The Poetics | Page 2

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 un-happiness 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