Furthermore, Hermann decided to translate only Averroes’s commentary, because, on account of the different metrical systems and the obscurity of the lexicon, he was not able to make complete sense of Aristotle’s work from the Arabic version, as he remarks in his “Proem.”7
Today we possess an English translation of Averroes’s Arabic text (Butterworth 1986) and, when we compare the two, we must admit that Hermann did not go wrong on the fundamental points. But he certainly adds to the confusion when he attempts to translate the poetic examples from Arabic; and he occasionally decides to replace them with Latin examples taken from the rhetorical tradition. When, for instance, Averroes proposes as an example of metaphor a fine line of Arabic poetry “the horses of youth and its trappings have been removed” (Butterworth 1986: 61), meaning that, in old age, love and war, activities associated with youth, are no longer practicable, Hermann substitutes the tired old chestnuts, pratum ridet (“the meadow smiles”) and litus aratur (“the strand is plowed”).8 In addition he gets badly tangled up in the rhetorical terminology. He translates what was intended as the term for metonymy as translatio and the term for metaphor as transumptio, but when Averroes cites both as species of the genus “substitution,” he proceeds to use the term concambium (p. 42). When Averroes says that poetic discourse is imitative, Hermann translates with the adjective imaginative, with quite drastic results for the comprehensibility of the text (ibid.).
Things go from bad to worse when Averroes, for “peripeteia” and “anagnorisis,” uses terms equivalent to “reversal” and “discovery”; the best Hermann can come up with is circulatio and directio, choices that are of little help in making the concepts clear (p. 53).
But the blame is not all Hermann’s. Butterworth is convinced that the Middle Commentary has been unjustly condemned and is more useful than previously thought, and he may be right as far as the comprehension of Averroes goes, but he is overindulgent with Averroes when it comes to a proper understanding of Aristotle.
Many readers will recall Borges’s 1947 short story entitled “Averroës’ Search” (in Borges 1998) in which the Argentinian writer imagines Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn-Aḥmad ibn-Muḥammad ibn-Rushd (aka Averroes) as he endeavors to write a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. What bothers him is that he does not know the meaning of the words “tragedy” and “comedy,” which he had already come across nine years earlier when reading the Rhetoric. The problem is an obvious one, since these artistic forms were unknown in the Arabic tradition. The irony of Borges’s story stems from the fact that, while Averroes is struggling over the meaning of these obscure terms, beneath his windows a group of children is role-playing, impersonating a muezzin, a minaret, and a congregation, in other words, they are performing theater, but neither they nor Averroes are aware of the fact. Later on, somebody tells the philosopher about a strange ceremony he once witnessed in China, and from the description the reader is able to deduce that it was a theatrical performance—but the characters in the story are not so perceptive. At the end of this veritable comedy of errors, Averroes returns to his meditations on Aristotle and concludes: “Aristu [Aristotle] gives the name “tragedy” to panegyrics and the name “comedy” to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur’àn and the mu’allaqat of the mosque” (Borges 1998: 241).
Readers tend to attribute this paradoxical situation to Borges’ imagination, but what he describes was precisely the quandary that beset Averroes.9 In the Middle Commentary, everything Aristotle has to say about tragedy is referred by Averroes to poetry in general, and more particularly to the poetic forms known as laudatio (praise) and vituperatio (blame). This epideictic poetry makes use of representations, but—though Averroes reminds us how men take pleasure in imitating things, not only in words but also through images, song, and dance—he speaks of them as exclusively verbal representations. Such representations are intended to instigate to virtuous actions, and their intent, then, is moralizing. Aristotle’s pragma thus becomes a virtuous and voluntary operation (Hermann: “operatio virtuosa, que habet potentiam universalem in rebus virtuosis, non potentiam particularem in unaquaque rerum virtuosarum” [“a virtuous deed that has a universal power with respect to virtuous matters, not a particular power with respect to one or another virtuous matter”] [p. 47]). Averroes understands that poetry tends toward the universal, and that its end is to arouse pity and fear in order to impress the minds of the audience. But for him these procedures too are calculated to render persuasive certain moral values, and this moralizing notion of poetry prevents Averroes from understanding Aristotle’s notion of the fundamentally cathartic (and not didactic) function of the tragic action.
The situation becomes still more “Borgesian” when Averroes finds himself obliged to comment on Poetica 1450a 7–14, where Aristotle lists the six components of tragedy. For Aristotle, as we know, these are mythos (plot), ethos (character), lexis (diction), dianoia (thought), opsis (spectacle), and melos (song or melody). Averroes interprets the first term to mean “mythic statements” (Hermann translates “sermo fabularis”), the second as “character” (Hermann: “consuetudines”), the third as “meter” (Hermann: “metrum seu pondus”), the fourth as “belief,” that is, as “the ability to represent what exists or does not exist in such and such a way” (Butterworth 1986: 78); for Hermann: “credulitas” or “potentia representandi rem sic esse aut sic non esse” (“the ability to represent the thing as it is or as it is not”). The sixth component is correctly interpreted as “melody” (tonus), but evidently Averroes is thinking of a poetic melody, not of the presence of musicians onstage. Things get more (or less) dramatic when we come to the fifth component, opsis. Averroes cannot envisage a spectacular representation of actions, and in translating opsis as nazar he has in mind something that leads to the “discovery of the correctness of a belief” (Butterworth 1986: 76),10 in other words a type of argumentation that demonstrates the correctness of the beliefs represented (for moral purposes). And all Hermann can do is to go along, so he translates “consideratio, scilicet argumentatio seu probatio rectitudinis credulitatis aut operationis non per sermonum persuasivum (hoc enim non pertinet huic arti neque est conveniens ei) sed per sermonem representativum” (“an examination or argument or proof of the correctness of a belief or the correctness of a deed, not by means of a persuasive statement [for that is not applicable to this art nor appropriate for it] but by means of a representative statement”).
Having failed in this way to grasp the meaning of spectacle, Averroes goes on to remark (Butterworth 1986: 79) that epideictic poetry “does not use the art of dissimulation and delivery the way rhetoric does,” and Hermann translates “non utitur carmen laudativum arte gesticulationis neque vultuum acceptione sicut utitur hiis retorica” (“laudatory verse does not take advantage of the art of gesticulation nor of putting on facial expressions the way rhetoric does”) (p. 49). On the other hand, Averroes had been led astray by 1450b 15 et seq., where Aristotle says that spectacle, however effective it may be, is not essential to the poetic art, since tragedy can also function without performance and without actors. In this way, Aristotle’s concession (tragedy can also be read) is transformed into the elimination of the opsis. Consequently, at least in the form in which it reaches its medieval readers, Aristotle’s text appears to exclude the only truly theatrical aspect of tragedy.