Celebration of Aristotle

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The notion of genre has long engaged scholars and thinkers.

...a feat which Mr Serracino managed to accomplish with great attention to detail

Many attempts have been made throughout history and across cultures to describe the functions of various kinds of genres along with their impact on the reader and literary effectiveness.

Aristotle’s Poetics – the first set of writings of its kind – was pioneering text which described and classified dramatic theory based on a philosophical analysis into what is the first true expression of literary criticism.

It was high time that such a seminal work was translated into Maltese – an endeavour completed by Karm Serracino, a lecturer of Classics in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta and the executive president of the recently founded and thriving Malta Classics Association.

Dwar l-Arti tal-Poeżija is a publication by BDL Publishing in association with the Malta Classics Association.

The book launch, held in the balmy courtyard at Ir-Razzett tal-Markiż on Friday, was a resounding success.

It featured three short excerpts from two different plays: Sophocles’s Electra and Racine’s Phèdre, to exemplify Aristotle’s theories.

Portrayed by Marco Carta, Kris Spiteri and Stephanie Bugeja, the characters in these scenes followed several of the major terms established by Aristotle in his Poetics, of which sadly only the work on Tragedy survives.

The notions of Peripeteia (reversal) and Anagnorisis (recognition) were best explored by the two scenes from Electra, where the eponymous young woman, played by Ms Bugeja, first laments her father, Agamemnon’s death.

She later aids her long-lost brother, Orestes (whose identity is unknown to others) to deliver the final blow to their mother, Clytemnestra’s new husband, the tyrannical Aegisthus, by offering him their mother’s body wrapped in a sheet, supposedly as the corpse of Orestes.

When Aegisthus lifts the veil to discover who it really is, Orestes finally reveals himself.

They escort him off set to be killed at the hearth, the same location Agamemnon was slain.

The play ends here, at a high climax point – before the death of Aegisthus is announced. Aegisthus’s recognition or anagnorisis of Orestes as the assassin of his own mother makes his vengefulness and bitterness dissolve into despair, thus leading to the reversal of roles or peripeteia, with relation to who wields the power between the two.

Ms Bugeja gave a strong performance as Electra as did Mr Carta as Orestes, although I did find Mr Spiteri’s Aegisthus rather lacking in energy. In the extract from Phèdre, on the other hand, Mr Carta gave a solid interpretation, although I did feel he was rather mis-cast as Hippolytus, while Ms Bugeja’s impassioned Phèdre, who has become secretly enamoured of her stepson Hippolytus, plucks up courage to confess her desires on finding out that her husband Theseus, Hippolytus’s father is presumed dead at sea.

With an introductory speech on the complexity of Aristotelian language and the hard work involved in its translation, Prof. Horatio C. Vella, Mr Serracino’s mentor, explained what hard work it is to translate the text faithfully from the original, while maintaining its style and theoretical thought accessible – a feat which Mr Serracino managed to accomplish with great attention to detail and sustained dedication to the love of language and philosophy.

And herein lies the true beauty of such a text, as Prof. Joe Friggieri explained in his highly entertaining talk where he explored the relationship of Aristotelian Poetics.

He spoke about Aristotle’s thought processes, his attitudes towards learning and entertainment, focusing on his idea of Mythos or plot.

Merging references to film, television, drama and the pursuit of knowledge, the talk implied that the human spirit and intellect is enriched by the synthesis of different but related concepts across various disciplines.

It was a night where the true star was the concept of how things can be interrelated in a polymath’s idea of heaven: interdisciplinarity at its best.