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mistaken impression that this long but interesting Romance forms part of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, been suggested that a complete translation of it should be included in the present publication. The Romance in question does not, however, in any way, belong to my original and forms no part of the Breslau Text, as will be at once apparent from an examination of the Table of Contents of the latter (see post, p. 261), by which all the Nights are accounted for. Dr. Habicht himself tells us, in his preface to the first Vol. of
Whilst on the subject of German translations, it may be well to correct an idea, which appears to prevail among non-Arabic scholars, to the effect that complete translations of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night exist in the language of Hoffmann and Heine, and which is (as far, at least, as my own knowledge extends) a completely erroneous one. I have, I believe, examined all the German translations in existence and have found not one of them worthy of serious consideration; the best, that of Hammer-Purgstall, to which I had looked for help in the elucidation of doubtful and corrupt passages, being so loose and unfaithful, so disfigured by ruthless retrenchments and abridgments, no less than by gross errors of all kinds, that I found myself compelled to lay it aside as useless. It is but fair, however, to the memory of the celebrated Austrian Orientalist, to state that the only form in which Von Hammer’s translation is procurable is that of the German rendering of Prof. Zinserling (1823–4), executed from the original (French) manuscript, which latter was unfortunately lost before publication.
