Excursus. Principles Of Graeco-Arabic Textual Criticism And Editorial Technique

Abstract

The edition of the Arabic translation of Theophrastus's On First Principles (or the Arabic translation of any classical Greek text) contains the following parts: (a) a critical edition of the Arabic translation; (b) apparatus criticus for the Arabic text; (c) apparatus criticus for the Greek text, containing information for the Greek text that is gained from the Arabic edition; (d) English translation of the Arabic translation; (e) philological commentary on the details of the Graeco-Arabic translation; (f) Greek- Arabic and Arabic-Greek glossaries. The purpose of each part is briefly described in this chapter. Establishing the translator's autograph or clean copy from the extant manuscripts is done as in any edition of an Arabic text with regard to selecting variants and identifying and correcting errors. Determining how the Arabic translation relates to the Greek exemplar from which it was made involves comparing the received Greek text with the Arabic edition.Keywords: Arabic translation; extant manuscript; Graeco-Arabic textual criticism; Greek apparatus criticus; Greek exemplar; Theophrastus's On First Principles