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Introduction

Twice a year at the Dionysian Festivals in Athens writers of comedy were invited to compete for the three drama prizes. At the City Dionysia of 414 B.C., a tense year in the apparently endless war with Sparta, Aristophanes entered his brilliant fantasy, The Birds. For some reason it took only the second prize: the first went to Ameipsias for his Komastai, a comedy that has not survived; but it is clear that the audience received The Birds with favor, and even now, more than two millennia later, we can sense much of the delight and some of the fun that Athens found in it. It is not so general a favorite as The Frogs, perhaps, nor has it the scandalous domestic force that makes Lysistrata irresistible; but its vivacity, its otherworldliness, and the ironic twist of its resolution make it one of the most engaging, as it is certainly the most beautiful, of the eleven plays of Aristophanes that have come down to us.

Comedy withers more quickly than tragedy because so much of its material is drawn from ordinary life, from men as they are. Tragedy idealizes; comedy, in general, does not. (Aristotle says that tragedy represents men as better than they are, comedy as worse; but he was thinking of the satiric and lampooning aspects of comedy as social attack.) It is comedy, not tragedy, that holds a mirror up to nature. True, daily life has implications as profound as those that any tragedy could deal with; we, of all men, scarcely need to be reminded of that; but it is the way of comedy to lighten these implications by providing a happy solution of the problems involved. A "happy ending," in the widest sense, is essential to the comic plot. At any level, from the highest to the lowest, the boy gets the girl, or the man achieves salvation, or some other desired end is achieved after a struggle. There need be no laughter, nor even amusement in the ordinary sense: no one in his right mind would turn to Dante`s Comedy, the greatest of them all, for this kind of entertainment. Comedy is the representation of difficulties overcome, of success achieved, by someone who is recognizably one of us. However, if it is satirical - and all of Aristophanes` comedies are - it is almost bound to concern itself with local matters, with abuses, scandals, and otherwise notable situations that the audience will be familiar with. That is to say, it will be topical; and it is this topicality, so endearing to its original audience, that makes it wear less well as time passes. The tragedy of an Antigone or an Oedipus is untouched by time, beyond time; a comedy like The Birds is timestruck at the heart.

For what becomes of a topical allusion as the years go by? Shakespeare`s audience in 1609 may have laughed itself helpless over the porter in Macbeth with his drunken fumbling of the word "equivocation." That was a local joke, just as "I need him" (to take a rapidly fading example) is a local joke today. Topical humor very quickly congeals into footnotes, and nothing is less funny than a joke that needs scholarly explanation. It is the more remarkable, then, that Aristophanes is still so triumphantly funny. He is more topical than Shakespeare, his poetry is full of local allusions, many of them impenetrable; but the humor flashes and burns even in the most desperate obscurities, and though we may often be confused, we are not bored. It is a victory of poetry over matter. We enjoy Aristophanes not because we perceive that his circumstances and our own are alike, but because he enables us to pass with laughter beyond the circumstances into the inner precincts of man`s nature. The comic material implements his vision, but it is the vision, not the material, that counts. What moves us is the transforming power of an art that takes "men as they are" and makes them more than they are, not merely by exaggeration, not by turning them into Types, clearly not by generalization or abstraction, but by a mode of perception and re-creation that is ultimately as inexplicable as any other of the mysteries of poetry. Happily we do not need to explain. It is enough to accept, to be grateful to whatever art it is that can take a cranky old down-easter like Pisthetaerus, the amiably unlovable hero of The Birds, and turn him into a god without jeopardizing his humanity. The highest comic impulse ends in a fusion of the human with the divine. I have spoken of Aristophanes` "vision." The word is not quite reputable today: we are subjected to so many "visions" on every side; but in this instance the term is apt enough. The Birds is a vision: it has variously been called a Utopia, a dream of escape, a romantic fugue. Some authorities have seen in the founding of Cloudcuckooland an allegory of the great Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C., - an enterprise which, if it had succeeded, might well have brought Athens control of Sicily and of the whole Mediterranean world. Others have tried to identify Pisthetaerus with Alcibiades, recklessly and destructively intent upon indulgence at the expense of the public good. Still others have pronounced it a fantasy of evasion, a retreat from an intolerable actuality into the never-never land of dream. "The prototype of Utopian escapism," one of them writes, "the last rejection of human ineptitude lying (as with Swift) in the rejection of the human form." Everyone agrees that the topical references are fewer than we should expect from Aristophanes at this point in his career, and it is this peculiarity that lends color to the theory of escape. Yet the theory is uneasy. We know little about Aristophanes, and the great bulk of his work has been lost; but the impulse to avoid an ugly actuality is not evident in the other plays that we have, and the idea of disengagement, however temporary, loses much of its force when we consider that the savagely explicit Lysistrata was written three years later than The Birds. If the latter is a vision, it may be a Utopia vision, but a Utopia vision in reverse: that is to say, instead of being an Ideal State, the kind of commonwealth that Plato describes in the Republic, it is an ironically contemplated surrogate State where everything is as bad as in real life, only bad in a different way. The injustice of the Birds has been substituted for the injustice of mankind, and that is all.

The reference to Swift seems equally insecure. It is true that in that appalling last book of Gulliver`s Travels Swift seems to "reject the human form." Here we have a real Utopia; but the happy citizens are horses, not men, and it is the human form of the Yahoos that symbolizes everything that is brutish and disgusting. If final illumination is madness, Swift is mad in these pages, and it would be a blessing if the madness were contagious. However that may be, the elevation of the Houyhnhnms and the abasement of the Yahoos can not be taken as a "rejection of the human form." The noble Horses are not really horses at all, but men idealized. Their customs, their beliefs, even their speech (since we hear them mostly in translation, as it were) are equine only per accidents; what they do and what they think are what men at their best are capable of doing and thinking. By making them horses Swift is merely employing the shock technic of the Beast Fable. He is not rejecting humanity. He is not saying that the world would be better if it were controlled by noble animals. He is saying that we men have debased our humanity, forgotten it, and so rejected it; that we behave like the bestial Yahoos in violation of the moral order; and that consequently the best beast, the virtuous Houyhnhnm, is in every way our superior. I do not pretend that "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms" is an agreeable story; but if you are looking for the affirmative, loving element in social satire, you will find more of it here than anywhere else in the Travels.

Aristophanes is hardly comparable. In his Fable there is not even a superficial rejection of the human form. Cloudcuckooland is full of birds, of course, and the hero himself becomes birdlike to the extent of sprouting wings and acquiring a comic beak; but the human form is never lost sight of. "Are you laughing at me?" the Hoopoe indignantly asks at one point. "No, by Zeus," he is told, "we`re laughing at that absurd beak of yours." "Ah," he says, "that`s what Sophocles did to me in that play of his." Exactly. The human being is always there - "immanent," we might say - beneath the feathers, behind the beak. Like Bottom, he has been "translated," but he is no more (and no less) a Hoopoe than Bottom is an Ass. His pretty wife is a Nightingale; but the poet represents her as a flute girl, beautifully adorned, wearing a bird mask. The bird artisans and soldiers are Cranes, Storks, Kites, and the like - nominally birds; but the fun lies in the instant perception of the human beneath the inhuman disguise. It is precisely because the Birds look so much like birds that Aristophanes` device is so chilling. For a moment we had thought that a different order of animal life might bring a different and happier world to pass, but the ironic truth is that the Birds are only feathered men and that Cloudcuckooland is only an aerial Athens. Aristophanes is even more disheartening than Swift; for the Houyhnhnms at least give us a glimpse of what men might be like, but the Birds provide no hope at all. The Birds is fantasy, but it is not a fantasy of escape. Oddly, though, it begins with an escape. Two respectable old men are taking a walk through difficult country. Their names are Pisthetaerus and Euelpides - that is to say, "Faithful Friend" and "Natural Optimist" - and they are householders of ancient Athens; but when we have made allowances for the more than two thousand years that separate us from them, we find that they are not very different from anxious citizens that we meet every day. They are merely more irascible. They are voters tried beyond endurance, and that is why they are taking their walk - away from Athens, away from taxes, party commitments, and civic duties, away from the informers, the packed courts, the inspirational clergymen, the homosexuals, the generals and admirals, the futile theorists of uplift, the city planners, the New Science, the whole sorry mess. They are heading north - north is the direction of witchcraft and improbable solutions - to meet a person named Terues. This Terues, if they have remembered their mythology, is a notable. His story is a compound of rape, incest, murder, and cannibalism; but the point is that he himself, who was once King of Thrace, has magically turned into a Hoopoe - a flamboyant and filthy kind of hawk - and is now the ruler of All Birds. Pisthetaerus and his friend meet Tereus, ingratiate themselves with him, and convince him that they are the harbingers of a new order - for the Birds, of course. It is the Birds, they tell him, who should inherit the heavens and the earth. Birds antedate everything, even the Olympian gods. Primal creation proceeded from an Egg, and Zeus and his supporters are a usurping conspiracy. As for mankind, it is despicable and powerless. Then why not establish a Bird City State? Pisthetaerus will show Tereus how. What a marvelous concept, to seize the air between heaven and earth! Birds could then dictate to gods and men alike, since Olympus would be cut off from the necessary incense of ritual sacrifice, and the earth would be open to devastating raids from the sky. The Birds are persuaded. The aerial City is built, fortified, and dedicated with exquisite rites. Tereus may be the nominal King, but Pisthetaerus is more glorious still: deified, the human Founder marries a goddess, herself one of the defeated Olympians, and becomes the patron divinity of the State. The new realm is named Nepeaokokkyria, and the word means Cloudcuckooland.

Well, this is a kind of escape - but for Pisthetaerus, not for us. Note what happens once the City is established. Pisthetaerus meets and deals with all sorts of unwelcome visitors from abroad. One of them is a City Planner. As a matter of fact, he is a historical character, one Meton, and hence a true Topical Allusion; and Pisthetaerus drives him away. An Oracle Monger, a dealer in inspirational literature, is physically assaulted. A would-be Parricide - a most beguiling young man - is drafted into the army and sent off to the equivalent of Korea. And so it goes. On the celestial side we have the goddess Iris, the Heavenly Messenger, who is grossly insulted and sent weeping away; we have Prometheus, absurdly disguised as an Elect Maiden of the Panathenian Escort; and finally we have a Peace Delegation from Olympus composed of no less than three divinities, all of them slapstick gods. It is noteworthy, but it was to be expected, that every one of the visitors from earth represents some aspect of civic evil, and that they are all defeated by violence or by the threat of violence. What was less to be expected is the contemptuous treatment of the gods. We may say that this was part of the comedic tradition, that blasphemy of a comic sort was licensed at the Dionysian Festivals. Nevertheless there is something more than ritual license in this glorification of everything that Greek moderation dreaded - the exaltation of a man, the degradation of the immortal gods. Our ideas of blasphemy are not those of the Greeks, but there is more in the apotheosis of Pisthetaerus than traditional excess. I think it is philosophical irony.

Clouds and cuckoos are volatile and unstable. A State founded upon a dream of them may satisfy a Pisthetaerus, but Aristophanes would not be the moralist that he is if he were to be content with this much. We must not be deceived by the appearance of a New Deal. Is not Cloudcuckooland founded upon deception and injustice? Even before Pisthetaerus` triumph there have been oppressive hints of what is in store for the Birds: the very roasts for his wedding feast are roast bird subversives - a shockingly prompt comment on the ways of idealistic reform, but shocking only in its promptness. Dubious oratory, slippery theorizing, and the strategy of bribery and unscrupulous blockade may be necessary to political reform, but they do not suggest the return of the Golden Age. Cloudcuckooland is a beginning again, but in the old way and in the same hopeless direction. Human pride and human excess may be disguised in all sorts of ways, but they still challenge Nemesis. No vision of escape works in this way: you do not surmount your vexations when you picture them as inevitable, unchangeable, though you may manage to learn resignation. Aristophanes is smilingly unconsoling. The beauty of his writing, the unearthly music, the brilliant bird pageant, together with the strong male delight in the contentions and savors of living - these qualities, powerful as they are, should not blind us to the ironic judgment that lies at the heart of this poem. The incantation of art only intensifies the central disenchantment. I should say a few words about the present translation. It is described as "composite," and its origin is - to me, at any rate - dark. I do not know who made the original prose version upon which it is based. In any case, it was published privately and anonymously, and it had been circulating more or less obscurely when Professors Oates and O`Neill included it, with many alterations made in the interests of liveliness and a closer approach to sayable English, in their two-volume collection of Greek drama. Since then it has undergone at least two more revisions, for one of which I myself am responsible; but the diction and the spirit of the original translation are so idiosyncratic as to defy this kind of tinkering, however hard an editor may try. That is to say, it has its own integrity; and it has, moreover, the virtue of being literal. If we can distinguish what a man said from the way he said it - a distinction that has its difficulties - our composite translation gives us the prose sense of what Aristophanes said.

Needless to say, the Greek is not prose. To speak only of form: the metrical variety and the strophic complexity of Aristophanes` poetry can not be too much admired: his lightness, his speed, his virtuosity, are among the wonders of art. A prose translation will not even suggest these qualities; quite properly, it will not try to do so. It is difficult enough to suggest them in verse. Swinburne has probably come closest in his version of the parabasis of this play:

It was Chaos and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and Hell`s broad border,

Earth was not, nor air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order

First thing first-born of the black-plumed Night was a wind-egg hatched in her bosom,

Whence timely with seasons revolving again sweet Love burst out as a blossom, Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning. . . The lines have something of the anapestic plunge, the color, though there is a shrillness, a windy nervousness, that would make an extended reading uncomfortable. But even a flamboyant tone serves to remind us that Aristophanes is color and movement, and that a reduction to the neutrality of prose is a betrayal. Most translation, for that matter, is betrayal; we have to choose among compromises. If we bear in mind that what we are reading is never more than the ghost of what the original poet said - and a poor ghost at that, raised by the private mutterings of a medium very frequently uncertain in the seance - we shall at any rate not be led astray. Our pose translation keeps a certain faith. We can perceive some of the substance though we miss the form. Possibly that is all we had a right to expect.