TRANSLATING ARISTOPHANES’ PUNS

Abstract

This paper sketches a taxonomy of Aristophanic puns and explores the strategies employed by ‘faithful’ English translations for rendering such jokes. No pun is untranslatable. At the same time, there is no perfect translation but a range of options, more or less effective for a certain context, audience, and type of pun. The challenges which translators face with Aristophanic jokes, as well as the ingenious solutions they offer on occasions, invite us to reappraise the original puns, whose wittiness is too often denied by scholarship.