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Aristotle: Poetics

Aristotle: Poetics

Joe Sachs

St. John's College (Annapolis)

2006 • 1-58510-187-7 • paper • 80 pages • 5½ x 8½ • $10.95

Designed for courses in undergraduate philosophy, as well as for the general reader interested in the major works of western civilization.

| About the Author | Table of Contents | Preface | Reviews |

 Description                                             

A complete translation of Aristotle’s classic work, supplemented with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms.

 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 as well as Plato's Theaetetus and Republic.

 Table of Contents                                      

Introduction
Acknowledgments
The Poetics
Glossary of Names
Glossary of some important Greek words

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.

 Reviews                                                   

“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 Greek-less 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