Banned Book Club: Lysistrata

I should have been more specific about *how many* banned books I intended to read.  Scrolling through the list, it is fascinating to look for patterns in how many books a given government bans and their reasons.  Australia seems to have had no qualms with heavy handed censorship which seems bizarre for a people whose persona doesn't exactly ooze political correctness.

I started out with the free version of Lysistrata.  Oof.  The good news it is only 73 some pages and could be skimmed in an hour.  The bad news is that I found the trash talking in rhyming couplets and allusions to gods, geography and less-than-current events nearly incomprehensible.  It was kind of clever the Spartan characters picked up Scottish dialect as I had just come off a steampunk Victorian YA read that had employed similar devices, but you can imagine this did nothing to assist with reading comprehension.  So I watched the 3 min summary on a whiteboard youtube just to be sure I had followed the general gist.

Kinda interesting a Greek military junta in the 1960's banned this one, as it looks like they let a lot of other edgy stuff through like a German sex ed documentary featuring live birth.  The junta looks like it generally undid itself by bringing military force down on student protesters and division within the ranks of leadership.  Fascinating to learn that the Greeks were embroiled in a civil war such a short time ago since in my head it seems like such a wise old country full of stoic philosophers.

Also kind of curious what the literal translation of this would be.  A while ago, I stumbled upon a theory that as our culture has globalized, we've become less violent.  We think violence is increasing because our standard for what we consider to be violent is a moving target and is rising faster than actions, leading us to run exposes and documentaries on violence society might have previously thought were unremarkable... Like the T-shirts that have filled my pinterest feed emblazoned with "Wooden Spoon Survivor."  Some of the lines in here would seem to support that theory if this was a faithful literal translation.  Every couple of pages, I'd find a jarring scenario where a character would be trying to woo his wife with flattery and then 2 lines later be wishing her dead or brutally beaten... but maybe that was a double entendre that was clumsily translated.