On Translating Aristotle’s Poetics

ON TRANSLATING ARISTOTLE'S POETICS GEORGE WHALLEY 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 lIuently 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 pretry 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.' As I have worked repeatedly through the Poetics, trying to unfold the original to students of English who have even less Greek than Shakespeare had, I have gained an increasingly vivid sense of the activity of Aristotle's mind in this broken and intermittent little document; and have wondered whether a translation could conceivably be prepared that would bring a reader to "the revelation ... of the driving energy of Aristotle's thought.'" "An editor in these days," Ingram Bywater wrote sixty years ago, "can hardly hope to do much to advance the interpretation of a book which has been so carefully studied and re-studied by a long succession of editors and translators, many of them among the more Volume XXXIX, Number 2, January 1970 78 GEORGE WHALLEY illustrious names in the history of classical scholarship.'" To think of doing anything about the interpretation of the Poetics would make the heart even of a classical scholar quail.· Of interpretation there is great store, not least in the work of those Chicago scholars whose enemies have called them neo-Aristotelians - Crane, Olson, McKeon, Maclean, Weinberg , to name but a few. These know their Greek as well as their English literature; and there is nO sign that as critical theory has effioresced classical scholars have failed to apprise themselves of what might conceivably be profitable in the criticism of English letters to enrich and refine the commentaries they write for classical scholars. And still, I feel, there is something that needs to be done that has not yet been done for students of English literature; and it would probably take more than a plain translation. My purpose is simply to recover for Aristotle's Poetics what Werner Jaeger said was Plato's aim in writing his dialogues: "to show the philosopher in the dramatic instant of seeking and finding, and to make the doubt and conflict visible."· Aristotle's works, as we know from the three lists that have come down from antiquity, fall into three groups, only One of which survives. His early reputation as a writer rested on a number of dialogues in the Platonic manner, many if not all written before he founded the Lyceum: all are now lost, and what little we know about them is from a few fragments and a few comments by other writers. He also compiled very extensive memoranda and compendious collections of material put together (sometimes with the help of others, he being perhaps the first to make systematic use of research assistants) for purposes of study and as a basis for future scientific works. Beyond fragments only one of these survives - the...