Читать книгу The Bakhtyār Nāma. A Persian Romance онлайн

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Since the Arabian version of the Romance of the Ten Viziers given in the French Continuation of the Thousand and One Nights, translated, as already stated, by Dom Chavis and edited by M. Cazotte, is not mentioned by M. Lescallier, we must conclude, either that he did not know of it, or that he deemed it beneath his notice. Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte have, in truth, received rather hard treatment at the hands of their critics. Dr Jonathan Scott, amongst others, must gird at Cazotte, though without the shadow of reason. In his edition of the Arabian Nights, published in 1811,^[22] Appendix to vol. vi, referring to the English translation of the “Continuation” (see foot-note, page ssss1), he says that “the twelve first stories in the third volume had undoubtedly an Oriental foundation: they exist, among many others, in a Persian manuscript, lately in my possession, entitled Jamī’u-’l-Hikāyāt, or a Collection of Narratives. Sir William Ouseley has published a liberal^[23] translation of them, with the Persian text, by reading which the liberties M. Cazotte has taken in the tale of ‘Bohetzād and his Ten Viziers’ may be fairly seen, and a reasonable conjecture formed of his amplification of all others. Sir William Ouseley’s hero is named Bakht-yār, i.e., Befriended by Destiny, as in my manuscript, in that of M. Cazotte it is probably Bakht-zād, i.e., Born under a Fortunate Planet.” In this last sentence Scott has strangely blundered: the hero of the Persian Tale is certainly called Bakhtyār, but in Cazotte’s version it is the King who is called Bohetzād (or Bakht-zād), and the hero, Aladdin. From these strictures of his it is very obvious that he was not aware of the existence of an Arabian version of this romance. According to Lowndes’ Bibliographer’s Manual, “a valuable edition of the Arabian Nights was published, in 1798, by Richard Gough, considerably enlarged, from the Paris edition, with notes of illustration, and a preface, in which the supplementary tales published by Dom Chavis are proved to be a palpable forgery.” Gough’s name has not come down to us in connection with the Arabian Nights—except through Lowndes, where it is but a name. And Habicht’s Arabian text has very conclusively disproved all Gough’s absurd “proofs;” and, what is more, a comparison of the Romance as given by M. Cazotte with Habicht’s text will not only show that in both are the Tales of the same number and placed in the same order, but the incidents are almost invariably identical. The following is a comparative table of the order of the Tales in the “History of the Ten Viziers,” as they are found in Habicht’s Arabian text, Cazotte, Caussin de Perceval, the German translation, and the Persian version—of the last the order and number of the tales are alike in Ouseley, Lescallier, and the lithographed text: