But it is of another cause of misunderstanding that I wish principally
to speak in this preface. The great edition from which the present
translation is taken was the fruit of prolonged study by one of the
greatest Aristotelians of the nineteenth century, and is itself a
classic among works of scholarship. In the hands of a student who
knows even a little Greek, the translation, backed by the commentary,
may lead deep into the mind of Aristotle. But when the translation is
used, as it doubtless will be, by readers who are quite without the
clue provided by a knowledge of the general habits of the Greek
language, there must arise a number of new difficulties or
misconceptions.

To understand a great foreign book by means of a translation is
possible enough where the two languages concerned operate with a
common stock of ideas, and belong to the same period of civilization.
But between ancient Greece and modern England there yawn immense
gulfs of human history; the establishment and the partial failure of
a common European religion, the barbarian invasions, the feudal
system, the regrouping of modern Europe, the age of mechanical
invention, and the industrial revolution. In an average page of French
or German philosophy nearly all the nouns can be translated directly
into exact equivalents in English; but in Greek that is not so.
Scarcely one in ten of the nouns on the first few pages of the
_Poetics_ has an exact English equivalent. Every proposition has to be
reduced to its lowest terms of thought and then re-built. This is a
difficulty which no translation can quite deal with; it must be left
to a teacher who knows Greek. And there is a kindred difficulty which
flows from it. Where words can be translated into equivalent words,