Naṣr Allāh Munshī’s Preface to Kalīla va Dimna: Translation and Commentary

Abstract

The translation/adaptation of Kalīla va Dimna by Abū al-Maʿālī Naṣr Allāh Munshī (ca. 540/1146) is arguably the original work of “artistic prose” (naṡr-i fannī) in Persian—and indisputably one of the most influential ever written. What Naṣr Allāh produced is in fact a multilingual tour de force. Not only did he translate the Arabic text of Kalīla wa-Dimna attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, but he interwove a huge number of quotations of poetry in both Persian and Arabic, as well as proverbs, and references to the Qur’an, Ḥadīth, and even works of caliphal history. This text was clearly meant for, and would only be intelligible to, an educated bilingual audience. The book demonstrates the cosmopolitan mastery that Naṣr 6 Allāh brought to bear as a secretary at the court of the Ghaznavid sultanate. His take on Kalīla va Dimna was, for generations, a key model for the style of Persian literary prose. Around the end of the ninth/fifteenth century, in Timurid Harāt, a new version of the book of fables was created by the author Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 910/1504–5). This version was suited to the later era, when, among other changes, the measure of eloquence in Persian was less connected to the incorporation of references in Arabic. Kāshifī titled his work Anvār-i suhaylī, and it became tremendously popular in the early modern period, across the whole swath of the world in which Persianate culture was a strong influence. (i.e., the area demarcated by Shahab Ahmed as “the Balkans to Bengal”; or, in the terminology of some others, “the Danube to the Deccan.”) It was the Anvār that served as the basis for the translation of Kalīla and Dimna into a number of new languages, including Ottoman Turkish. Naṣr Allāh Munshī’s text appears to have received much less attention from this point on— including in orientalist scholarship. In the twentieth century, several Iranian literary historians studied the work and expressed their appreciation of its style, and Mujtabā Mīnuvī produced a critical edition (first published in 1964) that remains in use to this day. But it was not until 2019 that a (more or less) complete English translation of Naṣr Allāh’s Kalīla va Dimna, by Wheeler M. Thackston, became available. (For comparison, Arthur N. Wollaston’s translation of the Anvār-i suhaylī dates to the 1870s.) Thackston has done a great service by rendering Naṣr Allāh’s work into English. Owing to a desire to make the text readable and accessible to a general audience, he has omitted certain features in translation. Most, if not all, of the poetry quotations are absent. There are passages in which the original Persian text has, in Thackston’s opinion, become corrupted, and so he has grafted in Kāshifī’s version of the equivalent material. Most relevant for our purposes, Thackston has greatly condensed Naṣr Allāh’s preface, in which the author explains his motivations for adapting Kalīla va Dimna from Arabic and his view of the book’s importance. Hence the chapter at hand, which will consist of a complete and literal rendering of Naṣr Allāh’s preface into English—on the basis of Mīnuvī’s edition, with his page numbers indicated clearly—along with notes and commentary. One important issue to explore is the manner in which Naṣr Allāh sets Kalīla va Dimna in an explicitly Islamic framework, arguing that just kingship is necessary for the flourishing of the religion, and that a ruler could be instructed as to the appropriate path by this classic book of animal tales.