Page:The Mesnevī (Volume 1).pdf/33

 16 before consonants, I write and  and give the original reading below. The iẓáfat has been added throughout (except where it is sufficiently represented by ), whether it has to be pronounced in scansion or not. Vowels and other orthographical signs have been inserted in Arabic verses or quotations, in words of ambiguous meaning, and in any place where they seemed likely to help the student.

Apart from unimportant differences of spelling and manifest errors of writing, the critical notes furnish a complete account of the variations which occur in the text of ABCD, but I have not recorded such variants as the omission of or the substitution of an equivalent formula in the Headings. Of the variants in L, which are numerous and extensive, only selected specimens are given, including all the verses that do not occur in any of the four older MSS. The variants of the Búláq edition (Bul.) are given in full as regards the poem itself, less fully as regards the Headings. I have also collated the text in Ismáʿíl Anqiraví's Turkish commentary entitled Fátiḥu ʾl-Abyát. The principal variants of this and other Oriental editions will be noticed in my commentary.

Since the lithographed and printed editions differ from each other both as regards the readings which they adopt and the number of verses which they include, any general comparison with the present text is impossible. But the text most nearly resembling mine, that of the Turkish Commentator (which I will designate as F), exhibits a great amount of divergence from it. In the First Book F contains 42 additional verses, None of them occurs in C, and only two in A. Seven are found in B, twenty-five in L, and thirty-four in the Búláq edition, while there are five which occur neither in the Búlaq edition nor in any of my MSS. The variant readings can be counted by hundreds, and many of these materially affect