Sailing From Byzantium by Colin Wells

Author:Colin Wells [Wells, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780553803815
Google: IVn0TBrvGyYC
Goodreads: 675
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The biggest problem the translators faced was generally not the difficulty of the Greek itself but the scarcity of good, accurate Greek manuscripts. Perhaps this helped give rise to the later myth of Hunayn's supposed journeys to Byzantium in search of texts.

Altogether, Hunayn and his group produced the most significant body of work in the translation movement. In addition to the medical books of Galen and others, they also accounted for the vast majority of important philosophical works, including those of Plato (Sophist, Timaeus, Parmenides, Crito, Laws, Cratylus, Republic, Phaedo, and Euthydemus) and Aristotle (Categories, Hermeneutica, Analytica Priora, Analytica Posteriora, Sophistics, Topics, Rhetoric, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorologica, Book of Animals, On the Soul, On the Plants, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics).

Hunayn's spectacular success as a translator may actually have lain partly behind the major setback in his career. This occurred during the reign of al-Mutawakkil, and it has traditionally been chalked up to the jealousy of Hunayn's Nestorian colleagues. Apparently Hunayn held views that were sympathetic toward the Iconoclast movement, which was just coming to a close after more than a century of dominating the Byzantine Orthodox Church. In this, he would have differed from the official Nestorian line, which supported the veneration of icons. The story goes that a few of Hunayn's fellow Nestorians somehow persuaded him to spit on an icon, which, as they no doubt anticipated, outraged the Nestorian patriarch when he heard about it, which of course they made sure he did. With the caliph's approval, the indignant patriarch had Hunayn flogged and imprisoned for six months, with the added punishment of confiscating both his fortune and—worse—his precious library.

After his release, the loss of his books hindered Hunayn's work to some degree. He refers to it repeatedly in the Risala. In the entry for the year 856 he explains to his patron Ali ibn Yahya, who commissioned the Risala and who had asked him for a list of Galen's translated works, why he had been unable to comply with the request:

I continued to refuse your demand (viz. to write a list of all the translations of Galen's books) and put you off till a later time, because I had lost all the books which I had gradually collected during the course of the whole of my adult life in all the lands in which I had travelled, all of which books I lost at one blow, so that not even the … book in which Galen enumerates his works remained to me.

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