) which are of no infrequent occurrence even in
this, the best of the existing texts, by carefully collating it
with the editions of Boulac and Breslau (to say nothing of
occasional references to the earlier Calcutta edition of the
first two hundred nights), adopting from one and the other such
variants, additions and corrections as seemed to me best
calculated to improve the general effect and most homogeneous
with the general spirit of the work, and this so freely that the
present version may be said, in great part, to represent a
variorum text of the original, formed by a collation of the
different printed texts; and no proper estimate can, therefore,
be made of the fidelity of the translation, except by those who
are intimately acquainted with the whole of these latter. Even
with the help of the new lights gained by the laborious process
of collation and comparison above mentioned, the exact sense of
many passages must still remain doubtful, so corrupt are the
extant texts and so incomplete our knowledge, as incorporated in
dictionaries, etc, of the peculiar dialect, half classical and
half modern, in which the original work is written.
One special feature of the present version is the appearance,
for the first time, in English metrical shape, preserving the
external form and rhyme movement of the originals, of the
whole of the poetry with which the Arabic text is so freely
interspersed.
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