Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East The Syriac and Arabic Translation and Commentary Tradition By Uwe Vagelpohl (Leiden: Brill, 2008. 347 pages.)

Abstract

The Late Antique Aristotelian tradition inherited by the world of early
Islam in the Near East considered the Rhetoric an integral part of one’s
training in logic and reasoning. Thus far, however, there has been little academic
interest in it, apart from Deborah Black’s ground-breaking monograph
published some two decades ago and the recent edition in Maroun
Aouad’s translation and study of Ibn Rushd’s commentary on it. Vagelpohl’s
revised Cambridge dissertation is a careful historical and linguistic
study of its translation and naturalization in Syriac (less so) and Arabic
learned culture in the Near East. As such, he considers the text a case study
that raises wider questions about the whole process of the translation movement
that, after a relative absence of interest, is again inspiring a new vogue
of academic literature.
Since translation is a process of cultural exchange, it is important to pay
attention to details and formulations. The choice of the Rhetoric requires
some justification, as Vagelpohl admits, for two reasons: (a) the Aristotelian text was not that significant in antiquity; more practical manuals were more
widely used and taught, and (b) the Arabic tradition distinguished between
two traditions of rhetoric, an indigenous genre of balaghah (and bayan) that
drew upon classics of the Arabic language and was essential for training
preachers and functionaries, and a more philosophical and Hellenizing
khitabah represented by the Aristotelian text and its commentary, such as
the one by Ibn Rushd. Clearly the former tradition dominated, for even a cursory
examination of the manuscript traditions and texts in libraries attests to
this imbalance. However, Vagelpohl argues that the challenges posed by the
text reveal strategies and approaches used by the translators to deal with the
cultural exchange that may assist our understanding of the wider translation
movement ...