Today was a good day for sitting in Harvard Yard and reading, so that's exactly what I did on my extended lunch break. The book in question is "The Classical Heritage in Islam", by Franz Rosenthal, an excellent whirlwind tour of the Greek authors and their books that had the most influence on the intellectual development of Arab Civilization. So often we think of the Muslim world as part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (i.e., "people of The Book"), but it is just as much a part of the Graeco-Roman tradition as well, if not more so.

Rosenthal also offers an interesting explanation for why the scholars of Baghdad didn't bother to translate the rather copious amount of "high" literature produced by the Romans and the Greeks. As far as Arab philologists were concerned, poetry is untranslatable, since the poetic art is unique to each particular language. To translate a poem therefore is to destroy it. This belief was not only aesthetic: for the same reasons, the Qu'ran is also not be translated, as the medium and the message are inextricably bound up together, a belief that I happen to be quite fond of myself. I'd always wondered why Aristotle and Euclid made the cut, but Sophocles, Pindar, and even Homer didn't, especially when there's ample direct and indirect evidence that the translators in question were quite familiar with the corpus of Greek poetry. As they rightly understood that in order to translate the works of an ancient Greek, they needed to think like them, many Arab translators immersed themselves in as much Greek literature as they could find, prose and poetry alike. It is said that one of the translators for the eminent Baghdadi scholar Hunayin was so humiliated by his employer for the wretched quality of his Greek that he disappeared for three years and returned able to recite the works of Homer from memory!

It's nice thought, that the omission of the poets from the Abbasid translation movement of the 8th-10th Centuries A.D. might have been a token of respect and not a mark of disdain. There's an article that the Gutas book turned me onto called "Homer in Baghdad" that may elaborate on this idea somewhat; unfortunately it's written in German, so I'll have to slog my way through it - dictionary in hand - when time permits. If anything, I now have a really cool short story idea, if nothing else...