I found this....interesting article through the Loeb site on the subject of their previously sterile translations:
ARTS IN AMERICA
O Profligate Youth of Rome, Ye #*!, Ye @#! (See Footnote)
By JULIE FLAHERTY
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 27 — The publisher of the Loeb Classical Library, the very proper series of Greek and Roman literature for English-speaking readers, has been gradually putting back the naughty bits it had been editing out of the books.
For example, it no longer tiptoes around Plato's writings on homoerotic love or cleans up Aristophanes' bathroom humor. But the most recent translations are so faithful to the original ribald words of their authors that some of them would make the Farrelly brothers blush.
Harvard University Press here is the current caretaker and publisher of the Loeb Classical Library, which now contains about 500 texts. When James Loeb, an American banker, financed the publication of a classical literature series in 1910, he envisioned an "everyman" version of the classics, with the Greek or Latin text on one page and the English translation opposite. His vision was also G- rated.
The British and American translators he retained kept with the manners of their age, replacing vulgarities and obscenities with euphemisms or just omitting lines and scenes all together. Some plays, like Aristophanes' "Assembly Women," were so rife with off-color jokes that major sections were untranslatable.
Many of the great authors who inspired the Renaissance were anything but prissy. "But James Loeb himself, as a 19th-century man and a promoter of the classics, had no intention of disillusioning anyone," explained Jeffrey Henderson, who became editor of the Loeb last year.
Sometimes the books made mention of the "coarse sense" of a word in footnotes, or translated the offending passages into equally cryptic Latin (from Greek) or Italian (from Latin), which was supposedly a bawdy language anyway. Benjamin Bickley Rogers even apologized for his misleading doublespeak. Confronted with a sexually explicit 22- line epic metaphor in Aristophanes' "Peace," he did the verbal equivalent of throwing up his hands, writing in a footnote: "I have purposely confined my translation (if the vague paraphrase I offer be worthy of the name)."
As things loosened in the 1960's, the Loeb began updating its collection. George P. Goold, an Englishman who became editor in 1973, was determined to use more accurate language, as with this old passage from Catullus: "Tis you I fear, you and your passions, so fatal to the young, both good and bad alike." In Mr. Goold's translation, it became: "Tis you I fear, you and your p***s, so ready to molest good boys and bad alike."
But even a risqué Roman like Catullus seems tame compared with the Loeb's latest endeavor: a new translation of Aristophanes.
"Aristophanes is the worst," said Mr. Henderson, who translated the two volumes of Aristophanes the Loeb reissued in 1998, and another due out next month. The playwright used slang for all manner of body parts and bodily functions.
In Mr. Rogers's old translation, a passage reads: "Now girls, now girls, keep close to me: our youngsters I know well are sore all over for the love of you." Mr. Henderson translated the same line: "This way, girls, follow me, and quickly; a great many horny men await you." Where the Greek text calls for a vulgarity, Mr. Henderson complies.
"There are four-letter Greek words, and we know what they are," he said. "The tone of them is very well documented."
Removing the offending language not only waters down the meaning of the play, he argues, it drowns it. It would be akin to dubbing vulgar language in "Blue Velvet."
"This is a particular kind of comedy that was meant to be transgressive," Mr. Henderson said. "It was put on at a festival for the wine god Dionysus. The characters wore outrageous costumes and had big leather phalluses. The point of the comedy was to shake people up. To expose what was normally hidden, to make fun of it, to take the important people down a peg or two and speak up for the ordinary man."
For years college professors have shared the earthiness of these writers with their students, or at least challenged them to learn their Latin and Greek and figure it out for themselves. More precise English translations have been around for a while from other publishers, and the less- squeamish French were doing accurate translations as early as the 1920's. But the tidy Loeb volumes were the last bastion of Anglo-American restraint, and their conversion represents how the definition of what is mainstream has changed.
"It was a great relief because the previous translations have been so delicate about those things that they are really confusing,' said Emily Katz Anhalt, who teaches classics at Trinity College and gave last year's "Greek Elegiac Poetry" and "Greek Iambic Poetry" a favorable critique in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. "Most people don't read this material in the original Greek, so they are getting a skewed version."
She points out that in the 1931 edition of "Elegiac Poetry," a man is told "All the young are concerned for your beauty." In the new version, the line becomes "All the young men are obsessed with your looks."
"It's important for society to recognize that some of the norms that we take as given in terms of civilized behavior are a bit arbitrary," Ms. Anhalt added.
"Plato was a great espouser of homoerotic love," Mr. Henderson said. "When he talks about men being in `love' or `lovers,' you shouldn't translate it as `close friends — wink, wink.' "
Not all the ancients were so explicit, but even their texts became silly in the hands of Victorian-era translators.
"They would take a perfectly harmless text like Homer and they would turn it into nearly incomprehensible English, because that to them represented high-style epic," said Richard P. Martin, a professor of classics at Stanford University. Trained on Milton and Spenser, the translators used an abundance of "ye's" and verbs ending in "-eth" that made the flowery texts read like Gilbert and Sullivan librettos.
Those in the know used to trade snickering jokes about the particularly obvious gloss-overs, Mr. Martin said. "It's one of those little games that classicists play," he said.
The new translations have helped change the Loeb's reputation for unscholarly translations, unsuitable for classroom use (although plenty of undergraduates used them as clandestine study aids). It has reissued about four books a year for the last decade, and most large bookstores carry some of them.
Mr. Henderson has heard no complaints from offended readers, although he does receive e-mail asking, "Is this stuff really in there?"
Looks like I need to pick up some Aristophanes...
ninja http://www.hup.harvard.edu/loeb/translation.html 
Reply
