Page:Aristotle s Poetics Bywater.djvu/11



Translation, which faces the text in the present volume, is added in compliance with what seems to be now almost the rule with Greek texts of this description. The custom is perhaps one more honoured in the breach than the observance; but there is something to be said for it in the instance of the Poetics, because they are read by many whose study of Aristotle begins and ends with this one work of his. And there are certainly difficulties of a special kind throughout the book, which require a version or even a paraphrase to explain them. Aristotle's mode of statement here is often elliptical, allusive, and over-charged with meaning; and he not unfrequently omits to indicate the connexion of ideas in his sentences and paragraphs, so that the logical relation between them is left for us to perceive as best we can. Under these circumstances the freedom of a paraphrase may be at times the only means of making his statement intelligible to the modern reader. If Bernays thought it necessary to adopt this method of interpretation in a rendering of the Politics, there is still more reason for its adoption in one of a book like the Poetics. I have accordingly not scrupled to recast many of Aristotle's sentences, and also to insert here and there words or short clauses, in order to make the sense and sequence of ideas clearer as I suppose he would have done himself, if