Query on Panchatantra

[Klaus Karttunen]

Dear Colleagues.

as Rohit Chopra's question seems not to have got full answer, let me
briefly outline the history of the way of the Panchatantra through
successive translations to Europe. A Middle Persian translation of an
early Sanskrit recension -- both of which are not preserved to us -- was
further translated into several Near Eastern languages: Syriac, Arabic
and Hebrew. From these, at least three European translations were made
during the Middle Ages: the Old Spanish mentioned by Chopra and Das, the
Latin by John of Capua and the Greek. These became all well known and
were translated further, e.g. John's verion into Middle High German and
Middle English and the Greek one into several Slavic languages. A fourth
time the text arrived in Europe in the 17th century, when the French
translation of the Persian Anwar-i Suhaili -- founded on the Arabic
Kalila was Dimna -- was published by David Sahid and Gilbert Gaulmin
(see my article in Studia Orientalia 85, 1999, 193-197), a fifth in
1724, when Antoine Galland's French translation of the Humayun-name, the
Turkish adaptation of the Anwar-i Suhaili appeared.

Regards
Klaus

--
Klaus Karttunen, Ph.D.
Docent of Indology and Classical Ethnography
Institute of Asian and African Studies
PL 59 (Unioninkatu 38 B), 00014 University of Helsinki, FINLAND
phone 358-0-19122188, fax 358-0-19122094