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Beyond Mimesis:
Aristotles Poetics
in the Medieval
Mediterranean
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the work both demands and thwarts philological precision. We are used to thinking of
literature as the most enduring of the arts.
Music is as ephemeral as a breeze; frescoes
corrode; sculptures crumble; winds, earthquakes, and pollution wear away even the durable stones of monuments. But words may be
copied and recopied without loss. True, letters
may be misconstrued, the meanings of words
may shit over time, and whole languages die
or are so transformed that ancient texts are as
occult to latter-day speakers of the language
as a foreign tongue. he task of the philologist
is to restore texts made opaque by age so that
works diligently (if imperfectly) preserved
through the generations can speak again, so
that words can mean again what their authors
intended them to mean. But Aristotles Po
eticspassed in cabotage between the intellectual centers of the Mediterranean and the
Near Eastposes a daunting challenge to the
notion of philology as the guardian of textual
integrity. How should the philologist approach
a text not faithfully preserved but thoroughly
transformed by those who transmitted it, creating it anew for historically and linguistically
distinct communities of readers?
he most striking of the medieval innovations catches the reader without warning on
the opening page of a modern edition of the
text and has excited the most comment among
modern historians. Every poem, Aristotle
says (according to Averros and Hermannus),
and every poetic oration is either praise or
vituperationthus did medieval readers understand the technical terms used by Aristotle,
tragedy and comedy, and throughout his commentary Averros uses the term mad.h (),
or praise, when Aristotle speaks of tragedy,
and hij (), or vituperation, when he
speaks of comedy.2 Yet this is neither the most
penetrating nor the most significant of the
changes wrought by the medieval translations
and commentaries. Averros and Hermannus
followed an established tradition by reading
the Poetics as part of the organon and hence
as a work of logic. And because they understood it as a manual for those who intended to
use words to efect change in the world, they
viewed it in a continuum with ethics; thus the
injunction upon the poetiterated in both the
Arabic and Latin versions of Averross commentaryto use encomium and vituperation
to praise the good and blame the base. Aristotles interrogation of mimsis (), the
backbone of his Poetics, had long fallen by the
wayside. his is scarcely remarkable; as Earl
Miner has pointed out, the notion of a literary
tradition grounded in mimicry or dramatic
imitationin the narrative representation of
an individual human lifeis unique to ancient
Greece.3 By the late Middle Ages, Aristotles
discussion of mimsis had lost its structural
integrity. Averros used a variety of words to
discuss forms of poetic statements, representation, and comparison not even notionally
linked to one another. Finally, Averros was
the irst of the commentators on the Poetics
to cite poetry to illustrate his argument. Even
Aristotle included very few poetic examples in
his treatisea curious omission for the champion of a posteriori argument.
Averross commentary on Aristotles
Poetics embraced the tradition of translation
and interpretationthe Arabic versions of
Aristotles worksthat preceded it; it worked
through Aristotles words to try to reconstruct
the vanished Greek poetry behind them; and
it moved forward from Aristotle to account
for the Arab poets using the universal structure of Aristotelian thought. And Hermannus followed Averros step-by-step, gamely
translating into Latin even citations from the
Koran and from the Arab poetssixty-eight
of them, as short as a single line and as long
as six, from the pre-Islamic poets to the moderns. Hermannuss and Averross translations
of the Poetics are, in a word, radically comparatist treatises, infused with an awareness
of linguistic and historical depth of which
Aristotle himself was entirely innocent. Both
versions are generated by, and themselves pro-
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.
(53 )
he purpose of this discussion is to comment
upon those universal rules in Aristotles Po
etics that are common to all or most nations,
for much of its contents are either rules particularly characteristic of their poems (i.e., the
Greeks) and their customs therein or are not
found in the speech of the Arabs but are found
in other languages. (Middle Commentary 59)
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NOTES
1. Of the Syriac version, translated by Ishq
. ibn Hu
. nain,
c. 900, only the deinition of tragedy from chapter 6 survives (1450a 38; it has been published in Latin translation
in Tkatsch 1: 15556). Ab Bishr Matt ibn Ynus and his
student, Yahy
. ibn Adboth of them active in the Abbasid
translation movement that saw the translation of all of Aristotles major works into Arabictranslated the Syriac version into Arabic, c. 930. Only Ab Bishr Matts translation
survives. On the transmission history see Lucass introduction to Aristotles Poetics xxiixxv; Peters 2830; Dahiyats
introduction to Avicennas Commentary 412.
2. Hermannus 41; Averros, 54, Mid
dle Commentary 59. It should be noted that, although
Averros did not (as Ab Bishr Matt ibn Ynus had
before him) give an Arabic transliteration of the Greek
word tragidia (), Hermannus did contrive to
translate Averross madh. occasionally with the Latin
tragedia (see, e.g., 47, 48, 49).
3. More precisely, Miner deines drama as the foundation genre of western poetics and no other (216; emphasis added). It is one of the presuppositions of this
essay that the late Latin and medieval Romance literary
traditions, like the Arabic, difer from the Greek poetic
tradition in this fundamental way. Greek literature originated in drama, but medieval Latin and Romance literatures shared with Arabic an origin in lyric poetry. And,
as Miner points out, it cannot be emphasized strongly
enough that concern with languageand, as Hermannus and Averros stress, with the ethical dimension of
literary inventionare as symptomatic of lyric presumptions about literature as concern with representation is of dramatic presumptions (26).
4. It is a striking fact that the three great learned
languages of the Middle Ages, cognate in so little, agree
on the way they designate linguistic incompetence: the
word is barbaros in the Greek, barbarus in the Latin, and
barbar in the Arabic.
5. Averross baling discussion of poetic statements
that may be interpreted so long as they use unfamiliar
words ( 116, Middle Commentary 124)
is evidently drawn from Ab Bishr Matts translation
(123). Hermannus astutely skips this passage.
6. Avicenna uses the word altajb (wonder [ 68,
Commentary 115]); so too Averros says that the poet may
use diicult language to create al-tajb wal-ildhdh
(wonder and delight [ 116, Middle Com
mentary 124]). Ab Bishr Matt, in contrast, does not suggest that the borrowed words and metaphoric language he
discusses may create a feeling of wonder in the reader.
7. Aenigma quidem est oratio aut impossibilis, aut
diici lis ad unum aliquem certum intellectum, ut dicit
Aristoteles in ine suae poetriae. . . . Et dicit Averrois ibi
quod istud frequenter invenitur apud poetas arabum
(Benvenuto, comment on Purgatorio 33.4651). Benve-
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WORKS CITED
Abd al-Rahmn
.
Badw. Introduction. Avicenna,
321.
Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. D. W. Lucas. Oxford: Clarendon,
1968. Print.
Averros. Averroes Middle Commentary on Aristotles
Poetics. Ed. and trans. Charles Butterworth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Print.
. . Ed. and trans. Charles Butterworth
and Ahmad
.
Abd al-Majd Hard. Cairo: al-Hayah
al-Mis.ryah al-mmah lil-Kitb, 1986. Print.
Avicenna. . Ed. Abd al-Rahmn
.
Badw.
Vol. 9. Cairo: al-Dr al- Mis. ryah lil-Talf wa- alTarjamah, 1966. Print.
. Avicennas Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle.
Ed. and trans. Ismail M. Dahiyat. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
Print.
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