Читать книгу The Bakhtyār Nāma. A Persian Romance онлайн

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There is yet another work usually considered as belonging to the Sindibād class of romances, namely, the Turkish Tales of the Forty Viziers, which is said to have been composed, during the reign of Sultān Murād II, in 1421, after an Arabian romance entitled “Tales of the Forty Mornings and Forty Evenings,” composed by Shaikh Zāda. But the author of this work, as M. Deslongchamps has justly remarked, has borrowed little from the Book of Sindibād besides the frame. The tales—which are eighty in number, forty of which are told by the Viziers, and forty by the Queen—are quite different from, yet no whit inferior to, those of any version of the King and his Seven Counsellors. M. Petit de Lacroix, last century, made a French translation of this work as far as the story of the Tenth Vizier, which was soon afterwards rendered into English, but divested of much of the Oriental costume and colour. In 1851 Behrnauer issued a German rendering of the Turkish text. And it may interest some readers to know that Mr E. J. W. Gibb—whose recently published translations of Ottoman Poems, with Introduction, Biographical Notices, and Notes, have received the approbation of competent judges—is at present engaged on a complete English translation of this highly entertaining romance.