in normal English can
reproduce the style of Aristotle. I have sometimes played with the idea
that a ruthlessly literal translation, helped out by bold punctuation,
might be the best. For instance, premising that the words _poesis_,
_poetes_ mean originally 'making' and 'maker', one might translate the
first paragraph of the _Poetics_ thus:--

MAKING: kinds of making: function of each, and how the Myths ought to be
put together if the Making is to go right.

Number of parts: nature of parts: rest of same inquiry.

Begin in order of nature from first principles.

Epos-making, tragedy-making (also comedy), dithyramb-making (and most
fluting and harping), taken as a whole, are really not Makings but
Imitations. They differ in three points; they imitate (a) different
objects, (b) by different means, (c) differently (i.e. different
manner).

Some artists imitate (i.e. depict) by shapes and colours. (Obs.
sometimes by art, sometimes by habit.) Some by voice. Similarly the
above arts all imitate by rhythm, language, and tune, and these either
(1) separate or (2) mixed.

Rhythm and tune alone, harping, fluting, and other arts with same
effect--e.g. panpipes.

Rhythm without tune: dancing. (Dancers imitate characters, emotions, and
experiences by means of rhythms expressed in form.)

Language alone (whether prose or verse, and one form of verse or many):
this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover
mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics,
elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the metre and say
'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a common class-name by
their metre, as if it was not their imitation that makes them 'makers').

Such an experiment would doubtless be a little absurd, but it would give
an English reader some help in understanding both Aristotle's style and
his meaning.

For example, their enlightenment in the literal phrase, 'how the
myths ought to be put together.' The higher Greek poetry did not make
up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the
myths. Again, the literal translation of _poetes_, poet, as 'maker',
helps to explain a term that otherwise seems a puzzle in the _Poetics_.
If we wonder why Aristotle, and Plato before him, should lay such stress
on the theory that art is imitation, it is a help to realize that common
language called it 'making', and it was clearly not 'making' in the
ordinary