This captatio benevolentiae is unwarranted. Yet the authors seem almost embarrassed by the exuberance of their translations, and hasten to tell whoever is still reading that “or the purist, it may seem we stray at times somewhat far, but there it is” (x). Here the authors are speaking to classicists, although the breezy tone persists, and something of breezy logic intrudes on otherwise serious justifications of translation style and play choice (Why these particular five? “… we like them, as others have liked them” ). (viii)įour pages of this kind of introductory material, however, lead to a page and a half of apologia which no general reader would dream of demanding.
This approach got him in trouble both with the lowbrows, for not being funny enough, and with the snobs, for not being pure enough.
Terence preferred Greek originals with higher moral content and remained true to their philosophical spirit on the other hand, he borrowed bits from some plays to pep up others. This will take the scholar a few paragraphs to get used to, but the general reader will profit, as here, in this pithy discussion on contaminatio : Our conceptual legacies from ancient Rome. The introduction adopts the populist tone, complete with sentence fragments in the spirit of trendy journalism: ” Gravitas. There is much virtue to be measured here, a few misfires to be counted, and plenteous food for thought, not least in the authors’ ability to make an important and wickedly difficult job look like an enjoyable romp.Īct I of the translator’s task opens for Berg and Parker with a crux: are they playing to a popular, near Latinless audience (“those not exactly clubby in Latin” ), or to the scholarly reader, who will see lack of rigor, even inauthenticity in exuberant translations and a breezy, generalist tone? Both kinds, it seems, though the authors try hard to concentrate on the popular, with uneven success. Of modern-day attempts at Plautus-inspired music, for example, only Stephen Sondheim has excelled the inspired zaniness of Douglass Parker’s lyrics. These versions have verve: playability, liveliness, accessibility, unlike anything on library shelves today. These five new translations, two by Douglass Parker (“Double Bind” and “Wild, Wild Women” ) and three by Deena Berg (“Major Blowhard”, Brothers, Hecyra), take to its logical, lively conclusion the long-held but oft-ignored reality that Plautus and Terence were writers for the stage.
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