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The Birds … with Notes.

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First edition of the first metrical translation of Aristophanes’ The Birds into English by Henry Francis Cary (1722–1844) – perhaps best known for his blank verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Cary vows to remain ‘tolerably close to the original, except … when the grossness of the poet is such as our manners would not admit of … [or] when there is some play on words, which it would be impossible to preserve exactly in another language’ (pp. v–vi). The most notable instance of the latter is Cary’s neologism ‘Cuckoocloudland’ (p. 76), the utopian city in the sky created by the birds of the world. ‘Given how much there is in Aristophanes to outrage and violate nineteenth-century manners and sensibilities, it may seem surprising how popular he was. The popularity came at the price of bowdlerizing much of the “grossness”, but there was admiration and even a certain yearning for his unbuttoned earthiness as well as for his aerial levity’ (The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English IV, p. 184).

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