Aristotle: Poetics - Softcover

Aristotle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1585101877 ISBN 13: 9781585101870

Publisher: Focus, 2006

Synopsis

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and the Nicomachean Ethics )also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms.

Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Modern students can now appreciate the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers. Through clear, faithful translations in the Focus Philosophical Library, renowned scholars have made modern and classical philosophical texts accessible and inspirational.

From the Introduction
Some of the most exhilarating things an educated person can think about come tumbling out of Aristotle’s inquiry into the questions of what a tragedy is, what it does, and how it does it. In the Poetics a human achievement of rare power and a thinker of rare depth met, and the world has never stopped talking about their encounter.

“I find the Introduction extremely convincing, lucid, learned, fair to past scholarship, and truly illuminating about the meaning of tragedy in general and about the very specific acceptions of hamartia, katharsis, ekplêxis, and thauma, in the context of an appropriate understanding of the Poetics. Another remarkable feature is the dexterity and ease with which it draws on all the relevant parts of the Aristotelian corpus to shed light on troublesome textual passages in the Poetics. Finally, the style of the Introduction is straightforward, free of unnecessary jargon, direct, and economical, the best interpretation of the Poetics I ever read.”
—Sabetai Unguru, Tel Aviv University

“The translations of Joe Sachs are a great gift to Greekless amateurs like me. He uses simple, unambiguous words joined into sentences that are often complex, as they must be to be accurate, but always clear (after sufficient attention has been paid). A stylist may find some awkwardness in the hyphenated compound words and the noun clauses he prefers to the polysyllabic Latinate words often found in English versions of Aristotle. But these blunt locutions — along with Sachs’ excellent notes — manage to convey both the richness of meaning and the clarity of thought of their Greek antecedents. The resulting translation may strike some as awkward in style, but it will strike the careful reader who cares about what is translated as elegant (in the way mathematicians use that word).”
Jerry L. Thompson, Author, Truth and Photography

About the Author:

Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated Aristotle's "Physics," "Metaphysics" and "On the Soul" and, for the Focus Philosophical Library, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" and "Poetics", and Plato's "Theaetetus" and "Republic."

About this edition

• Publisher: Focus
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1585101877
• ISBN 13: 9781585101870
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80