The Poetics of Aristotle between Europe and Islam. A Multilingual Edition with Studies of the Cultural Contexts of the Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Translations
With the support of the Einstein Visiting Fellowship, the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies will bring to Berlin a leading international scholar in Graeco-Arabica (i.e., the scientific translations from Greek into Arabic), Dimitri Gutas of Yale University, to edit critically and translate into English Aristotle's Poetics and its commentaries in all languages in which they appeared, together with a study of its cross-cultural reception. In Berlin, a key work of world literature and science and one that throws a bridge between Europe and Islam will for the first time be philologically documented and historically contextualized throughout its entire history. The salient developments in its long transmission from antiquity to the Renaissance took place in the Islamic world, which produced its earliest commentaries. Therefore the core of the project is the cultivation of the Poetics in Arabic-Islamic culture, and BGSMCS is its logical venue. This is intended to become a model for the multilingual edition and study of similar foundational texts.
Gutas co-edited the Greek original in a first critical edition. In Berlin he will produce the further editions (Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Hebrew versions) together with a group of scholars from the BGSMCS and other institutes of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Max Planck Institut for the History of Science. The group will also study the cultural and intellectual history of the Poetics and how the Islamic commentaries shaped its European reception.