The (Not Really Con)Lang Blog: Aristophanes and Other Challenges

I’ve run into a weird problem with my dissertation.

The novella of my dissertation is set in Classical Athens, just after the end of the Peloponnesian War. It’s alt-history with a number of steampunk elements, which means it’s got enough speculative elements that I can gloss over a few historical inaccuracies. I’d just rather not, if I can help it.

I’ve put a lot of effort into making the story as accurate as Steampunk Classical Athens can be: the class dynamics are contemporary to the time, the technological advances are all based on things they would actually be focusing on, and I’ve tried to keep the culture of the time mostly intact. There are no white characters in this story: there are characters with privilege, characters without, and characters balancing between the two like acrobats. (At the same time, I’m using a world that the US considers to be it’s cultural ancestor to illuminate perhaps some deep-seated and ancestral issues with democracy as we know it.)

The weird problem comes with citing my sources. Classical Greece was absolutely saturated with stories. Not just Homer, but religion and history and—most importantly—the theater. The first full scene of the story involves the main character going to see a play by Aristophanes, which means… Well, I have to quote some Aristophanes.

In the first draft, I picked a translation and copy-pasted, figuring I’d cite the work of the translator in the notes. I immediately got several comments about the dissonance in language—it didn’t match my voice and the difference was jarring. So now I’m brushing off my Classical Greek and doing my own translations.

Because I’m not great at making it easy for myself.