Commentary for Lysistrata?

Latin Learning Latin
1

Salvete,

I am reading/transcribing a Latin translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and am looking for an online (public domain) commentary to the play (its content, not the language). Does anyone know of one?

Thank you for your help,

Carolus Raeticus

2

Can’t help with your query, I’m afraid, but I’m curious about the translation. Is it in verse, and when was it done?

3

It is in prose, as seem to be many translations. I have to work out the exact year, however, because the Latin publication date is given using these inverted Cs (quite a bit of those), and I am not really comfortable with those.

Carolus Raeticus

4

Surely it says somewhere (on the title page, in the prelims?) who translated it into Latin. Brunck did a much reprinted versio Latina. Could that be it?

5

Multas gratias mi Carole. In oratione soluta scriptum (quod expectabam) multo minus me teneret.

How I hate those pesky reversed C’s. As if the permutations of the other numerals weren’t enough! I get that it’s shorthand for CCCCC, but why it should be preceded by I I’ve never understood (1x500?), and why that preceded by C = 2 (of all things) x 500 has always baffled me. I’m sure it shouldn’t, but I’ve never bothered to find out why the system works as it does, and I’m happy to stay ignorant. Thank God for the Babylonians and Arabs, I say.

6

Apparently there is a verse translation made by Florent Chrétien (1540-1596), see here.

7

Thanks as always Shenoute. That’s quite a name. Did he fancy himself as a second Tertullian? * And that’s quite a damnatio by Kuster—enough to make the translation sound interesting, though I doubt I’ll set about tracking it down. Do you happen to know what meter(s) he used? Plautine? But surely archaisms would be at home there, and were those meters yet understood? Something like Seneca perhaps?

Perhaps I should track it down after all.

  • But I read in L’histoire universelle that he was so named as being the 5th son and born in September. There must have been more than a side-glance at Tertullian, though, surely?
8

When I was googling Chrétien’s name, Tertullian kept coming among the first results. I kept on looking because I couldn’t think of any Latin author less likely to have done a translation of Aristophanes :smiley:

Chrétien’s translation is in fact reprinted in Kuster’s edition (see p. 528), so no need to track it down. It seems to be in senar iambic but I really am no expert. I would be glad to have your impression about the quality of the translation if you read it.

9

Thanks again Shenoute. The translation seems highly accomplished to me, both accurate and fluent. Which is all the more impressive given the versification. The meters replicate the Greek: iambic trimeter is iambic trimeter (not senarius), tetrameters tetrameters, and so on; this extends to the lyric meters. I haven’t done more than sample the translation, but I don’t see anything to justify Kuster’s contumelious putdown of it.

10

Sorry, that I am only responding now.

The publishing date is, if I translate the Roman number correctly, 1826. At the end of the (lengthy) preliminary discourse, it says Versio Latina est Brunckiana. So, the author of the Latin version is Richard Franz Philipp Brunck (1729-1803).

Valete,

Carolus Raeticus

11

Thanks Carolus. What a pain these dates can be! I see your Wikipedia link calls his Aristophanes translation “excellent.” I wouldn’t know, myself.

12

Thanks for your comments, it definitely makes me interested in reading it (and improving my knowledge of Latin verses at the same time).