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From: "Terrence Lockyer" <lockyert@mweb.co.za>
To: "Classics List" <classics@u.washington.edu>
Cc: <rdgross@uark.edu>, <dlevine@uark.edu>
Subject: Aristotle in English
Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 11:52:59 +0200
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A brief addendum, offering no specific help on English versions:  Gerald F.
Else (tr.), Aristotle:  Poetics (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press
1967), p. 11 mentions a Latin translation by Giorgio Valla and published in
1498, but otherwise confirms Shepherd's indications that serious and
widespread interest therein, especially in the vernacular, began only some
time into the following century.  In 1278, William of Moerbeke (13th C.) had
produced a Latin version, extant in MSS identified only in 1930, from an
otherwise unknown Greek original, and there was a paraphrase by Averroes
(Abu l-Walid Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Rushd, 12th C.), which seems to have
existed in both Arabic original and Latin, but these evidently did not
circulate widely prior to the broader rediscovery of the Poetics around the
end of the 15th C. (I take the details from F. L. Lucas, Aristotle:  Poetics
[Oxford : Clarendon Press 1968], pp. xxii-v, and Brian P. Copenhaver and
Charles C. Schmitt, A History of Western Philosophy, 3:  Renaissance
Philosophy [Oxford and New York : OUP 1992], pp. 8-9, 66-8, who offer
several references to secondary literature).  There exists (so Else, p. 12,
Lucas, p. xxiii) also a 10th C. Arabic version by one Abu Bisr (two Latin
versions of which were produced in the 20th C.), translated from a Syriac
version, of which there is a fragment extant.  The first printed edition of
the Greek was in an Aldine edition of Greek orators of 1508.  The 1536 Latin
of Alexander Paccius (Alessandro Pazzi) was apparently a considerable
improvement on Valla, and the real catalyst (along with Horace) for the 16th
C. revival.


Terrence Lockyer
Johannesburg, South Africa

.