Translation as Interpretation:Translating Galen’s Polysemous Term Physis into Arabic

In the ninth century almost the entire corpus of the Greek physician Galen was translated into Arabic, mainly by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and his circle. A key concept of Galen’s thought is nature (physis) and the physician uses it in many ways and with different meanings. His late antique commentators show great awareness of the polysemy of the term physis, and the same applies to his Arabic translators. So the question arises of how Ḥunayn and his circle dealt with this polysemous term – did they choose a similarly polysemous Arabic term to keep the ambiguity of the original or did they render the text more precise by employing different terms? In the latter case, they would have provided not only a translation but also a concise account of how they understood nature in a given translated passage and/or how they wanted their audience to understand it. The article studies one particular case, the translation of the term physis within the Arabic translation of On Diseases and Symptoms done by either Ḥunayn or his nephew Ḥubayš. The exhaustive comparison between the Greek passages and their corresponding Arabic translations documented in the appendix shows that the translator mainly translated physis by two different terms of the same root, i.e. ṭabīʿa, which is mostly used in phrases conveying an activity, and ṭabʿ, which is mainly employed in an adverbial sense. Particularly interesting are cases in which physis is simply not translated, as in some of them Galen may speak about demiurgic Nature, a principle that he often equates to the divine Demiurge, especially in his On the Usefulness of the Parts. These findings also allow for some tentative suggestions regarding the translation’s intended audience.