Marianna Zarantonello
Università degli Studi di Padova
The Nestorian physician Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 260/873) was one of the most accomplished translators from Greek into Syriac and Arabic of the ʿAbbāsid translation movement (8th–10th century). Medieval sources and modern readers acknowledge the high quality of his translations, resulting from a perfect command of Greek language and remarkable understanding of Hellenic culture. The paper presented here shall explore the meaning and implications of an anecdote concerning his education within its historical setting.
According to biographical accounts Ḥunayn spent several years of his adolescence away from Baghdad to perfect his knowledge of Greek. Once this was achieved, he returned home able to “recite some Greek poetry by Homer”. This report implicitly suggests that Ḥunayn – who, as sources relate, knew Byzantine intellectuals personally and traveled to Greek-speaking countries – learned Greek according to the ancient custom, still alive in the 9th century, of studying grammar by transcribing and memorizing Homer’s verses. Curiously enough, however, no further unmistakable traces of this literary training emerge from his production, either translations or
original works.
The anecdote is even more significant when read in relation to two other key facts. First, one of the members of his Baghdad-based circle of translators, Iṣṭifān ibn Basīl, authored an Arabic version of a selection of the Menandri Sententiae, in which they are improperly attributed to Homer. Consequently, the question arises: how is it possible that Ḥunayn – who likely supervised this translation – did not realize that those verses were not Homer’s? This complex transmission phenomenon and its relations with the account on Ḥunayn’s education deserve a close inspection. Second, the Menandri Sententiae is one of the very few specimens of Greek poetry that reached the Arabs. Poetry, and belles lettres more generally, have had very marginal space in the ʿAbbāsid
translation movement, as happened in other ancient and medieval translation activities. Translations of literary and culture-specific texts seem to have been fostered in milieus characterized by interactions between the cultures of source and target language, biliteracy and bilingualism in the education system, as in the Roman translation project started in the 3rd cent. BC. In the light of this, then, it may be no coincidence that Homer and the Menandri Sententiae, that is, the two cornerstones of late antique elementary schooling, were also respectively the Greek poet and the specimen of Greek poetry best known to the Arabs, who eventually associated the latter with the former.