On Translating Aristotle's Poetics

Abstract

The obvious question is — why again? Even a select list of English translations in this century makes quite a litany: Butcher, Bywater, Hamilton Fyfe, Lane Cooper, Allan Gilbert, Preston Epps, Seymour Pitcher, L. J. Potts, George Grube, Gerald Else. I admire three or four of these, and decry none of them. While the study of English literature has — in part at least — taken the place of Greek and Latin as a central humanist discipline and literary criticism has tried to assume the role almost of an autonomous discipline, Aristotle's Poetics has continued to be a document of great historical and critical importance. Because almost nobody in the field of English studies reads Greek any more — if indeed anybody ever could read fluently and without dismay the Greek of the Poetics — translations have accumulated, all highly accomplished. But many of them are of a marmoreal smoothness; almost the more eloquent and stylish the translation, the farther it is from indUcing the direct tactile qualities of the Greek original. For many students of English literature, even some pretty mature ones, the Poetics is either a doctrinaire statement that can be readily mastered from a translation, or a very limited account of poetry, interesting enough as the oldest surviving treatise on poetry but distant, foreign, and not very much to the point. Certainly the continuous reprinting of Butcher's translation in collections of critical texts has not encouraged the currency in English studies of certain important developments in Aristotelian scholarship in the past forty years.