The Arabic Philosophical Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics: Translation, Transmission, and Interpretations. Al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes
Résumé
According to Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist, at least two Arabic translations of the Poetics were made. One of them, now preserved in Parisinus Arabus 2346, was realized by Abū Bišr Mattā ibn Yūnus based on a Syriac version (itself identified by specialists as the result of the Greco-Syriac translation by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn). This chapter first attempts, drawing from historical and philological remarks on the Arabic text of the Poetics, to trace the history of this translation – explaining the reasons for its existence, characterizing its obscurities, and examining the translation of certain terms, crucial in the Greek text, that could not find equivalents in the Arabic language due to a significant chronological and cultural gap. We then consider how Arabic philosophers of Greek tradition, the falāsifa, have read and interpreted the Poetics by integrating it into the so-called “expanded” corpus of the Aristotelian Organon, forging the concept of “poetic syllogism” and simultaneously redefining the notion of “imagination.” This chapter concludes with mentioning Averroes’ Commentary on the Poetics and its Arabo-Latin translation by Hermannus Alemannus in the 13th century, briefly outlining the legacy of this Latin text in medieval Western thought.
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