Tolkien's Funny Bone

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Unfortunately

1) The second book of the Poetics, covering comedy, was lost, and
2) The Arabic translation of the first book, on tragedy, was a very bad one (IIRC an indirect one via Aramaic)

True enough, although the source for the Arabic version of Aristotle’s Poetics was actually in Syriac, a late descendant of Aramaic.

That this translation is now partially lost is irrelevant because it was complete when early Arab commentators used it. Indeed, that the Arabs were using a bad translation helps explain some of their misinterpretations.

The surviving works were influential in medieval Europe, particularly Avarroes (who indeed did not have access to the Poetics). Late medieval and Renaissance writers sometimes preferred Avarroes’ interpretation to better translations because they preferred Avarroes’ humanism.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes for a reasonable discussion.

Again, this has nothing to do with Dante’s use of Comedy as the name of his poem.