Perhaps one of the things that stuck out to me most when I
was reading Lysistrata was the portrayal of the Spartans. Honestly, my first
thought about the way Lampito and her fellow Spartans was Why are they talking
like rednecks? For example:
"I calklate so. Hit's fitness whut done it, fitness and
dancin'." -Lampito, page 356.
Whoa, Lampito sounds like she's from backwoods Tennessee!
I tried to reason why our playwright Aristophanes would
write the Spartans in such a way that they would seem rather stupid, while the
Athenians used perfect grammar and articulation.
Ancient Greece was not the unified country we now know as
Greece. Greece was not unified at all, but consisted of several different
city-states, which functioned much like separate small countries. Each had its
different culture, and as evidenced from
the ongoing wars talked about in the play, did not always get along. The cities
of Athens and Sparta were two of these city-states.
Athens had a much more art-filled culture than Sparta. Named
for the goddess of wisdom, Athena, Athens gave us such things as drama, the
Parthenon, and most importantly democracy. Citizens of Athens were well learned
and directly decided their laws When you
think ancient Greece, you probably think of Athens, which is still very much
alive today.
Sparta, however, left no ruins for us to admire. The
Spartans were extremely war like people, and they did not build their city to
last. For the citizens of Sparta, duty to the state was much more important
than expressing any individuality. The only real "citizens" of Sparta
were the soldiers. Luxury was banned, and Spartans did not make or create
anything to trade with (unless you counted warriors.)
Probably because these differences were so stark and
apparent, Athens and Spartans were usually at odds with each other, though as
Lysistrata tells us on page 446, they had occasionally allied together for their
mutual benefit. Athenians thought of Spartans as barbaric, and it is important
to note that Aristophanes was an Athenian. He couldn't help to think of
Spartans as barbarians and a bit backwards, even if he was writing a play that
preached a united and war-free Greece. He certainly did not have to worry about
offending any Spartans with his play, because no Spartan would waste his time
with such a silly thing as a play when there was fighting to be done.
I posted this on Emily's post, too, but the way that the Spartans speak is actually the translator's interpretation. The Spartans were a simpler-living people than those living in the city of Athens, and were consider less civilized. He felt giving the Spartans a mountain hick accent would help the reader understand the difference between the laconic Spartans and the "civilized" Athenians.
ReplyDeleteI was curious about why the translator did that, so I'd looked it up in the footnotes while I was reading.
Actually one of my favourite parts of this play was the use of the different dialects to illustrate how the Athenians and the Spartans. It helped me to understand the background of the conflict for the play. I think it was really clever to do that in the translation. Do any of you know if there's a difference in the original play?
ReplyDeleteThe translator actually talks about the changes he made from the original text under the "Translation" section on page 344. The information on why he set up the Spartan dialect like that can be found in the footnotes on page 460.
ReplyDelete...I like knowing seemingly trivial background information on things, so I made sure to read most of the footnotes and some of the introduction.