Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Rethinking Medieval Translation
- 1 On Not Knowing Greek: Leonzio Pilatus's Rendition of the Iliad and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities
- 2 Translation and Transformation in the Ovide moralisé
- 3 Translating Lucretia: Word, Image and ‘Ethical Non-Indifference’ in Simon de Hesdin's Translation of Valerius Maximus's Facta et dicta memorabilia
- 4 Translating Catharsis: Aristotle and Averroës, the Scholastics and the Basochiens
- 5 The Ethics of Translatio in Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile
- 6 Invisible Translation, Language Difference and the Scandal of Becket's Mother
- 7 Medieval Fixers: Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography
- 8 The Task of the Dérimeur: Benjamin and Translation into Prose in Fifteenth-Century French Literature
- 9 The Translator as Interpretant: Passing in/on the Work of Ramon Llull
- 10 Rough Translation: Charles d'Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve
- 11 Bueve d'Hantone/Bovo d'Antona: Exile, Translation and the History of the Chanson de geste
- Untranslatable: A Response
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Translating Catharsis: Aristotle and Averroës, the Scholastics and the Basochiens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Rethinking Medieval Translation
- 1 On Not Knowing Greek: Leonzio Pilatus's Rendition of the Iliad and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities
- 2 Translation and Transformation in the Ovide moralisé
- 3 Translating Lucretia: Word, Image and ‘Ethical Non-Indifference’ in Simon de Hesdin's Translation of Valerius Maximus's Facta et dicta memorabilia
- 4 Translating Catharsis: Aristotle and Averroës, the Scholastics and the Basochiens
- 5 The Ethics of Translatio in Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile
- 6 Invisible Translation, Language Difference and the Scandal of Becket's Mother
- 7 Medieval Fixers: Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography
- 8 The Task of the Dérimeur: Benjamin and Translation into Prose in Fifteenth-Century French Literature
- 9 The Translator as Interpretant: Passing in/on the Work of Ramon Llull
- 10 Rough Translation: Charles d'Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve
- 11 Bueve d'Hantone/Bovo d'Antona: Exile, Translation and the History of the Chanson de geste
- Untranslatable: A Response
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This essay investigates translation, aesthetics and performance in the long Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the transmission of Aristotle and the politics of festive drama: plays staged in public spaces for heterogeneous audiences during religious holidays. My main interest is κάθαρσις (katharsis), an abstruse term from the Poetics and Politics that gets translated and deployed in diverse, often incompatible ways by premodern and modern scholars and that has been used, both implicitly and explicitly, to account for the dynamics of performance and ritual in medieval festive settings. Though the Politics was widely available in Latin translation from 1260 on, its references to catharsis pertain mostly to musical aesthetics, and medieval intellectuals do not seem to have drawn from it a theory of theatrical reception. As for the Poetics, it was known almost exclusively through Averroës's Middle Commentary (1175), which Hermannus Alemannus translated into Latin in 1256. Having no understanding of Greek tragedy as theatre, Averroës, in keeping with previous Arabic readings of Aristotle, reorients the Poetics away from aesthetics towards logic. That tradition renders mimesis as the use of imaginative representations to move audiences unable to grasp more conclusive forms of reasoning to embrace the good.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Medieval TranslationEthics, Politics, Theory, pp. 84 - 106Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012