Baburnama: Chaghatay Turkish Text with Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan's Persian Translation.

• Author: Dankoff, Robert

"The Babur-nama is lengthy, ponderous to poise and grasp, and work on it is still tentative, even with the literary gains since the Seventies."(l) So wrote Annette Beveridge in 1922, alluding to Paver de Courteille's French translation of 1871, the first made from Babur's original Chagatay Turkish rather than from the Persian translation of 1589. Pavet's version was based on Nikolai Ilminski's Kazan imprint of 1857 (= K), while Beveridge's own was based on the superior manuscript which her husband Henry Beveridge had discovered in Hyderabad in 1900 and which she published in facsimile in 1905 (= H). It is a measure of the ponderous nature of scholarship in this field that no serious text-edition of the Babur-nama was published until 1993, by Wheeler Thackston. And in 1995 appeared a truly exemplary edition of the Chagatay text by Eiji Mano.(2)

Thackston's edition is more useful than Mano's in certain respects.

It presents the Chagatay in fully punctuated transcription, thus informing the reader how the editor thinks the text ought to be read.(3)

It includes an edition of the Persian translation (= P) on the facing page, thus facilitating comparison with the oldest interpretation of the text.(4)

It includes a fresh and lively English translation, which in many ways is an improvement on Beveridge.(5)

Mano's edition is superior to Thackston's in several respects.

It makes use of two other Chagatay MSS - the so-called Elphinstone us in Edinburgh (= E), and a fragmentary MS in London (= L) - which, though inferior to H, nevertheless, as Mano demonstrates, sometimes preserve superior readings and cannot be ignored when establishing the text;

It has a much fuller critical apparatus and is based on a finer critical sense and a more comprehensive analysis of the textual issues. Mano somewhat overstates the case when he says (vol. 2, p. xli) that in Thackston "almost the entire text is no more than a romanized transcription of H." But it is true that Thackston relies almost exclusively on H, and this does lead him again and again into error, as Mano demonstrates in some detail (vol. 2, pp. xli-xliv [corresponding to the Japanese introduction, vol. 1, pp. xxxi-xxxiv]). Still, Thackston's reading is occasionally better than Mano's.(6)

A shortcoming in all critical analysis of the Chagatay text to date is the failure to utilize the great Chagatay-Persian dictionary of Mirza Mahdi Khan, compiled in the mid-eighteenth century and entitled Sanglax (= S). According to Sir Gerard Clauson, who made the work available in an excellent facsimile edition in 1960, S contains about two hundred fifty quotations from the Babur-nama.(7) My own observation is that these must have been based on a manuscript no longer available, and belonging to the group PEK as opposed to HL (see Mano, 1: xxxix = 2: 1).(8) S is sometimes useful for establishing the text of the Babur-nama. Thackston in particular, but Mano also, would have been saved from quite a few errors if they had consulted it.(9) It is another measure of the ponderous nature of scholarship in this field that we have no...