also at Bombay. This translation is written in an easy fluent style, omitting
all coarseness of expression or objectionable passages, in language easily
understood, and at the same time in good and elegant Hindustani. It is
therefore extremely popular, and selections from the 4th Jild have been taken
as text books for the Indian Civil Service examinations. A Romanised Urdu
version of the first two Jilds according to Duncan Forbes' system of
transliteration, was made 'under the superintendence of T. W. H. Tolbort,' and
published under the editorship of F. Pincott in London, by W. H. Allen and Co.
in 1882.[FN#5] There has been no attempt to divide this translation into
Nights: there are headings to the several tales and nothing more. To supply
this want, and also to furnish the public with a translation closer to the
original, and one more intelligible to Eastern readers, and in accordance with
Oriental thought and feeling, a third translation was taken in hand by Totaram
Shayan, at the instance of Nawal Kishore, the well-known bookseller and
publisher of Lucknow. The first edition of this translation was lithographed
at Lucknow in the year A.H. 1284 (A.D. 1868) and published in a 4to vol. of
1,080 pages under the title of Hazar Dastan.[FN#6] Totaram Shayan has followed
'Abd al-Karim's arrangement of the whole work into four Jilds, each of which
has a separate pagination (pp. 304; 320, 232, and 224.) The third Jild has 251
Nights: the other three 250 each. The translation is virtually in prose, but
it abounds in snatches of poetry, songs and couplets taken from the writings
of Persian poets, and here and there a verse-rendering of bits of the story.
This translation, though substantially agreeing in the main with that of 'Abd
al-Karim, yet differs widely from it in the treatment. It is full of flowery
metaphors and is written in a rich, ornate style full of Persian and Arabic
words and idioms, which renders it far less easy to understand than the simple
language of 'Abd al-Karim. Some passages have been considerably enlarged and
sometimes contain quite different reading from that of 'Abd al-Karim with
occasional additional matter. In other places descriptions have been much
curtailed so that although the thread of the story may be the same in both