Finally, with the exception of those individual-specific examples, the entirety of Ibn Ridwan's so-called autobiography consists of paraphrastic renderings of classical Greek ethical, medical, and philosophical works.
For example, he quotes the very text on which Ibn Ridwan constructed his sira (that is, the Hippocratic Oath) and here in Ibn Ridwan's own paraphrastic commentary, "The Seven Hippocratic Virtues.
155) we find the important observation that in the Renaissance literal translations were more likely to be made by people whose Latin was less competent whereas more competent writers of Latin translated in a freer and more
paraphrastic fashion.
As Resnick and Kitchell point out in their introduction, it is probable that at the time Albert disputed these questions, he was already at work on his De animalibus libri XXVI, a massive
paraphrastic commentary on the same Aristotelian works.
67) Here al-Wahidi states that he has divided and collected the exegetical material into three groups (majmu'at): first, that based on philological understanding, or what he calls "meanings" (ma'ani al-tafsir); second, material inherited from the early generations or which has come to be accepted because it is based on hadith methodology (musnad al-tafsir); and third,
paraphrastic or abridged material (mukhtasar al-tafsir).
A start was made by Hermann Stadler, who in the years before the First World War provided a modern edition of Albert's
paraphrastic commentary on Aristotle's zoological books.
Before 1970, most scholars thought that the earliest manuscripts of the Peshitta were highly
paraphrastic (like the Palestinian Targum, which many thought served as the Peshitta source) and that the later ones were mostly literal, minus the excised paraphrases.
Albertus Magnus, for example, based his massive
paraphrastic commentary as well as his disputed questions on the Scotus text.
As commentary, Rorem's treatment of each section of the Corpus dionysiacum is
paraphrastic and somewhat uncritical; and, as an introduction to its influence, his account must be far less concerned with origins than with consequences.
The immediate product of this decision was Albert's
paraphrastic commentary on the Physics, but there were long-term results as well.
The translation is both
paraphrastic and literal, and notably inventive throughout However, danger looms large over the more colorfully paraphrased sentences, famous for their complex content.
In the first part of this text, containing Albert's
paraphrastic commentary on Aristotle's zoological books, Stadler attempted to determine which words were taken from Albert's source, Michael Scot's translation from the Arabic, and which were Albert's own composition.
