Comic names

Puns are often found in proper names of persons and places. We may distinguish between invented names based on a comic word, and existing (or slightly modified) names which resemble a comic word.Footnote ¹² In the first group we have, for instance:

1. A1 Προξενίδης ὁ Κομπασεύς (Av. 1126), translated as ‘Proxenides of Braggarton’ (Henderson), ‘of Boaston’ (Sommerstein, Dunbar), ‘of Bragham’ (Kennedy), ‘the Braggadocian’ (Rogers), ‘the Braggartian’ (Oates and O'Neill), ‘the Boastonian’ (Merry);

2. A2 Ποσθαλίσκος (Thesm. 291), translated as ‘little Dick’ (Henderson), ‘little Dickie, little Willy’ (Austin and Olson), ‘little Willy’ (Halliwell), ‘little Willykins’ (Sommerstein), ‘little son Erektos’ (Barrett);

3. A3 χαυνοπολῖται (Ach. 635), translated as ‘citizens of Simpletonia’ (Henderson), ‘of Emptyhead’ (Sommerstein).

Some examples of the second group are:

1. B1 Βαλλήνη (Ach. 234), translated as ‘Peltingham’ (Henderson, Sommerstein), ‘Hurlingham’ (Merry) – punning on Pallene and βάλλων of 236;

2. B2 Παιονίδης Κινησίας (Lys. 852), translated as ‘Kinesias from Paionidai’ and ‘Cinesias from Paeonidae’ (Halliwell, Henderson, both missing the pun), ‘Mr. Screw from Bangtown’ (Henderson), ‘Cinesias from Bangwell’ (Sommerstein), ‘from Bangladesh’ (Kanellakis) – punning on the name of the deme Paionidai, which resembles παίω (‘to fuck’), together with Κινησίας (a real name punning on κινῶ = ‘to fuck’) making a hyperbole;

3. B3 Σεβῖνος [ὁ] Ἁναϕλύστιος (Ran. 427), translated as ‘Humpus of Wankton’ (Henderson), ‘Fuck-you from Anaphlystos’ (Halliwell), ‘Phucus of Dickeleia’ (Sommerstein), ‘Shaftus of Stiffwick’ (Barrett/Dutta) – punning on the name of the deme Anaphlystos, which resembles ἀναϕλάω (‘to masturbate’; cf. Eccl. 979), together with Σεβῖνος (an invented name punning on σέ + βινῶ = ‘I fuck you’) making a hyperbole;Footnote ¹³

4. B4 ἀνὴρ Κόπρειος (Eq. 899) and Kοπρεαῖος (Eccl. 317), translated as ‘a man from Dungstown’ (Henderson), ‘from Shittington’, ‘from Crapton’ (Sommerstein), ‘a Coprolitish man’ (Rogers), ‘Mr. O'Shit’ (Oates and O'Neill), ‘from Shithole’ (Kanellakis) – the deme Copros near Eleusis, either named after the mythical hero Copreus, son of Pelops, or directly from κόπρος, literally means ‘dung’;

5. B5 ὁ νοῦς δ᾿ ἐν Κλωπιδῶν, said of Paphlagon (Eq. 79), translated as ‘his mind in Larcenadae’ (Sommerstein), ‘in Thieventon’ (Merry), ‘on Crimea’ (Henderson), ‘in Kleptomanchester’ (Kanellakis) – punning on the name of Clopidae, a settlement of the deme Aphidna, which resembles κλοπεύς (‘thief’);Footnote ¹⁴

6. B6 A man ἐκ Κοθωκιδῶν (Thesm. 620) is usually simply translated ‘from Cothodidae/Kothokidai’ (Rogers, Barrett, Oates and O'Neill, Sommerstein, Halliwell), which was a deme near Eleusis, but there is possibly a pun on κόθημα = αἰδοῖον, hence ‘a guy from Phalladelphia’ (Henderson), ‘Penisylvania’, ‘Hornywood’ (Kanellakis);

7. B7 Instructed by Socrates to go to bed, Strepsiades is afraid that οἱ Κορίνθιοι will bite him (Nub. 710) – an explicit (cf. 699) pun on κόρεις, ‘bugs’, translated as ‘Cootie-rinthians’ (Henderson), ‘Tom Tugs’ (Sommerstein), ‘Bedouins’ (Starkie), ‘Phlaeacians’ (Bailey).

These examples represent five translating strategies:

1. 1. Transliteration (Paeonidae, Cinesias, Anaphlystos, Cothodidae), which does not render either the pun or the comic concept, and leaves modern readers – even us classicists in many cases – wondering about the pragmatics of each name;

2. 2. Turning existing English common names into proper names (little Dickie, Mr Screw, from Shithole, Tom Tugs), which renders the comic concept but not the pun;

3. 3. Inventing English proper names that pun on common names (Bragham, Larcenadae, Simpletonia, Shittington). This renders the comic concept but only a certain type of punning mechanism – equivalent to the Greek puns A1–A3 above – which might be considered ‘the easy solution’;

4. 4. Adaptation of modern names, with slight phonetic interventions (Boaston, Dickeleia, Phalladelphia, Penisylvania) or larger ones (Kleptomanchester, Cootierinthians) so that the comic concept of the original pun is added to. The more familiar the reader or spectator is with the modern name, the more effective the joke: for instance, Dickeleia or Thieventon make comic sense to anyone but are funnier to those who know Deceleia (an ancient deme of Attica) or Steventon (Oxfordshire);

5. 5. Appropriation of modern names which coincidentally include an equivalent – though unappreciated in real life – pun to that of the ancient text (Crimea, Bedouins, Bangladesh) and therefore need no interventions.

Strategies 4 and 5 render both the concept and the pun, but entail a significant cultural displacement. Such spatial and/or temporal reframing is excused, if not enthusiastically received, in the case of passing jokes, but it is always avoided when it comes to the names of the main characters. In the realm of ‘faithful’ translations, Strepsiades (literally ‘twister’) cannot become, let's say, ‘Tino Turner’ – which would not strike us negatively if it were a one-off. Even more conservative renderings (strategy 3) are avoided: Paphlagon, for example, who is thus named because ἁνὴρ παϕλάζει, ‘the man's on the boil!’ (Eq. 919, Sommerstein), is nowhere translated as what would be a very modest adaptation – ‘Bubbleagon’.

Paretymology

Puns are often created by claiming, or implying, a false etymology for a word through its mere phonetical resemblance with another word (a paronym). Thus we have, for example:

1. C1 πόλις supposedly related to πόλος (Av. 184), which is neatly translated with pairs such as site>city (Kennedy, Henderson), stage>state (Sommerstein), station>state (Rogers), pole>polity (Merry);

2. C2 πατρὶς supposedly meaning πᾶσ᾿ ἵν᾿ ἂν πράττῃ τις εὖ (Plut. 1151) – the only existing translation which attempts to capture the pun is ‘homeland is wherever one feels at home’ (Halliwell), which yet loses out, in that ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ are not paretymologically related and that ‘to feel at home’ does not carry the monetary connotations of Hermes’ εὖ πράττω;

3. C3 ἐριώλη (literally ‘hurricane’), supposedly meaning ‘a waste of wool’ (ἔριον+ὀλλύναι), is ironically attributed by Philocleon to a coat made of ἐρίων τάλαντον (‘a talent of wool’, Vesp. 1148–9). That coat has been ingeniously translated as ‘a waste-coat’, punning on ‘waistcoat’ (Merry, MacDowell);

4. C4 ἔργῳ ᾿ϕιαλοῦμεν, ‘to get to work’ (actually from ἐπι+ἰάλλω), is paretymologically linked by Trygaeus to ‘libation bowl’ (ϕιάλην, Pax 431–2).Footnote ¹⁵ The pun has been translated with pairs such as ‘pitcher’ and ‘pitch in’ (Henderson), ‘bowl’ and ‘bowl along at work’ (Merry), or ‘get boldly on with the job’ (Sommerstein, noting: ‘boldly is not in the Greek, but has been added to help reproduce the joke’;

5. C5 The chorus hesitates to welcome Peace by offering her an ox, because that could be seen as a promise to send military help to their allies in case of further war – a far-fetched connection of βοΐ to βοηθεῖν (Pax 926).Footnote ¹⁶ The chorus’ reaction has been successfully translated as ‘we don't want to have to go on an oxpedition anywhere’ (Sommerstein), ‘no need of bull-works now’ (Rogers), ‘we want no bullying here’ (Paley);

6. C6 Having sore eyes (τὰς λήμας) caused by smoke, say the old men in Lysistrata, must be a result of Λήμνιον πῦρ (‘Lemnian fire’, a proverbial expression owed to the volcanic history of Lemnos: Lys. 299–301). The limited phonetic overlap of the two words makes it a weak pun, which, reasonably, no English translation has bothered to render. If necessary, we could perhaps translate as ‘our eyes are searing like from lemon, it must be then a fire from Lemnos’ (Kanellakis);

7. C7 ἀσκωλίαζω (to play a hopping game involving a balloon, <ἀσκός) is linked to not having κωλῆ (pork thighs, ham: Plut. 1128–9) to eat; the first letter of the verb contributes to the pun, as it echoes an alpha privative. Presumably, the implication is that, without animal sacrifices, Hermes’ stomach will look like a balloon, that is, full of air. Two effective translations are: ‘ham…ham it up [sc. the hunger]’ (Henderson) and ‘gammon…game on bladders’ (Rogers);

8. C8 Strepsiades regrets having bought a κοππατίαν (a koppa-branded racing horse) for his son. ‘I wish I'd had my eye knocked out (ἐξεκόπην) with a stone first!’ he exclaims (Nub. 23–4: Henderson). A translation that renders the pun is ‘I wish that I had my eye “hacked” out, before I had ever seen this “hack”’ (Merry).

Based on our examples, we can trace the following translating strategies, other than translating word for word, which ruins the pun:

1. 1. Phonetic adaptation of words, substituting paretymology with misspelling (waste-coat, oxpedition, bull-works);

2. 2. Making slight semantic additions to facilitate a pun in English (boldly, Lemnos, ham it up);

3. 3. Creating an equivalent English paretymology (pole>polity, pitcher>pitch in, gammon>game on).

It should be noted that far-fetched etymologies were not necessarily viewed as fanciful material by the ancient Greeks; they found prominent place in Plato's work, for example, where they are often taken as evidence in support of an argument.Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, we may assume that not many Athenians were researching ‘historical linguistics’, and therefore it remains unclear whether Aristophanes’ audience perceived (and laughed at) his paretymologies as such. Even worse, could some spectators have taken his paretymologies as facts? What is certain is that Aristophanes had carefully trained his audience to recognize wordplay as a malicious device of sophists and neoteric poets, in the context of his comedies at least, and therefore even the plausible paretymologies would sound suspect. Thus, in Frogs, Euripides is satirized for supposedly having composed the gnomic C9: τὸ πνεῖν δὲ δειπνεῖν (Ran. 1478), translated as ‘breath and breakfast’ (Merry), ‘breath be mutton broth’ (Rogers), ‘dying is dining’ (Sommerstein, noting: ‘I have altered the sense for the sake of a pun’).

Para prosdokian

Para prosdokian (p.p.) is the type of joke where the latter part of a sequence (be that a phrase within a sentence, or a word within a phrase, or even a syllable within a word) introduces an unexpected end, either by contradicting or reinterpreting the semantics of the first part (e.g. ‘John makes good money, he was always a competent…forger’) or by violating a formula or popular intertext (e.g. ‘If I were…I’). While p.p. jokes are very frequent in Aristophanes,Footnote ¹⁸ only a few of them are based on a pun. Some examples, if not an exhaustive list, are:

1. D1 ἀπολεῖς ἄρ᾿ ὁμήλικα τόνδε ϕιλανθρακέα (Ach. 336), with the last word placed p.p. for ϕιλάνθρωπον, translated as ‘Then you'll kill this, my coeval, my coal-eague?’ (Henderson), ‘my coeval, the philanthr-acist’ (Starkie);

2. D2 διαπεινᾶμες (Ach. 751), appearing p.p. for διαπίνομεν, translated as ‘fasting’ (instead of ‘feasting’: Rennie, Henderson), ‘having shrinking bouts’ (instead of ‘drinking bouts’: Sommerstein), ‘drink dry…toasts’ (instead of ‘dry wine’: Starkie);

3. D3 πρὶν ἀντιλαβέσθαι πρωκτὸν ἕτερον τῆς ϕλογός (Thesm. 242), with πρωκτὸν placed p.p. for οἰκίαν, translated as ‘before the flames catch hold of another arse’ (instead of ‘house’: Sommerstein, noting ‘the [phonetic] similarity – in some dialect pronunciations, identity – of the two English words is a rare piece of good luck for the translator!’);

4. D4 ἐλθὼν σῆς δάμαρτος ἐσχάρας (Thesm. 913), with the last word (= αἰδοῖον) appearing p.p. for ἐς χέρας (cf. Eur. Hel. 566), translated as ‘come into your wife's charms!’ (instead of ‘arms’: Henderson), ‘hearth’ (not a p.p. but a double entendre: Halliwell, Sommerstein).

The translating strategies these few examples present are:

1. 1. Finding an identical English pun (feasting/fasting), if lucky;

2. 2. Inventing an equivalent English pun (charms/arms, drinking/shrinking, arse/house); or

3. 3. Phonetic adaptation (coal-eague, philanthr-acist).

Phonological figures

Puns are often based on repetitive sounds, through figures such as alliteration (‘See it, say it, sorted’), anadiplosis (‘Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate’), anaphora (‘Every breath you take / and every move you make / every bond you break / every step you take…’), homoioteleuton (‘the sooner the better’), and paronomasia (‘muscular mice’), or through homophony (‘Jim’/‘gym’). Of course, apart from comedy, such figures are extensively used in high-register poetry and oratory, and there is nothing inherently funny about them, as the examples above show. It remains upon the semantics to give them a comic, or other, tone; the homophony ‘weak’/‘week’, for instance, becomes a pun only when placed in a witty sentence: ‘Seven days without laughter makes one weak’ (Mort Walker).Footnote ¹⁹

Let us consider some examples of phonetic repetition based on figura etymologica:

1. E1 κέλης κέλητα παρακελητιεῖ (Pax 900), translated as ‘jockey will outjockey jockey’ (Henderson, Sommerstein) or ‘riders will ride side by side’ (Oates and O'Neill);

2. E2 καὶ μιαρὲ καὶ παμμίαρε καὶ μιαρώτατε (Ran. 466), translated as ‘scum you! Utter scum! Scum of the earth!’ (Henderson), ‘you villain, arch-villain, you utter villain’ (Sommerstein, cf. Dillon, Rogers);

3. E3 κατώρυξέν με κατὰ τῆς γῆς κάτω (Plut. 238), translated as ‘he buries me down under ground’ (Sommerstein), which invests in alliteration rather than in repetition;

4. E4 δεινότατον ἔργον παρὰ πολὺ ἔργων ἁπάντων ἐργασόμεθ᾿ (Plut. 445), translated as ‘We'll be doing far the most dastardly deed ever done’ (Henderson), which also replaces paronomasia with alliteration;

5. E5 πόδα σὺ κυλλὸν ἀνὰ κύκλον κυκλεῖς (Av. 1379), translated as ‘you twist and turn your limping limb’ (Merry; surprisingly he notes that ‘there is probably some joke we do not understand’, even though his fine translation provides the answer: it is a pun for the sake of a pun);

6. E6 ἠλιάσει πρὸς ἥλιον (Vesp. 772), literally meaning ‘You'll be judging [at Heliaia] out in the sun’, which is not rendered as a pun in any existing translation. I suggest ‘You'll be deck-chairing the court’.

The following examples entail phonetic repetitions based on alliteration:

1. F1 χαῖρ᾿, ὦ Χάρων (Ran. 183, repeated three timesFootnote ²⁰) is not rendered as a pun in most translations (‘Welcome, Charon!’ Rogers, Henderson; ‘Hello, Charon!’ Sommerstein, Halliwell) but an English alliteration is possible: ‘cheery Charon!’ (Dillon), ‘Cheerio Charon!’ (Dickinson), ‘Hello, hell!’ (Kanellakis);

2. F2 ἐπᾴσομαι μέλος τι μελλοδειπνικόν (Eccl. 1153), literally ‘I'll accompany you with a sort of pre-dining celebration song’ (Sommerstein),Footnote ²¹ has been neatly translated as ‘I'll sing a song, a Lay of Lay-the-dinner’ (Rogers);

3. F3 χέσαιτο γάρ, εἰ μαχέσαιτο (Eq. 1057) has been translated as ‘If she fought she'd be taken short’ (Sommerstein), ‘In fighting she's always a fright in’ (Rogers) – both rendering the rhyme but not the scatological content – and ‘When the spears start hitting, she promptly starts shitting’ (Sommerstein);

4. F4 The exchange between Chremylus and Blepsidemus ποῦ; / παρ᾿ ἐμοί. / παρὰ σοί; / πάνυ. (Plut. 393) has been best translated as ‘“Inside where?” / “In my house.” / “In your house?” / “That's right.”’ (Henderson, cf. Sommerstein, with ‘Exactly’ at the end). I would change the coda to ‘Indeed’ to make a perfect alliteration;

5. F5 Similar is the exchange between Euripides and his kinsman: Ἀγάθων ὁ τραγῳδοποιός. / ποῖος οὗτος Ἁγάθων; (Thesm. 29–30), literally ‘“…the tragic poet Agathon.” / “What Agathon do you mean?”’ (Henderson).Footnote ²² No existing translation renders the pun, for which I propose replacing alliteration with homophony: ‘“…the tragic poet Agathon, you know.” / “I…no.”’

Aristophanes himself offers examples of homophonic puns:

1. G1 The comic pronouncing of Διὸς καταιβάτου (Pax 42), literally ‘Zeus the Descender’, as Διὸς σκαταιβάτου – a phenomenon called ‘juncture’ in phonetics – has been translated as ‘Zeus of the Thunder Crap’ (Henderson, cf. Sommerstein) and, most ingeniously, as ‘sulphur-bolting Zeus’ (Rogers), given that both kind of strokes involve emission of that chemical. Merry notes: ‘If it is thought worth while to elaborate a joke in English, there is material for it in sweeping bolt and bolt sweepings!’ In any case, it seems difficult to translate with a juncture pun in English;Footnote ²³

2. G2 Another juncture pun is τί δῆτα ληρεῖς ὥσπερ ἀπ᾿ ὄνου καταπεσών; (Nub. 1273), literally ‘Why are you talking such nonsense, as if you'd fallen off a donkey?’ (Sommerstein), which sounds like ἀπὸ νοῦ καταπεσών: ‘off your head/off your Ned’ (Merry);

3. G3 The homophony between the female name Ἀμεινία and its male version, Ἀμεινίας, which in vocative also becomes Ἀμεινία (Nub. 689), and the confusing exchange it creates between Socrates and Strepsiades, is not only another example of Aristophanes warning his audience that wordplay is linked to sophistry – it has also proven one of the greatest challenges in translating Aristophanes. Most translators simply transliterate the name in English and add an asteriskFootnote ²⁴ to explain the joke in the footnotes, but Sommerstein achieves an equivalent pun by substituting the name:

Across these subcategories of phonological puns, we have encountered the following translating possibilities:

1. 1. Finding an equivalent pun in English which renders both the comic content and the type of figure of the original (‘Cheerio Charon’, ‘hitting’/‘shitting’, ‘♂Sandie’/‘♀Sandie’);

2. 2. Inventing a pun in English which renders the comic content but replaces the type of figure of the original (‘off your head/off your Ned’, ‘deck-chairing’, ‘dastardly deed ever done’);

3. 3. Inventing a pun in English which renders the type of figure of the original but modifies its comic content (‘If she fought she'd be taken short’).

Double meaning

Double entendres, a surprisingly large number of which are not sexual, are our last, but not least, category. We may distinguish between words hinting at other words (usually paronyms) and words ambiguous in themselves. Some examples of the first group:

1. H1 A juror made of συκίνου wood (Vesp. 145), literally ‘figwood’, with a pun on συκοϕάντης (‘slanderer’), is neatly translated as someone made of ‘Impeach wood’ (Henderson), or with a juncture pun, ‘I'm peach wood’ (Parker). We see that both parts have been semantically adapted (fig>peach, slanderer>impeacher) to facilitate a pun in English. Sometimes it is possible to attempt an identical pun in the target language, but here the option ‘syco-more’ (Van Daele) is rather weak, in that most English speakers would not automatically recall ‘sycophant’;Footnote ²⁵

2. H2 σὺ δέ γ᾿ ὄζοις ἂν καλαμίνθης (Eccl. 648), literally ‘you'd smell of catmint’ (<μίνθη), with a pun on μίνθος (‘human ordure’), has been translated as ‘you'd smell of eau d'ordure!’ (Henderson, probably playing with the perfume brand eau d'orange verte), and with the orthographic pun ‘you'd be smelling of…tur(d)meric’ (Sommerstein, who acknowledges that this is a substitute pun);

3. H3 In his allegorical dream, the slave Xanthias saw a whale (Cleon) weighing βόειον δημόν (Vesp. 40), literally ‘beef fat’, with the last word being a paronym of δῆμος. The pun is translated as ‘weighing pea pulse’ (a homophone of ‘peoples’: Henderson) and ‘weighing a bit of grease’ (a homophone of ‘Greece’: MacDowell);

4. H4 Placed in a context where men express their worries about their wives’ fidelity, the phrase ὀρχουμένης μου τῆς γυναικὸς ἑσπέρας (Lys. 409), literally ‘last night my wife was dancing’ (Sommerstein), is certainly a pun on ὄρχεις (‘testicles’): ‘my wife was having a ball the other night’ (Henderson) or, more accurately, ‘my wife attended a couple of balls last night’ (Kanellakis);

5. H5 I highlighted the role of the context in H4 because, in the current example, the same lexeme (ορχ) creates a non-sexual double entendre. The sons of Carcinus the dancer are called τριόρχοι (‘buzzards’, Vesp. 1534), as a pun on τρεῖς ὀρχησταί (‘three dancers’, cf. Σ), regardless of the literal meaning of the word, that is, ‘with three testicles’.Footnote ²⁶ They have been translated as ‘triple duckers’ (a weak paronym of ‘triple dancers’: Henderson) and ‘three kinglets’ (Oates and O'Neill).

Finally, some examples of ambiguous words:

1. I1 μὴ ᾿κκόρει τὴν Ἑλλάδα (Pax 59) prima facie means ‘don't sweep Greece away!’ (Henderson) but can also be understood as ‘don't make Greece empty of young people’ (Olson), ‘don't rob our youths’ (Sharpley) – a double entendre which no translation has managed to render; perhaps ‘Stop cleansing the Greeks’ (Kanellakis);

2. I2 A husband is suspicious of his wife, who visits the shoemaker too often with the excuse τοῦ ποδὸς τὸ δακτυλίδιον πιέζει τὸ ζυγόν (Lys. 416–17), ‘the sandal-strap is hurting her toe’. But since δακτύλιος means anything ring-shaped, including the anus (LSJ, s.v. ii.2), we cannot blame the wife for being dishonest, at least: ‘the thong is squeezing her pinky winky’ (Henderson);Footnote ²⁷

3. I3 When bald Aristophanes compares himself to other comic poets by saying κἀγὼ μὲν τοιοῦτος ἀνὴρ ὢν ποιητὴς οὐ κομῶ (Nub. 545), he means both ‘But myself, being such a man and a poet [sc. humble], I do not plume myself’ and ‘But myself, being such a man and a poet [sc. bald], I do not let my hair grow’. The pun translates perfectly into English as ‘I do not act like a bigwig’ (metaphor: Henderson), ‘give myself hairs’ (homophone of ‘airs’: Sommerstein), or ‘give myself (h)airs’ (orthographic pun: Merry).

The translating strategies found in these examples are:

1. 1. Retaining both meanings of the Greek double entendre in English (a ball/balls, give airs/hairs);

2. 2. Retaining one of the two meanings and adapting the other semantically (‘pea pulse’ retains δῆμον but adapts δημόν, ‘tur(d)meric’ retains μίνθος but adapts μίνθη);

3. 3. Adapting both meanings (‘Impeach wood’ retains neither ‘sycophant’ nor ‘fig’, ‘kinglets’ retains neither ‘dancers’ nor ‘buzzers’, and ‘cleansing’ retains neither ‘sweeping’ nor ‘taking the young away’).