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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]
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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
PREFACEIn 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: âWe 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
sweetâas we well knowâbut 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.â Aristotle certainly knew the passage,
and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Platoâs
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 Aristotleâs 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 âmakingâ and âmakerâ, one might translate the first
paragraph of the Poetics thus:â
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
effectâe.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 âmakingâ to the
metre and say âelegiac-makersâ, âhexameter-makers,â giving them a
common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation
that makes them âmakersâ).
Such an experiment would doubtless be a little absurd, but it would
give an English reader some help in understanding both Aristotleâs
style and his meaning.
For example, there i.e.lightenment in the literal phrase, âhow the
myths ought to be put together.â 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 âmakerâ,
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 âmakingâ, and it was clearly
not âmakingâ in the ordinary sense. The poet who was âmakerâ of a
Fall of Troy clearly did not make the real Fall of Troy. He made an
imitation Fall of Troy. An artist who âpainted Periclesâ really âmade
an imitation Pericles by means of shapes and coloursâ. 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 âcreative powerâ 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 âimitate.g.od menâ while comedy âimitates bad menâ
strikes a modern reader as almost meaningless. The truth is that
neither âgoodâ nor âbadâ 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
eudaimoniaâa word often translated âhappinessâ, but meaning
something more like âhigh lifeâ or âblessednessâ. [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 âto actâ or âactionâ. But
prattein, like our âdoâ, also has an intransitive meaning âto fareâ
either well or ill; and Professor Margoliouth has pointed out that it
seems more true to say that tragedy shows how men âfareâ than how they
âactâ. 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 âdoneâ or âgone throughâ
(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 Aristotleâs 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 âbad shotâ or âerrorâ, but is currently
used for âoffenceâ or âsinâ. Aristotle clearly means that the typical
hero is a great man with âsomething wrongâ in his life or character;
but I think it is a mistake of method to argue whether he means âan
intellectual errorâ or âa moral flawâ. The word is not so precise.
Similarly, when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is
more tragic when
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