Aristotle on the art of poetry
Aristotle
智子疑邻寓意
Translator Bywater,Ingram
Creation of machine-readable version:Eric Eldred,Project Gutenberg新车除味
Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup:University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.ca. 120kilobytes
This version available from the University of Virginia Library
Charlottesville,Virginia
抛弃英语Publicly accessible
etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengA.brow.html
2003
About the print version
Aristotle on the art of poetry
Aristotle
Ingram Bywater95pg.
Clarendon Press
Oxford
1920
Source copy consulted:Alderman Library Call No.PN1040.A5C61913
Prepared for the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.
Published:1913
verballyEnglish
Greek
Latin nonfiction pro masculine LCSH
Revisions to the electronic version
August2003corrector Anne Metz,Electronic Text Center,Alderman Library
Added tags and TEI header.
etextcenter@virginia.edu.Commercial u prohibited;all usage governed by our Conditions of U:etext.lib.virginia.edu/conditions.html
ARISTOTLE
ON THE ART OF POETRY
TRANSLATED BY INGRAM BYWATER
WITH A PREFACE BY GILBERT MURRAY
OXFORD
广州雅思考试AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
FIRST PUBLISHED1920REPRINTED1925,1928,1932,1938,1945,1947
1951,1954,1959.1962
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
In the tenth book of the Republic,when Plato has completed his final burning denunciation of Poetry,the fal Siren,the imitator of things which themlves 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 rve the things we ought to rule,he ends with a touch of compunction'We will give her champions,not poets themlves but poet-lovers,an opportunity to make her defence in plain pro and show that she is not only sweet--as we well know--but 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.'Aristotle certainly knew the passage,and it looks as if his treati on poetry was an answer to Plato's challenge.
原理图英文Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.They nearly all need study and c
omment,and at times help from a good teacher,before they yield up their cret.And the Poetics cannot be accounted an exception.For one thing the treati is fragmentary.It originally consisted of two books,one dealing with Tragedy and Epic,the other with Comedy and other subjects.We posss only the first.For another,even the book we have ems to be unrevid 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 Aristotle's extant writing,it suggests the MS.of an experienced lecturer,full of jottings and adscripts,with occasional phras written carefully out,but never revid as a whole for the general reader.Even to accomplished scholars the meaning is often obscure,as may be en by a comparison of the three editions recently published in England,all the work of savants of the first eminence,1or,still more strikingly,by a study of the long ries of misunderstandings and overstatements and corrections which form the history of the Poetics since the Renaissance.
But it is of another cau of misunderstanding that I wish principally to speak in this preface.The great edition from which the prent translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century,and is itlf 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 ud,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 ari a number of new difficulties or misconceptions.
骑行爱好者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 immen 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 cloly 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 p
oesis,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.
三胎配套支持措施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)different manner).
abandonedSome artists 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 the either(1)parate or(2)mixed.
Rhythm and tune alone,harping,fluting,and other arts with panpipes.
Rhythm without tune dancing.(Dancers imitate characters,emotions,and experiences by means of rhythms expresd in form.)
Language alone(whether pro or ver,and one form of ver or many)this art has no name up to the here 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,lightenment in the literal phra,'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 otherwi ems 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 n.The poet who was'maker'of a Fall of Tr
oy 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 immen 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 d 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 tho of comedy.High or low,rious 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,becau 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 'blesdness'.2
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 fare'either well
or ill;and Professor Margoliouth has pointed out that it ems more true to say that tragedy shows how men'fare'than how they'act'.It 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 sier to regard happiness as a way of faring than as a form of action.Yet Aristotle can u the passive of prattein for things'done'or'gone through'(e.g.52a,22,2955a,25).
The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caud 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 Aristotle's 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'bad shot' or'error',but is currently ud for'offence'or'sin'.Aristotle clearly means that the typical hero is a great man with'something wrong'in his life or character;but I think it is a mistake of method to argue whether he means'an intellectual error'or'a moral flaw'.The word is not so preci.
Similarly,when Aristotle says that a deed of strife or disaster is more tragic when it occurs'amid affections'or'among people who love each other',no doubt the phra,as Aristotle's own examples sh
ow,would primarily suggest to a Greek feuds between near relations.Yet some of the meaning is lost if one translates simply'within the family'.
There is another ries of obscurities or confusions in the Poetics which,unless I am mistaken, aris from the fact that Aristotle was writing at a time when the great age of Greek tragedy was long past,and was using language formed in previous generations.The words and phras remained in the tradition,but the forms of art and activity which they denoted had sometimes changed in the interval.If
we date the Poetics about the year330B.C.,as ems probable,that is more than two hundred years after the first tragedy of Thespis was produced in Athens,and more than venty after the death of the last great masters of the tragic stage.When we remember that a training in music and poetry formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn Athenian,we cannot be surprid at finding in Aristotle,and to a less extent in Plato,considerable traces of a tradition of technical language and even of aesthetic theory.
It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great rvices that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.But no writer,certainly no ancient writer,is always vigilant. Someti
mes Aristotle analys his terms,but very often he takes them for granted;and in the latter ca,I think,he is sometimes deceived by them.Thus there em to be cas where he has been affected in his conceptions of fifth-century tragedy by the practice of his own day,when the only living form of drama was the New Comedy.
For example,as we have noticed above,true Tragedy had always taken its material from the sacred myths,or heroic sagas,which to the classical Greek constituted history.But the New Comedy was in the habit of inventing its plots.Conquently Aristotle falls into using the word mythos practically in the n of'plot',and writing otherwi in a way that is unsuited to the tragedy of the fifth century.He says that tragedy adheres to'the historical names'for an aesthetic reason,becau what has happened is obviously possible and therefore convincing.The real reason was that the drama and the myth were simply two different expressions of the same religious kernel(p.44).Again,he says of the Chorus(p.
65)that it should be an integral part of the play,which is true;but he also says that it'should be regarded as one of the actors',which shows to what an extent the Chorus in his day was dead and its technique forgotten.He had lost the n of what the Chorus was in the hands of the great masters,say in the Bacchae or the Eumenides.He mistakes,again,the u of that epiphany of a God
which is frequent at the end of the single plays of Euripides,and which ems to have been equally so at the end of the trilogies of Aeschylus.Having lost the living tradition,he es neither the ritual origin nor the dramatic value of the divine epiphanies.He thinks of the convenient gods and abstractions who sometimes spoke the prologues of the New Comedy,and imagines that the God appears in order to unravel the plot. As a matter of fact,in one play which he often quotes,the Iphigenia Taurica,the plot is actually distorted at the very end in order to give an opportunity for the epiphany.3
One can e the effect of the tradition also in his treatment of the terms Anagnorisis and Peripeteia, which Professor Bywater translates as'Discovery and Peripety'and Professor Butcher as'Recognition and Reversal of Fortune'.Aristotle assumes that the two elements are normally prent in any tragedy, except tho which he calls'simple';we may say,roughly,in any tragedy that really has a plot.This strikes a modern reader as a very arbitrary assumption.Reversals of Fortune of some sort are perhaps usual in any varied plot,but surely not Recognitions?The clue to the puzzle lies,it can scarcely be doubted,in the historical origin of tragedy.Tragedy,according to Greek tradition,is originally the ritual play of Dionysus,performed at his festival,and reprenting,as Herodotus tells us,the'sufferings'or 'passion'of that God.We are never directly told what the'sufferings'were which
were so reprented; but Herodotus remarks that he found in Egypt a ritual that was'in almost all points the same'.4This was the well-known ritual of Osiris,in which the god was torn in pieces,lamented,arched for,discovered or recognized,and the mourning by a sudden Reversal turned into joy.In any tragedy which still retained the stamp of its Dionysiac origin,this Discovery and Peripety might normally be expected to occur,and to occur together.I have tried to show elwhere how many of our extant tragedies do,as a matter of fact,show the marks of this ritual.5
I hope it is not rash to surmi that the much-debated word katharsis,'purification'or'purgation', may have come into Aristotle's mouth from the same source.It has all the appearance of being an old word which is accepted and re-interpreted by Aristotle rather than a word freely chon by him to denote the exact phenomenon he wishes to describe.At any rate the Dionysus ritual itlf was a katharmos or katharsis--a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year,
the old contagion of sin and death.And the words of Aristotle's definition of tragedy in Chapter VI might have been ud in the days of Thespis in a much cruder and less metaphorical n.According to primitive ideas,the mimic reprentation on the stage of'incidents arousing pity and fear'did act as a katharsis of such'passions'or'sufferings'in real life.(For the word pathemata means'sufferings'as well as'passions'.)It is worth remembering that in the year361B.C.,during Aristotl
e's lifetime,Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome,not on artistic but on superstitious grounds,as a katharmos against a pestilence(Livy vii.2).One cannot but suspect that in his account of the purpo of tragedy Aristotle may be using an old traditional formula,and consciously or unconsciously investing it with a new meaning,much as he has done with the word mythos.
Apart from the historical caus of misunderstanding,a good teacher who us this book with a class will hardly fail to point out numerous points on which two equally good Greek scholars may well differ in the mere interpretation of the words.What,for instance,are the'two natural caus'in Chapter IV which have given birth to Poetry?Are they,as our translator takes them,(1)that man is imitative, and(2)that people delight in imitations?Or are they(1)that man is imitative and people delight in imitations,and(2)the instinct for rhythm,as Professor Butcher prefers?Is it a'creature'a thousand miles long,or a'picture'a thousand miles long which rais some trouble in Chapter VII?The word zoon means equally'picture'and'animal'.Did the older poets make their characters speak like 'statesmen',politikoi,or merely like ordinary citizens,politai,while the moderns made theirs like 'professors of rhetoric'?(Chapter VI,p.38;cf.Margoliouth's note and glossary).
It may em as if the large uncertainties which we have indicated detract in a ruinous manner from the value of the Poetics to us as a work of criticism.Certainly if any young writer took this book as a
manual of rules by which to'commence poet',he would find himlf embarrasd.But,if the book is properly read,not as a dogmatic text-book but as a first attempt,made by a man of astounding genius, to build up in the region of creative art a rational order like that which he established in logic,rhetoric, ethics,politics,physics,psychology,and almost every department of knowledge that existed in his day, then the uncertainties become rather a help than a ve us occasion to think and u our imagination.They make us,to the best of our powers,try really to follow and criticize cloly the bold gropings of an extraordinary thinker;and it is in this process,and not in any mere collection of dogmatic results,that we shall find the true value and beauty of the Poetics.
The book is of permanent value as a mere intellectual achievement;as a store of information about Greek literature;and as an original or first-hand statement of what we may call the classical view of artistic criticism.It does not regard poetry as a matter of unanalyd inspiration;it makes no concession to personal whims or fashion or ennui.It tries by rational methods to find out what is good in art and what makes it good,accepting the belief that there is just as truly a good way,and many bad ways,in poetry as in morals or in playing billiards.This is no place to try to sum up its main conclusions.But it is characteristic of the classical view that Aristotle lays his greatest stress,first,on the need for Unity in the work of art,the need that each part should subrve the whole,while irreleva
ncies,however brilliant in themlves,should be cast away;and next,on the demand that great art must have for its subject the great way of living.The judgements have often been misunderstood,but the truth in them is profound and goes near to the heart of things.
Characteristic,too,is the obrvation that different kinds of art grow and develop,but not indefinitely;they develop until they'attain their natural form';also the rule that each form of art should produce'not every sort of pleasure but its proper pleasure';and the sober language in which Aristotle, instead of speaking about the quence of events in a tragedy being'inevitable',as we bombastic moderns do,merely recommends that they should be'either necessary or probable'and'appear to happen becau of one another'.股份支付
Conceptions and attitudes of mind such as the constitute what we may call the classical faith in
