ABSTRACT

Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has solely been the concern of editors preparing works for print publication. This article contends that an investigation of variance is also of relevance for writing the cultural history of how anthologists encountered, manipulated, and published poems in the manuscript age. While a shortage of independent textual witnesses makes it harder to undertake this kind of study for the earliest periods of Persian literary history, such research can be conducted for later eras, including the seventeenth century, the time-frame covered by the biographical anthology of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (d. ca. 1698). In order to sample the degree of variance present in Nasrabadi’s anthology, his recensions of the verse of twenty poets are compared here with the available manuscript copies of the same twenty poets’ collected works. Instead of judging Nasrabadi’s accuracy in reproducing each fragment, I evaluate what variance can tell us about paths of textual transmission between Mughal North India, the Deccan Sultanates, and Safavid Iran. The evidence presented here reinforces the supposition that anthologies are fundamentally shaped by the social networks out of which they arise.

摘要

到目前为止，波斯文学选集中传播的诗歌的文本历史一直只是编辑准备印刷作品的关注点。本文认为，对差异的调查也与撰写有关文集学家如何在手稿时代遇到、操纵和出版诗歌的文化史相关。虽然缺乏独立的文本见证使得在波斯文学史的最早时期进行这种研究变得更加困难，但可以在以后的时代进行这种研究，包括 17 世纪，即穆罕默德传记选集所涵盖的时间框架塔希尔·纳斯拉巴迪（Tahir Nasrabadi，生于 1698 年）。为了对 Nasrabadi 选集中存在的差异程度进行抽样，他对二十位诗人的诗句的修订在这里与同样二十位诗人的作品集的现有手稿进行了比较。我没有判断 Nasrabadi 复制每个片段的准确性，而是评估哪些差异可以告诉我们关于莫卧儿北印度、德干苏丹国和伊朗萨法维之间的文本传输路径。这里提供的证据强化了这样一种假设，即选集从根本上是由它们产生的社交网络塑造的。