124.

]
theories and
methodologies

La imagen que un solo hombre puede formar es la que no toca a ninguno. . . .

El tiempo, que despoja los alczares, enriquece los versos.
Jorge Luis Borges, La busca de Averroes (586)
he image that a single man can form touches no one. . . . Time, which de
spoils fortresses, enriches poetry.

Beyond Mimesis:
Aristotles Poetics
in the Medieval
Mediterranean
karla mallette

HOW SHOULD LITERARY HISTORIANS AIMING TO DESCRIBE LITERARY

TRADITIONS THAT PREDATED THE MODERN NATION USE THE METHODOlogical tool kit developed contemporaneously with the European
nationalisms? Can philology be separated from the logic of the nation and from the teleological vanishing pointthe languages and
literatures of (for instance) modern France, Spain, or Italythat has
traditionally provided a rationale for readings of medieval literature
(and jobs for philologists)? Medieval literary historians have known
for some time that we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms
of the national literatures that would emerge centuries ater the texts
we study were written. And we have absorbed the lesson that the
nineteenth-century philologists on whose shoulders we stand worked
(frequently, if not systematically) under the inluence of the nationalizing movements emerging as they wrote, so that their pronouncements on medieval texts must be read with appropriate caution. We
have not, however, yet produced new geographic and historical formulations to replace the narrative that traces the origin of the modern European nations to a medieval Latin Christian crucible.
In this essay I attempt nothing so ambitious. I presume a
geochronological terrain that stretches from Abbasid Baghdad to
fourteenth-century Florence, but this is a narrative convenience suggested by the material I am treating, not a template. I aim to sketch
a series of textual transactions, to point out what happened when a
given text was translated between the three transregional languages
of literature and science in the medieval MediterraneanGreek, Arabic, and Latinand then brought within the orbit of composition in
the vernacular. I do, however, begin with a hypothesis that implies at

[ 2009 by the moder n language association of america ]

KARLA MALLETTE, associate professor in

the departments of Romance Languages
and Literatures and of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, is author of The Kingdom of Sicily,
11001250: A Literary History (U of Pennsylvania P, 2005) and European Modernity
and the Arab Mediterranean (U of Pennsylvania P, forthcoming). Her new research
focuses on lingua francas in the medieval
and early modern Mediterranean.

583

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Beyond Mimesis: Aristotles Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean

theories and methodologies

least a contingent geochronological rationale:

to avoid reading the Romance vernacular
poetic movements as prequels to modern national literatures, we need to see them against
the backdrop of the great cultural and historical drama that informed them. We should
understand them in the context of the collision between the three learned languages and
the cultural systems that generated them and
that they in turn supported in the medieval
Mediterranean. And it is a testament to the
mercurial dynamism of philological method
and the erudition of its past practitioners that
historians today turn to philology to devise a
strategy that might explicate the diversity of
regional and chronological responses to this
encounter of grammatica systems.
I can think of no better place to begin a
consideration of the literary complexities of
the medieval Mediterranean than Hermannus Alemannuss translation of Averross
commentary on Aristotles Poetics. Aristotles treatise on the poetic arts barely survived
antiquity. Only two premodern manuscripts
preserving the Greek text are known to scholars, one dating to the tenth century, and one
to the fourteenth. he Greek text, however,
was translated into Syriac before the turn of
the tenth century, and the Syriac version was
translated into Arabic during the late phase
of the Abbasid translation movement (before 930).1 Ibn Sn (9801037), known to the
West as Avicenna, wrote a summary of the
work. And the great Aristotelian commentator Ibn Rushd (112698)Averroswrote
both a short commentary and a middle commentary on the Poetics. It was this middle, or
medium-length, commentary that Hermannus translated into Latin, thus producing a
Latin version of an Arabic version of a Syriac
version of a Greek text.
Hermannuss De arte poetica is a primer
for the philologist working in the medieval
Mediterranean. In its linguistic complexity, in
the sea changes it underwent as it passed from
language to language and culture to culture,

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the work both demands and thwarts philological precision. We are used to thinking of
literature as the most enduring of the arts.
Music is as ephemeral as a breeze; frescoes
corrode; sculptures crumble; winds, earthquakes, and pollution wear away even the durable stones of monuments. But words may be
copied and recopied without loss. True, letters
may be misconstrued, the meanings of words
may shit over time, and whole languages die
or are so transformed that ancient texts are as
occult to latter-day speakers of the language
as a foreign tongue. he task of the philologist
is to restore texts made opaque by age so that
works diligently (if imperfectly) preserved
through the generations can speak again, so
that words can mean again what their authors
intended them to mean. But Aristotles Po
eticspassed in cabotage between the intellectual centers of the Mediterranean and the
Near Eastposes a daunting challenge to the
notion of philology as the guardian of textual
integrity. How should the philologist approach
a text not faithfully preserved but thoroughly
transformed by those who transmitted it, creating it anew for historically and linguistically
distinct communities of readers?
he most striking of the medieval innovations catches the reader without warning on
the opening page of a modern edition of the
text and has excited the most comment among
modern historians. Every poem, Aristotle
says (according to Averros and Hermannus),
and every poetic oration is either praise or
vituperationthus did medieval readers understand the technical terms used by Aristotle,
tragedy and comedy, and throughout his commentary Averros uses the term mad.h (),
or praise, when Aristotle speaks of tragedy,
and hij (), or vituperation, when he
speaks of comedy.2 Yet this is neither the most
penetrating nor the most significant of the
changes wrought by the medieval translations
and commentaries. Averros and Hermannus
followed an established tradition by reading
the Poetics as part of the organon and hence

as a work of logic. And because they understood it as a manual for those who intended to
use words to efect change in the world, they
viewed it in a continuum with ethics; thus the
injunction upon the poetiterated in both the
Arabic and Latin versions of Averross commentaryto use encomium and vituperation
to praise the good and blame the base. Aristotles interrogation of mimsis (), the
backbone of his Poetics, had long fallen by the
wayside. his is scarcely remarkable; as Earl
Miner has pointed out, the notion of a literary
tradition grounded in mimicry or dramatic
imitationin the narrative representation of
an individual human lifeis unique to ancient
Greece.3 By the late Middle Ages, Aristotles
discussion of mimsis had lost its structural
integrity. Averros used a variety of words to
discuss forms of poetic statements, representation, and comparison not even notionally
linked to one another. Finally, Averros was
the irst of the commentators on the Poetics
to cite poetry to illustrate his argument. Even
Aristotle included very few poetic examples in
his treatisea curious omission for the champion of a posteriori argument.
Averross commentary on Aristotles
Poetics embraced the tradition of translation
and interpretationthe Arabic versions of
Aristotles worksthat preceded it; it worked
through Aristotles words to try to reconstruct
the vanished Greek poetry behind them; and
it moved forward from Aristotle to account
for the Arab poets using the universal structure of Aristotelian thought. And Hermannus followed Averros step-by-step, gamely
translating into Latin even citations from the
Koran and from the Arab poetssixty-eight
of them, as short as a single line and as long
as six, from the pre-Islamic poets to the moderns. Hermannuss and Averross translations
of the Poetics are, in a word, radically comparatist treatises, infused with an awareness
of linguistic and historical depth of which
Aristotle himself was entirely innocent. Both
versions are generated by, and themselves pro-

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585

duce, an awareness that the literary tradition

in which they participate is bounded by other
traditions that lie beyond their own and that
are only partially perceptible to them.
Nowhere is their distance from Aristotle more evident than in Averross and Hermannuss handling of Aristotles treatment of
linguistic diference. Aristotles universe was
bounded by Hellenism; he perceived no intellectual life beyond the circle of light cast by
the Greek language. Linguistic diference intrudes on his discussion of Greek eloquence
only once: in his analysis of barbarismos () and ainigma (; ch. 22, p. 36,
esp. 1458a 2131). Poetic language should strive
for both clarity and the pleasing efects derived
from the use of metaphors and other rhetorical
ornaments, he writes. Unadorned style is prosaic, but an exaggerated or crude use of poetic
language will only obfuscate. A poet may frustrate his audience in one of two ways. Aristotle
classiies poetry that fails through overuse or
clumsy use of metaphors and such rhetorical devices as ainigma, enigma or riddle;
poetry that fails through overdependence on
gltta (
)non-Attic Greekhe characterizes as barbarismos.
Aristotle is here pointing out a flaw in
poetic language that depends excessively on
Greek dialectal forms or archaisms, and his
argument is all but impenetrable to one who
does not know the ancient Greek language and
the poetic traditions to which he refers. he extant old Arabic translation, made by the great
Abbasid-era translator and philosopher Ab
Bishr Matt ibn Ynus, rendered Aristotles
ainigma as lughz (), riddle or enigma.
And to translate Aristotles barbarismos, Ab
Bishr Matt used a variety of words: gharb
(), which can mean foreign, or simply
strange or outlandish; an Arabic cognate
(barbar; )of the Greek barbaros (), which denotes clumsy use of the Arabic language by a foreigner; rat.na ajamiyya
() , or gibberish using non-Arabic
words (12224).4 Avicenna, however, took a

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Beyond Mimesis: Aristotles Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean

theories and methodologies

dramatically diferent approach to the passage.

He excised Aristotles and Ab Bishr Matts
discussions of barbarismos from his summary
of the Poetics. In his brief comments on chapter 22, he described linguistic complexity not
as a potential threat to coherence but solely as
a source of pleasure. According to Avicenna,
the use of rare or unusual linguistic forms,
like the use of similes or metaphors, elevates
poetic language, making it reined and digniied (lat.f karm [ ;] 67, Com
mentary 115). he notion that the alienation of
language from linguistic norms might become
a source of obfuscation has vanished.
Averros, of course, knew no Greek. He
could not read backward from Avicennas and
Ab Bishr Matts treatments of the Poetics to
compare their statements to Aristotles words:
Avicennas and Ab Bishr Matts versions
were the Poetics he knew. And so he inherited
a complex textual tradition, one that allowed
him two distinct paths in interpreting Aristotles meaning in chapter 22. Although he
clearly knew and followed parts of Ab Bishr
Matts discussion of chapter 22, Averros
chose to disregard Ab Bishr Matts discussion of barbarismosthe use of nonstandard
language colored by linguistic difference.5
Rather, he (like Avicenna) focuses his comments here on the use of ainigma, a textual
puzzle that (in Avicennas words) leads not
to understanding, but to wonder ( 68,
Commentary 115).6 Averros uses this as an
invitation to survey the linguistic showboating so prized in the Arabic poetic tradition.
hus where Aristotle, in his treatise on poetics, discussed the diference between successful and clumsy metaphoric language and
the damage that nonstandard Greek can do
to poetic eloquence, Averros gathers a dazzling bouquet of citationsthe work of poets
ranging from the pre-Islamic era to the eleventh centuryto illustrate the point that he
is making, which is no longer that diiculty
is created when the clarity of Attic Greek is
muddied by the intrusion of non-Attic dia-

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lects but rather that an exhilarating brilliance

of linguistic play is made possible by the Arabic language ( 11721, Middle
Commentary 12528).
And Hermannus follows Averros as
far as he can. He translates Averross lughz,
riddle, as enigmarestoring, by a fortuitous
accident of translation, the Greek original,
ainigma ( 116, Middle Com
mentary 124; Hermannus 68). When Averros
gives a line from al-Mutanabbi, Hermannus
translates it. Averros cites an example of a
semantic root that may generate two distinct
words meaning the same thing. Hermannus translates this line; but his translation
includes a word not understood by the copyists of the Latin text and has not been reliably
transmitted. Averros cites four poets in rapid
succession, and Hermannus replaces this
with a bit of doggerel that he has apparently
invented and a line from Seneca. Hermannus
skips a discussion of words that have similar
forms but diferent meanings in Arabic and
rejoins Averros to translate selections from
al-Kumait, Imru al-Qays, and al-Mutanabb
(Hermannus 69; Averros,
11821, Middle Commentary 126230). Hermannus weaves his way through Averross
Arabic citations and examples, explaining
and translating what he can, replacing what
he cant, and eliding in silence those multiple
references that seem dictated not by necessitysurely Averros has demonstrated his
point by nowbut rather by Averross irrepressible urge to recite the Arab poets.
The discussion of linguistic difference
suppressed by the transmission of Aristotles
Poetics through Syriac and Arabic into Latin
has been restored through the mediation between languages, the act of translation that
brought the text into Latin. But in Hermannuss Poetria, barbarismos does not threaten
clarity or eloquence. Rather, it provokes a
literary genesis that takes a variety of forms:
translation, transliteration, transposition.
his dynamica staged encounter between

languages that becomes an occasion for the

production of meaning (and the occasional
lapsus)would recur, again through fortuitous mishap, in the medieval work of literary criticism that made most ambitious use of
Hermannuss Poetria. In his commentary on
the Divine Comedy (137580), Benvenuto da
Imola makes reference to the treatise a number of times, even citing one of Hermannuss
translations of Arabic encomium in praise
of Dante in his introduction to the Inferno.
Benvenuto turns to Hermannuss discussion
of enigma to gloss a passage in Purgatorio
33, in which Dantes Beatrice uses the Italian
cognate of the Latin word. He quotes Aristotles deinition of enigma (citing, of course,
Hermannuss words): it is a passage diicult
or impossible to puzzle out. And he tells us
that Averros reports that such devices are
frequently found in the poetry of the Arabs.7
In the passage that Benvenuto glosses,
Beatrice compares the occult prophecies she
speaks to Dante to the veiled words of the
Sphinx. But, by a delicious irony, Dante here
relies on a garbled version of the ancient legend. The medieval transmission of Ovids
Metamorphoses turned the Grecism Laades
the son of Laius, Oedipusinto Naades; in
Dantes version, water nymphs have ridden
their sea monsters across the desert to untangle the Sphinxs riddle. According to Beatrice,
events to come will (like the naiads) provide
the key to interpret an enigma whose meaning now appears irretrievable. he myth, as
reconigured by scribal error, answers Dantes
purposes admirably. Beatrices reference to
the resolution of the Sphinxs riddle is meant
to suggest that time will dissolve the knot of
the occult prophecies she speaks to Dante. he
moment demands the sense of anonymous
multiplicity, human yet impersonal, evoked
by a community of maidens who interpret an
encoded message through collective intelligencenot by Oedipus standing alone before
the ruinous feminine power of the Sphinx.
Dantes text requires us to rewrite literary his-

Karla Mallette

587

tory, and Benvenutos citation of Hermannuss

Poetria gives us the tools to do so.
From a promontory that we may view as
either the end of the Middle Ages or the beginning of the Renaissance, Benvenuto looks out
over a checkerboard landscape in which Greek
and Roman antiquity and Christian and Muslim poets and philosophers are neighbors.8
Such a confusion of tongues, however, does
not thwart meaning but generates it. At moments like thesewhen Hermannus translates
the Arab poets in illustration of a treatise on
Greek poetics, when Benvenuto cites one text
scrambled in transmission to gloss another
linguistic difference functions precisely as
enigma: a difficulty that may be resolved by
puzzling over it, and which becomes an occasion for the genesis of meaning. If Aristotles
barbarismos disappears from chapter 22 of the
Poetics, it is everywhere present in the treatise
as Hermannus transmits it. And barbarismos
does not interrupt the constitution of meaning but is a source of pleasure, making poetic
diction (in Avicennas words) reined and digniied. Averros explains the purpose of his
commentary in the opening paragraph:

theories and methodologies

124.2

<     >
 
.
(53 )
he purpose of this discussion is to comment
upon those universal rules in Aristotles Po
etics that are common to all or most nations,
for much of its contents are either rules particularly characteristic of their poems (i.e., the
Greeks) and their customs therein or are not
found in the speech of the Arabs but are found
in other languages. (Middle Commentary 59)

And Hermannus translates it thus:

Intentio nostra est in hac editione determinare quod in libro Poetrie Aristotilis de canonibus universalibus communibus omnibus
nationibus aut pluribus, cum plurimum eius

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588

Beyond Mimesis: Aristotles Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean

quod est in hoc libro aut sunt canones proprii

poematibus ipsorum et consuetudini ipsorum in ipsis, aut non sunt reperta in sermone
Arabum, aut sunt reperta in aliis idiomatibus.
(Hermannus, De arte poetica 41)
Our intention in this work is to comment upon
those of the general rules in Aristotles Poetics
that are common to all nations or to many,
since much of what is in that book either consists of rules common to (the Greeks) own
poems and poetic customs, or is not found in
the writings of the Arabs, or is found in other
languages (and not in Arabic).
(my trans.)

The words translated as nations here are

umam and nationes; and they are found
throughout the treatises, in both the Arabic
and the Latin versions. Averros and Hermannus use them to signal their awareness
that the practices they describe are historically and linguistically contingent and to remind the reader of the distance that separates
us (the moderns, the Arabs and the Latins)
from them (the ancient Greeks).
Of course, Hermannuss translation has
been looked on by nineteenth- and twentiethcentury historians as little more than a curiosity (and Averross commentary before him
as an unfortunate misire); where reference is
made to a medieval Latin translation of the
Poetics, scholars generally prefer William of
Moerbekes. Williama formidable translator who rendered Latin versions of the Poli
tics, Metaphysics, De caelo, and many others
directly from the Greektranslated the Poet
ics in 1278, just two decades later than Hermannus.9 Because he worked from the Greek,
William produced a version of the text much
less eccentric than the Averros-Hermannus
extravaganza. Where Aristotle wrote mimsis,
William translated imitatio. Where Aristotle wrote gltta (a word meaning tongue,
language, orin this contextforeign language), William translated lingua (tongue
or language). he word natio does not occur
in Williams Latin Poetics. It is, compared with

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Hermannuss strenuous romp through Arabic

and Greek letters, a brisk and eicient exercise.
In a much-cited passage Ernest Renan mocked
Averross translation of the Poetics: his blunders, in the matter of Greek literature, are risible. For example, under the impression that
tragedy was nothing more than the art of praise
and comedy the art of censure, he thought that
he found tragedies and comedies in the panegyrics and satires of the Arabs, and even in
the Quran! (5556). And he sneeringly called
Hermannuss translation tout fait inintelligible (79). Jorge Luis Borgess short story La
busca de Averroes exempliies an attitude toward Averross Poetics not uncommon among
modern scholars, in its melancholy portrait of
a medieval Arab whodespite his compendious knowledge of Aristotles thoughtcannot
imagine the theatrical arts and hence cannot
puzzle his way through Aristotles discussion
of Greek tragedy. Borgess Averros is himself
a tragic igure, hounded through no fault of his
own by an irremediable cognitive law.
Williams translation has won a modest following among modern scholars; it
appeared in a modern edition before Hermannuss. But it did not speak to the Middle
Ages. Only two manuscript copies of it are
known to scholars.10 he Arabic original that
Hermannus translated barely survived the
Middle Ages; Averross commentary on the
Poetics is extant in only two manuscript versions.11 Despite its excesses and its difficulties, Hermannuss translation found a wider
readership than any other medieval version
of Aristotles treatise. homas Aquinas, Roger
Bacon, and Coluccio Salutati cited it; it exists
in twenty-four manuscript copies and was excerpted in numerous lorilegia that themselves
circulated throughout the centers of European
learning.12 It seems, to judge from the excerpts
that appear in the florilegia, that Hermannuss citations of the Arab poets were part of
the appeal for medieval readers. One poem in
particulara fragment that Hermannus massaged in the translation, tricking it out with

end rhyme and wordplay and making it into a

haunting piece of occasional poetryappears
regularly in the lorilegia.13 And in one lorilegium produced for use by lecturers at the University of Paris, a number of poetic citations
and statements on the nature of Arabic poetics are excerpted. Or again it may have been
the ethical interpretation of the art of poetry that appealed to medieval readers of the
Hermannus-Averros version, this versions
insistence that the poet must praise the worthy and blame the base and must do so in language that conveys beauty and mystery as well
as clarity. Williams translation, in contrast,
bristles with transliterations of unfamiliar
Greek wordstragidia and komodia, dithy
rambopoetica, fystulative, and cytharistice
(and I ind all these on the opening page alone
[3]). Reading it is a bit like scrubbing oneself
with a lexical pumice stone. he reader may
feel invigorated at the end, but not appreciably
enlightened regarding the poetic arts.
A notion of philological practice emerged
during the nineteenth century that viewed the
philologist as cousin to the botanist or the zoologistin other words, as a natural philosopher. he philologist saw genetic taxonomies
everywhere: the manuscript exemplars of a
text, like languages, were analyzed in terms
of their relation to one another and their descent from a common ancestor. And for Romance languages (as the name suggests), all
roads led to Rome and thence to Greece. he
stemmatic criticism used to analyze linguistic
and textual history provided empirical demonstration of the Roman parentage of the Romance tongues. In 1814 the philologist Angelo
Mai discovered a method for blasting away
the surface of medieval palimpsests to reveal
the Roman text obscured beneath, and Giacomo Leopardi wrote in an ode celebrating
his achievement that Mai had awakened our
fathers from their tombs (15). he popularity
of Williams translation of the Poeticsonce
it had been discovered by modern philologistsand the parallel exasperation with the

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589

medieval eccentricities of Hermannuss owe

much to the understanding of philology as a
science able to articulate the links that bind
modernity to classical antiquity.
Times change, though, and so does the
past that the present sees as its origin. hough
philologists may still view the Mediterranean
as cradle of civilizations (perhaps mainly for
sentimental reasons), we no longer exclude
the Arabo-Islamic past from our narratives of
origin. Such an omission would (ironically) deracinate Aristotles Poetics by ignoring the path
it traveled through a millennium of its eventful
history. Hermannuss Poetria is a palimpsest
in which antiquity and the Arabic and Latin
Middle Ages are layered, no stratum quite successful in eradicating what preceded it. In his
translation of his exemplar (like Averross
before it), translation goes beyond mimesis to
generate a work grounded in another yet able
to communicate with its own linguistic and
historical audience. Thus Hermannuss Po
etria both models and demands a peculiarly
energetic reading practice: a thick philology
attentive to the constitution of meaning at
various points in the texts history, its multiple geneses and transmissions through and
between languages. Contemplating the veneer
of translation and interpretationvernacular,
Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Greekthat Aristotles Poetics acquired through the centuries, the
philologist may conclude that medieval poetic
practice was not so much bounded by linguistic
diference as generated by it, that medieval poetics originated not in mimesis but in translation. his curious linguistic cruciblein which
languages collided, commenting on, calquing,
and transliterating one anothershaped the
vernacular poetics that emerged from the late
medieval Mediterranean in ways that are still
poorly understood. And the task that faces
philologists today is to parse this scandalous
opulence, like an army of naiads deciphering
the enigmatic words of the Sphinx.

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NOTES
1. Of the Syriac version, translated by Ishq
. ibn Hu
. nain,
c. 900, only the deinition of tragedy from chapter 6 survives (1450a 38; it has been published in Latin translation
in Tkatsch 1: 15556). Ab Bishr Matt ibn Ynus and his
student, Yahy
. ibn Adboth of them active in the Abbasid
translation movement that saw the translation of all of Aristotles major works into Arabictranslated the Syriac version into Arabic, c. 930. Only Ab Bishr Matts translation
survives. On the transmission history see Lucass introduction to Aristotles Poetics xxiixxv; Peters 2830; Dahiyats
introduction to Avicennas Commentary 412.
2. Hermannus 41; Averros, 54, Mid
dle Commentary 59. It should be noted that, although
Averros did not (as Ab Bishr Matt ibn Ynus had
before him) give an Arabic transliteration of the Greek
word tragidia (), Hermannus did contrive to
translate Averross madh. occasionally with the Latin
tragedia (see, e.g., 47, 48, 49).
3. More precisely, Miner deines drama as the foundation genre of western poetics and no other (216; emphasis added). It is one of the presuppositions of this
essay that the late Latin and medieval Romance literary
traditions, like the Arabic, difer from the Greek poetic
tradition in this fundamental way. Greek literature originated in drama, but medieval Latin and Romance literatures shared with Arabic an origin in lyric poetry. And,
as Miner points out, it cannot be emphasized strongly
enough that concern with languageand, as Hermannus and Averros stress, with the ethical dimension of
literary inventionare as symptomatic of lyric presumptions about literature as concern with representation is of dramatic presumptions (26).
4. It is a striking fact that the three great learned
languages of the Middle Ages, cognate in so little, agree
on the way they designate linguistic incompetence: the
word is barbaros in the Greek, barbarus in the Latin, and
barbar in the Arabic.
5. Averross baling discussion of poetic statements
that may be interpreted so long as they use unfamiliar
words ( 116, Middle Commentary 124)
is evidently drawn from Ab Bishr Matts translation
(123). Hermannus astutely skips this passage.
6. Avicenna uses the word altajb (wonder [ 68,
Commentary 115]); so too Averros says that the poet may
use diicult language to create al-tajb wal-ildhdh
(wonder and delight [ 116, Middle Com
mentary 124]). Ab Bishr Matt, in contrast, does not suggest that the borrowed words and metaphoric language he
discusses may create a feeling of wonder in the reader.
7. Aenigma quidem est oratio aut impossibilis, aut
diici lis ad unum aliquem certum intellectum, ut dicit
Aristoteles in ine suae poetriae. . . . Et dicit Averrois ibi
quod istud frequenter invenitur apud poetas arabum
(Benvenuto, comment on Purgatorio 33.4651). Benve-

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nuto refers to Hermannus 68; Averros,

116, Middle Commentary 124.
8. Hardison sees Benvenuto as primarily a medieval
igure (34); La Favia sees Benvenutos commentary as part
of a new wave, a reading of the Comedy in chiave umanistica (84). Such diference of opinion, of course, casts
into sharp relief the imprecision of the optic we use to distinguish between the medieval and the early modern.
9. On Williams activities as a translator, see MinioPaluellos article on him in the Dictionary of Scientiic
Biography (43440). For discussion of the manuscript
transmission of Williams translation of the Poetics see
the sources cited in note 1 above and Minio-Paluellos introduction to the modern edition of the text (xivxvii).
10. Williams translation wasnt entirely unknown
during the Middle Ages. Albertino Mussato, a scholar
who taught at the University of Padua during the early
fourteenth century, cited it (along with Hermannuss; see
Kelly 18793).
11. On the manuscript transmission of Averross Mid
dle Commentary, see Butterworth xiv. Avicennas summary,
it should be noted, does survive in a handful of Arabic manuscripts; see Abd al-Rahm
. n Badw 1920; Dahiyat 9.
12. On citation of Hermannuss De arte poetica during the Middle Ages, see Boggess, Bodenham 17172.
13. he lorilegia are attracted in particular to the lines
that exhibit the densest word play: Temporales existentes
tempora liter cum tempore transierunt . . . res nempe nulle
stabiles, que cum luxu huius temporis lu xibiles fuerunt
(Temporal things, being temporal, change with time . . .
for nothing is lasting which has changed with the low of
this temporal world [Hermannus 61; my trans.]). hese
lines are cited in ive of the lorilegia collated by Boggess.
In the University of Paris lorilegium, the poem appears
in its entirety. See Boggess 285, 286, 289, 292, 293.

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