The Clouds are Moving Fast

Before your dear just citizen could get his hammer and chisel together, a distant Durbaner had already leapt like a spring-bok into the midst of the translating maul...Which may make it even more important at this point to clear the lines and remind ourselves of where the goal-posts are this time around.

The problem with last year's translation were institutional rather than artistic. To cut a long story short, too few people ended up doing too much for too long. To try to ensure that we reap the full benefits of collective action in circumstances of epistemic diversity, we elicited explicit (and, we hope, credible) commitments from no fewer than ten translators, and then assigned different sections of the text to each of them.

The sections were assigned with various needs and requests in mind: some people wanted to do songs (and many to avoid them); others scrapped to scrutinize particular passages (like the argument between Right and Wrong); and some effort was made to make everyone's portion a resonably continuous chunk of the play. No doubt there will be some trading of bits somewhere down the line, but for now we have a pretty clear idea of who's responsible for what.

Having sent each other off with cheering reminders of the intentions of our founding fathers (us: to have more fun), we then separately and collaboratively set about the Aristophanic corpus with all the zeal of a curious pathologist embarking on an autopsy. But alas! the opening sections were to test to the limit the comic savvy of your faitful phallic friend.

What was I to do with the section on naming (60ff. - ish)? Strepsiades wants to name his son after his own father, Pheidon, whose name seems to have something to do with thriftiness (see LSJ under pheido and Pheidon itself). His wife though insists on adding a horsey suffix (-ippos, -ppides), and they eventually arrive at the compromise Pheidippides.

Juggling all these thoughts and bearing in mind our translation of junior's equestrian predilections into automobile-mania, I came up with a load of bad car-puns and the names Thrifty and Thrifty-Car. With which there are two problems. One is that Pheidippides was according to Dover (ad. loc.), unlike the bizarre and bathetic moniker I came up with, a not uncommon name. The other is more serious. The sequence may not be funny. And, since one of the main characters' names is a pretty serious issue, I thought I would make it known to the demos and let whoever wishes have their say.