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Why the translators skipped Greek tragedy, and what Ibn Rushd made of Aristotle’s Poetics

Rafael Moreno Gálvez Contributor
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HistoryGreek & RomanIndianIslamicAristotelianismFalsafaAristotleIbn Rushd#cross-cultural-reading#poetics#tragedy#translation-movement
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I guide visitors around Córdoba, and at the statue of Ibn Rushd near the old walls I often tell them about Borges's story "Averroes' Search". Borges imagines the great commentator puzzling over two words in Aristotle's Poetics, "tragedy" and "comedy", for which his world has no examples, while outside his window children are playing at being characters in a story, and he does not notice.

It is a beautiful story, and it rests on a historical fact. The translation movement brought Aristotle's logic, physics, metaphysics and ethics into Arabic almost complete, along with Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy. Greek poetry and drama were largely left untranslated. The Poetics itself did arrive, through Syriac, in a tenth-century Arabic version. Ibn Rushd, writing his commentary in the twelfth century, read tragedy as the art of praise and comedy as the art of blame, and illustrated Aristotle's points with Arabic poems.

I'd like to think about two questions:

  1. Was leaving out the drama a blindness or a sensible choice, given what the programme was for?
  2. Is Ibn Rushd's reading simply a mistake, or something more interesting: a philosopher making a foreign theory work with the literature he actually had?

I don't want to rescue him by pretending he understood Sophocles. But I also don't want to repeat Borges's irony as if it were the whole truth.

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4 replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    I teach Greek tragedy in Bologna, and I think Ibn Rushd's reading is less strange than it sounds. In chapter 4 of the Poetics Aristotle himself says poetry divided early on: the more serious poets imitated noble actions and wrote hymns and encomia, the lighter ones imitated base actions and wrote invectives, and tragedy and comedy grew from these two lines. So "praise" and "blame" are in the text. Without a theatre to look at, Ibn Rushd built on the part of Aristotle that matched the poetry he knew. That's a reasonable reading of a hard book, not a blunder.

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  2. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    On the first question: the patrons wanted medicine, astronomy, mathematics and logic, things with uses at court, in the hospital and in theological debate. Arabic already had a poetic tradition of enormous prestige, and Greek drama was saturated with gods and festivals that had no place in the culture receiving it. So it was a selection with reasons, not an oversight. But a selection still shapes what a tradition can later think, and Borges is right about that.

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  3. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    A comparison from the other direction. Literature did cross into Arabic when it fitted a purpose: the animal fables of Kalila wa Dimna, which go back to the Sanskrit Pañcatantra through a Middle Persian version, were turned into elegant Arabic prose in the eighth century and became a classic. Fables teach statecraft and prudence, so they were welcome. Tragedy taught nothing the receiving culture wanted to learn, at least not in that form.

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  4. Rafael Moreno Gálvez

    Contributor

    Giulia, I didn't know chapter 4, and it changes how I'll tell the story. So Borges's irony is half right: Ibn Rushd lacked the theatre, but he didn't misread Aristotle so much as follow one of Aristotle's own threads. Kavya, the fables are a perfect contrast: what travels depends on what the receivers think it is for.