides \u2013 over the Underworld\u2019s throne of poetry. During this, each poet parodies the other\u2019s poetic and musical technique. Here being \u2018authentic\u2019 is a non-starter since we know almost nothing about Greek music, and in any case the parodies wouldn\u2019t be funny for a modern audience: you really have to update. But the basic terms of the situation are difficult to match: who now can be caricatured, like Euripides, as both musically avant-garde and intellectually superficial? Incidentally, in the 1947 Cambridge Greek Play production of Frogs, the surprisingly up-to-date musical parodies were of Showboat and rumba.<\/p>\n

\u2018Translationese\u2019<\/h2>\n

The greatest insight I\u2019ve gained from watching this production come together is how translation and mistranslation can be used as an extra theatrical medium for humour, and one (like a wordless slapstick sequence) which is easily compatible with our principle of speaking the original Greek verses. The surtitles, which all our audience-members will have to use, can give the impression that the surtitler is translating in real time and has just got stuck, fallen asleep, broken the machine, and so on; or one can parody the heavily footnoted \u2018translationese\u2019 which some old-fashioned versions of Greek drama adopted.<\/p>\n

In this production of Frogs you\u2019ll find plenty of approaches to translation on show: expect cameos from modern politicians, medleys of night-club classics, Kermit, a red-faced surtitler \u2013 and maybe a knock-knock joke too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the first part of Dr Thomas article, on Prometheus.<\/a><\/p>\n

Frogs will be performed in Greek with English surtitles at Cambridge Arts Theatre on October 16-19, tickets can be found at www.cambridgeartstheatre.com<\/a>, info at www.cambridgegreekplay.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We are pleased to offer free access to a number of articles related to the Cambridge Greek Play until 30th November 2013.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the second of two features marking Cambridge University Press\u2019 sponsorship of the Cambridge Greek Play 2013, Dr Oliver Thomas, incoming Editor of The Cambridge Classical Journal,\u00a0considers some of the ways of translating (and not translating) an ancient Greek play to keep it amusing. The second part of this year\u2019s Cambridge Greek Play will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":8196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6,14],"tags":[731,212,56,761,524],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-humanities","category-music-and-drama","tag-cambridge-greek-play","tag-classical-association","tag-classics-2","tag-frogs","tag-theatre"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8192"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}