INTRODUCTION
There are complete translations of the Mathnawí in Turkish[1], Arabic[2], and Hindustani[3], but only the first two of the six Books of the poem have hitherto been made accessible in their entirety to European readers, though a number of extracts from Books iii–vi are translated in E. H. Whinfield's useful abridgment. While it may seem surprising that a work so celebrated, and one which reflects (however darkly at times) so much of the highest as well as the lowest in the life and thought of the Mohammedan world in the later Middle Ages, should still remain imperfectly known to Western students, I think that this gap in our knowledge can at least be excused. Judged by modern standards, the Mathnawí is a very long poem: it contains almost as many verses as the Iliad and Odyssey together and about twice as many as the Divina Commedia; and these comparisons make it appear shorter than it actually is, since every verse of the Mathnawi has twenty-two syllables, whereas the hexameter may vary from thirteen to seventeen, and the terza rima, like the Spenserian stanza, admits only ten or eleven in each verse, so that the Mathnawí with 25,700 verses is in reality a far more extensive work than the Faerie Queene with 33,500. On the other hand, it is easily surpassed in length by several Persian poems; and the fact that the Sháhnáma has been translated from beginning to end into English, French, and Italian answers the question asked by Georg Rosen—"Who would care to devote a considerable part of his lifetime to translating thirty or forty thousand Persian distichs of unequal poetical worth?" The size of the Mathnawí is not the chief or the worst obstacle by which its translator is confronted. He at once finds himself involved in the fundamental difficulty, from which there is no escape, that if his translation is faithful, it must be to a large extent unintelligible, and that if he tries to make it intelligible throughout he must often substitute for the exact rendering a free and copious paraphrase embodying matter which properly belongs to a commentary, though such a method cannot
- ↑ In prose, by Ismáʿíl Angiraví in his commentary entitled Fátíḥu ʾl-abyát (Búláq, a.h. 1251 and Constantinople, a.h. 1289). A Turkish verse-translation by Sulaymán Naḥífí accompanies the Persian text in the Búláq edition of the Mathnawí (a.h. 1268). For Naḥífí (ob. a.h. 1151) see E. J. W. Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. iv, pp. 78–85, where an account is given of the circumstances which led him to compose his version of the Mathnawí. Gibb's description of it as "a literal and line for line rendering" seems to me to require much qualification.
- ↑ In prose, by Yúsuf b. Aḥmad al-Mawlawí in his commentary entitled al-Manhaj al-qawi (Cairo, a.h. 1289).
- ↑ I do not think that a complete prose translation in Hindustani has yet appeared, but there is one in verse, entitled Piráhan-i Yúsufi, by Muḥammad Yúsuf ʿAlí Sháh (Lucknow, 1889; Cawnpore, 1897).
