Читать книгу The Bakhtyār Nāma. A Persian Romance онлайн

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Of the present collection of Tales it is remarked by a learned and acute writer that they are, for the most part, well wrought-out, probable, and without anything magical or supernatural. And those readers who do not delight in the extravagant creations of Oriental fancy—enchanted groves and fairy palaces beneath lakes, where carbuncles of immense size supply the place of the sun—will find little in this romance to shock their “common sense.” Nor are there—except one or two expressions in the opening passages—any of those hyperbolical descriptions of female beauty and the puissance of monarchs which are so characteristic of most of the fictions of the East. These Tales are, indeed, singularly free from such extravagancies, and may be considered as well adapted to check the often fatal impetuosity of Eastern monarchs, which was doubtless the purpose of the original author.

The Notes and Illustrations may seem disproportionate in bulk to that of the text. They are, however, designed, not only to explain and illustrate allusions to Oriental manners and customs, but also to supply deficiencies of Sir W. Ouseley’s translation, from a comparison of other Persian texts, and furnish variants of the several tales as they are found in other versions of the Romance. And while it is not impossible that critics whose absurd shibboleth is “originality” may be disposed to consider my little book as “a thing of mere industry, without wit or invention—a very toy,” yet I venture to think that these Notes will prove to most readers not the least interesting part of the work. In the Introduction will be found some curious matter regarding this romance and its congeners which has not before been presented to English readers, the result of much research; for, however defective my share of the work may be, I have spared no pains to render it as complete and accurate as I could: in short, I would fain hope that, as a whole, the volume will be accepted as a humble contribution to the still unwritten History of Fiction; for even Dunlop’s meritorious work can now only be regarded as a large contribution to this “research of olde antiquitie.”