Who was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and what was new about the way he translated?

Question

I sell books in Baghdad, on the street where booksellers have worked for a very long time. Visitors often ask me about the "House of Wisdom" and the translators of the Abbasid age, and I realise I repeat the same few sentences I learned at school.
The name I hear most is Hunayn ibn Ishaq. I know he was a Christian physician who translated Greek books, especially medicine, into Arabic. But I'd like to know properly:
Who was he, and who paid for the work?Was his method really different from other translators', and how?And was there actually a great academy called the House of Wisdom where all this happened, as the posters say?
I would like to give my customers something better than school sentences.

Layla Haddad · Accepted Answer

Who. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873) was a Christian of the Church of the East from al-Hira, a physician who worked in Syriac, Arabic and Greek. He led what was effectively a workshop with his son Ishaq and his nephew Hubaysh, and translated a huge part of Galen's medical corpus, along with philosophy and science, into Syriac and Arabic. His patrons included caliphs, court physicians and wealthy families such as the Banu Musa brothers, mathematicians themselves.
Method. Two things stand out. First, he collected several manuscripts of a text, compared them and established the best reading before translating, which is to say he made something like a critical edition first. Second, a later report contrasts two approaches: word-for-word translation, which produced stiff and sometimes unintelligible Arabic, and Hunayn's practice of grasping the sense of a whole sentence and rendering it in natural Arabic.
The House of Wisdom. Historians are more cautious than the posters: many now think the Bayt al-Hikma was a palace library and archive rather than a great translation academy. The movement was far larger than any building: it ran for about two centuries, from early Abbasid times, and was paid for by many patrons.
A good line for your customers: the translation movement was not a room but a market, and Hunayn was its finest craftsman.

Aiko Tanabe · Answer

A parallel your visitors might enjoy, from Kyoto. At roughly the same time, the monk Kūkai (774–835) travelled to Tang China, brought back esoteric Buddhist texts and teachings, and founded the Shingon school in Japan. Different direction, different languages, same age: whole intellectual worlds were being moved across languages at the same time at both ends of Asia, by people who knew that translation is never just copying.

Rafael Moreno Gálvez · Answer

And the story has a second act here in Spain. Three centuries later, in Toledo, translators turned many of those Arabic books, and the commentaries written on them, into Latin. So Hunayn's careful work helped shape what European universities read. When I guide visitors in Córdoba I tell them the chain runs Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Latin, and that each link was a person with a method.

Zainab Kadhim · Answer

Thank you, Layla: "not a room but a market" will be on a card by my till. Aiko, Rafael, I like that the story keeps going sideways and forwards. I'll tell people the House of Wisdom was a library, and that the real house was the whole city.

Who was Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and what was new about the way he translated?

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