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Title: The Poetics

 

Author: Aristotle

 

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6763]

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[This file was first posted on January 24, 2003]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE POETICS ***

 

This eBook was produced by Eric Eldred.

 

ARISTOTLE

ON THE ART OF POETRY

 

TRANSLATED BY

INGRAM BYWATER

 

WITH A PREFACE BY

GILBERT MURRAY

 

OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

FIRST PUBLISHED 1920

REPRINTED 1925, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1945, 1947

1951, 1954, 1959. 1962 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

In the tenth book of the Republic, when Plato has completed his final

burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of

things which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and

weak in the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us

feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to

rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: ‘We will give her

champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to

make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only

sweet—as we well know—but also helpful to society and the life of

man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I

take it, if this can be proved.’ Aristotle certainly knew the passage,

and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato’s

challenge.

 

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good

teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the Poetics cannot

be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary.

It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and

Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the

first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and

unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader

division systematic, is not that of a book intended for publication.

Like most of Aristotle’s extant writing, it suggests the MS. of an

experienced lecturer, full of jottings and adscripts, with occasional

phrases written carefully out, but never revised as a whole for the

general reader. Even to accomplished scholars the meaning is often

obscure, as may be seen by a comparison of the three editions recently

published in England, all the work of savants of the first eminence,

[1] or, still more strikingly, by a study of the long series of

misunderstandings and overstatements and corrections which form the

history of the Poetics since the Renaissance.

 

[1] Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof.

Margoliouth, 1911.

 

But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally

to speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present

translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the

greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a

classic among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who

knows even a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary,

may lead deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is

used, as it doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the

clue provided by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek

language, there must arise a number of new difficulties or

misconceptions.

 

To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is

possible enough where the two languages concerned operate with a

common stock of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization.

But between ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense

gulfs of human history; the establishment and the partial failure of

a common European religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal

system, the regrouping of modern Europe, the age of mechanical

invention, and the industrial revolution. In an average page of French

or German philosophy nearly all the nouns can be translated directly

into exact equivalents in English; but in Greek that is not so.

Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the first few pages of the

Poetics has an exact English equivalent. Every proposition has to be

reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then re-built. This is a

difficulty which no translation can quite deal with; it must be left

to a teacher who knows Greek. And there is a kindred difficulty which

flows from it. Where words can be translated into equivalent words,

the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation

which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style

of Aristotle. I have sometimes played with the idea that a ruthlessly

literal translation, helped out by bold punctuation, might be the

best. For instance, premising that the words poesis, poetes mean

originally ‘making’ and ‘maker’, one might translate the first

paragraph of the Poetics thus:—

 

MAKING: kinds of making: function of each, and how the Myths ought to

be put together if the Making is to go right.

 

Number of parts: nature of parts: rest of same inquiry.

 

Begin in order of nature from first principles.

 

Epos-making, tragedy-making (also comedy), dithyramb-making (and most

fluting and harping), taken as a whole, are really not Makings but

Imitations. They differ in three points; they imitate (a) different

objects, (b) by different means, (c) differently (i.e. different

manner).

 

Some artists imitate (i.e. depict) by shapes and colours. (Obs.

sometimes by art, sometimes by habit.) Some by voice. Similarly the

above arts all imitate by rhythm, language, and tune, and these either

(1) separate or (2) mixed.

 

Rhythm and tune alone, harping, fluting, and other arts with same

effect—e.g. panpipes.

 

Rhythm without tune: dancing. (Dancers imitate characters, emotions,

and experiences by means of rhythms expressed in form.)

 

Language alone (whether prose or verse, and one form of verse or

many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name

to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in

iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the ‘making’ to the

metre and say ‘elegiac-makers’, ‘hexameter-makers,’ giving them a

common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation

that makes them ‘makers’).

 

Such an experiment would doubtless be a little absurd, but it would

give an English reader some help in understanding both Aristotle’s

style and his meaning.

 

For example, there i.e.lightenment in the literal phrase, ‘how the

myths ought to be put together.’ The higher Greek poetry did not make

up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the

myths. Again, the literal translation of poetes, poet, as ‘maker’,

helps to explain a term that otherwise seems a puzzle in the

Poetics. If we wonder why Aristotle, and Plato before him, should

lay such stress on the theory that art is imitation, it is a help to

realize that common language called it ‘making’, and it was clearly

not ‘making’ in the ordinary sense. The poet who was ‘maker’ of a

Fall of Troy clearly did not make the real Fall of Troy. He made an

imitation Fall of Troy. An artist who ‘painted Pericles’ really ‘made

an imitation Pericles by means of shapes and colours’. Hence we get

started upon a theory of art which, whether finally satisfactory or

not, is of immense importance, and are saved from the error of

complaining that Aristotle did not understand the ‘creative power’ of

art.

 

As a rule, no doubt, the difficulty, even though merely verbal, lies

beyond the reach of so simple a tool as literal translation. To say

that tragedy ‘imitate.g.od men’ while comedy ‘imitates bad men’

strikes a modern reader as almost meaningless. The truth is that

neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ is an exact equivalent of the Greek. It would

be nearer perhaps to say that, relatively speaking, you look up to the

characters of tragedy, and down upon those of comedy. High or low,

serious or trivial, many other pairs of words would have to be called

in, in order to cover the wide range of the common Greek words. And

the point is important, because we have to consider whether in Chapter

VI Aristotle really lays it down that tragedy, so far from being the

story of unhappiness that we think it, is properly an imitation of

eudaimonia—a word often translated ‘happiness’, but meaning

something more like ‘high life’ or ‘blessedness’. [1]

 

[1] See Margoliouth, p. 121. By water, with most editors, emends the

text.

 

Another difficult word which constantly recurs in the Poetics is

prattein or praxis, generally translated ‘to act’ or ‘action’. But

prattein, like our ‘do’, also has an intransitive meaning ‘to fare’

either well or ill; and Professor Margoliouth has pointed out that it

seems more true to say that tragedy shows how men ‘fare’ than how they

‘act’. It shows thei.e.periences or fortunes rather than merely their

deeds. But one must not draw the line too bluntly. I should doubt

whether a classical Greek writer was ordinarily conscious of the

distinction between the two meanings. Certainly it i.e.sier to regard

happiness as a way of faring than as a form of action. Yet Aristotle

can use the passive of prattein for things ‘done’ or ‘gone through’

(e.g. 52a, 22, 29: 55a, 25).

 

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern

attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word. Greek was

very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of

grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon

dictionaries. An instance is provided by Aristotle’s famous saying

that the typical tragic hero is one who falls from high state or fame,

not through vice or depravity, but by some great hamartia.

Hamartia means originally a ‘bad shot’ or ‘error’, but is currently

used for ‘offence’ or ‘sin’. Aristotle clearly means that the typical

hero is a great man with ‘something wrong’ in his life or character;

but I think it is a mistake of method to argue whether he means ‘an

intellectual error’ or ‘a moral flaw’. The word is not so precise.

 

Similarly, when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is

more tragic when