Posts featuring Aristotle

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

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Long Forgotten Stories of Translation: Part Two

Those long-dead translators and scholars deserve to be celebrated for what they were, giants on whose shoulders we sometimes still need to climb...

In the second part of this previous post, Brother Anthony of Taizé continues to celebrate the forgotten thinkers of the early Arab world. Although Renaissance Europe turned its back on Arabic writing, two of Spain’s greatest thinkers, Averroes and Maimonides, had produced invaluable commentaries and philosophies based on the works of Aristotle, whilst Toledo became a literary epicenter for re-translations from Arabic into Latin and Spanish. Read on to find out more.

The golden age of Córdoba did not last long. In 997, the military leader Almanzor captured Santiago and soon became the effective ruler of southern Spain. He ordered the destruction of books related to philosophy and astronomy, which he considered contrary to Islam, leaving only those about medicine and mathematics. After his death in 1002, bands of marauding North African Berbers sacked Córdoba, sparking an exodus of Jews, in particular, to other cities. Later in the century, in 1085, the Christian kingdom of Castile captured the great city of Toledo. The Muslim leaders were forced to turn to the Almoravid dynasty in North Africa for help, likewise composed of fierce Berber warriors. In 1089, the Almoravids took complete control of Islamic Spain. Less than a century later, they were replaced by an even fiercer and more fanatical North African dynasty, the Almohads, who were especially intolerant of Jews and Christians. READ MORE…

Long Forgotten Stories of Translation: Part One

Anti-Islamic attitudes are not a modern phenomenon and the campaign to erase the Islamic contribution to modern thought began long ago.

Today, early Arabic thinkers are largely overlooked in discussions of the origins of Western philosophy. In this essay (the second part of which will be published tomorrow), Brother Anthony of Taizé brings the focus back to this period of prolific scholarship and translation, and remembers the most influential philosophers and Greek-Arabic translators of the Medieval Islamic world.

In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “La busca de Averroes” (1947), we find Averroes (ibn Rushd, 1126-1198), the great Spanish Arabic commentator of Aristotle, at a loss to understand the words “comedy” and “tragedy” he has found in Aristotle’s Poetics, because his own culture has no tradition of theatrical drama. He is given hints by the sight of children playing at being the muezzin in a mosque, as well as by an account of a theatrical performance in China given by a returning traveler, but he can make nothing of them. Borges then intervenes to make this a parable illustrating the impossibility of ever understanding anyone who lives in a radically different time and culture. In reading this story, we are confronted with our own (and Borges’s) inability to write and read the actual words for “tragedy” and “comedy” which Averroes was struggling with. Today’s widespread Western inability to read Arabic, Greek, or even Latin, should be a source of shame, although it doesn’t seem to be. Many of Borges’s readers might already be at a loss to imagine an Arab struggling to understand Aristotle, so unfamiliar the intellectual history of the Muslim world has become. READ MORE…

Classic Philosophy Meets Arabic Language: A Dialogue with Professor Peter Adamson

A tenth-century resident of Baghdad could read Arabic versions of just about everything by Aristotle that we can read today.

The great Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries changed the Near East and beyond politically, culturally, and, in a particularly profound and lasting way, linguistically, resulting in the near hegemony of the Arabic language. This new Islamic world took shape around an original and powerful new religion, but the consolidation of an Islamic civilisation was also a period of immense cultural exchange and mutual influence, not only from fellow Abrahamic traditions such as Judaism and Christianity, but also from the world of classical Mediterranean antiquity. Indeed, while knowledge of classical Greek science and philosophy fell into virtual oblivion in the Christian West, Islamic scholars kept the tradition alive by means of large scale translation projects and sophisticated philosophical works, from the Persian Avicenna to Baghdad’s legendary house of learning and the Andalusian polymath Averroes. In this interview, Professor Peter Adamson of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München talks us through this fascinating and often overlooked period in philosophical history by exploring the works of translation that made it possible.

Jonathan Egid (JE): By the time the grand translation projects of the early Islamic world began, the wonders of classical Greek philosophy had attained the status of ancient wisdom, almost one thousand years old and already much discussed and much translated. How did the works of Greek thinkers come to be translated into Arabic, and what was the interest in these ancient and foreign ideas?

Peter Adamson (PA): This was a process that unfolded over the course of centuries. The translation movement begins already in the eighth century CE and continues well into the tenth century. It was basically an initiative of the elites under the Abbasid caliphate, including even caliphs themselves and the caliphal family, who also had philosophers as court scholars. For instance, al-Kindī, the first philosopher to make explicit use of Hellenic materials in his own writing, was tutor to a caliph’s son and dedicated his most important work to the caliph himself. The translators were well paid experts, so this was a very deliberate and expensive undertaking managed from the top down. It should, however, be said that it was not something that was undertaken in a vacuum. For quite a long time there had already been translations made from Greek into Syriac and other Semitic languages, and these were a model for the Arabic translations (sometimes literally: it was known for works to be translated first into Syriac for the purpose of making an Arabic version on that basis). Also I would say the translation movement had a kind of momentum of its own: whereas at first the texts to be translated were really selected by the elite and for a variety of practical or political motives, eventually they get to the stage where they are translating the entire output of certain thinkers, or at least everything they can get their hands on, in a kind of completist project. So for instance, one of the greatest translators, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, was clearly trying to translate whatever he could by Galen, the most important Greek medical authority, while his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn worked his way through Aristotle.

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