Page:The Mesnevī (Volume 1).pdf/21

 4 is no excuse. Let the balance be restored, by all means, and the sooner the better. But something remains to be said. Persian studies will not flourish as they should until the poetical masterpieces from which Persian literature draws its chief power of attraction, and which constitute its claim to rank as a world-literature, are made more accessible, in the fullest sense of the word, than they are now. The Sháhnáma, one of the two greatest poems in the language, can scarcely be obtained for love or money. And when shall we see the first European edition of Niámi's Khamsa?

The Mathnawí has often been printed or lithographed in the East, and some of these editions are good of their kind. The best, I think, is that in volumes containing the Persian with Turkish translation and commentary by Ismáʿíl Rusúkhí of Angora, who lived in the early 17th century; but copies are extremely hard to come by, while the editions of Búláq and Teheran also lie beyond the reach of most students. Apart from this, however, the Oriental editions differ greatly from each other, and even those which give something like a standard text are falsified and interpolated to a considerable extent; e. g., the Búláq text of Books I and II includes about 140 and the Teheran text about 800 verses which are wanting in the oldest MSS. There is ample evidence that at an early period the copyists began to alter the text of the poem for reasons which I will set forth in detail presently. In many cases it is still possible to detect these corruptions and restore the original readings, though the MS. that has most faithfully preserved the ancient recension contains only the first of the six books of the Mathnawí, But since the MS. next in authority (dated A. H. 718) exhibits a more genuine text of the entire poem than any that has been published hitherto, I feel that the tedious work of collation has been worth doing. Another grave, though less vital, defect in