Patriotic Obscenity

'Aaron Poochigian and the Comedy of Aristophanes'

Mark Haskell Smith interviews classics scholar and poet Aaron Poochigian at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Poochigan's newly-published translation is Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly.

"Aristophanes’s work contains a lot of what Poochigian calls 'patriotic obscenity.'

'I was struck under the previous president that, well, that old modes of discourse were no longer serving the democracy. I love Michelle Obama, but when she says, “When they go low, you go high,” it’s dangerous. Because when they go low it has more visceral impact and appeals to more people than when you go high. So the problem is resolved by patriotic obscenity.'

See Aristophanes, Plays, Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 5, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 4.