Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/512

 470 Reviews.

The Arabic wrongly supplies iis, because he mistakes the next words, / fnetidj =from us for / mcdj =^from the fnidsf. So just above he renders arhadji, which means before, as if it were aradjin ^ first of all, or to begin with. Similarly, it ignorantly translates arhadschoq, which means literally " to the eyes,'' but here has the idiomatic sense " deceptively," as if it were arhadji, con- nects with it grammatically the word mer (us) which follows, and blunderingly renders the entire wrong combination " before us."

An excellent example of a misrendering of the Armenian is found in fable No. 56, entitled the heifers and the oxen. The Armenian is as follows :

" The heifers were playing, and reproached the oxen, saying : ' You rest not from vexations and from working hard.' And lo, the king of the land came, and they gathered together the heifers and began to slay them, in order to prepare a feast for the king and his forces. And the oxen said : ' Behold, children of ours, because of this day ye idly rested and grew fat.' "

Now here the words italicised are rendered by an Arabic word, which means hurtful or detrimental. If we turn to Professor Marr's critical apparatus we see why. The true Armenian text has, wasn avours — because of this day. But the old Amsterdam edition of 1668 has the corruption wnasavors, which means " hurtful." This suggests that the Arabic text of these fables was translated from this edition, carried by some Armenian merchant to India ; or, if not from the printed book, then from the Edj- miatzin Codex No. 12, or from some similar codex ; for this MS., above all others, agrees in text with the Amsterdam edition. In the fable of " the king and his servant," of which Professor Marr translates into Russian the Arabic and Armenian texts, on p. 12 of his first volume, we find in the Arabic several corruptions peculiar to the Amsterdam edition and to this codex, and the same phenomenon presents itself again and again. A text like the Arabic, which thus renders corruptions which have grown up inside the Armenian tradition, is necessarily a translation of the Armenian ; and in section 46 of his first volume. Professor Marr gives a list of twenty such cases. His arguments are quite con- vincing.

In sections 55-89, Professor Marr examines the relation of Wardan's fox-book to the fables of Mkhithar Gosh, which have been printed at Venice in 1790, 1842, and 1852. Eighteen addi-