xi
on this passage, Professor Marr[1] writes: "John Petritzi translated not only ideas, but words, even words existing in the Georgian language: terms do not satisfy him unless they cover the original etymologically, or even in some cases by the number of their syllables.… To him we owe a ready-made philosophic terminology in the Georgian language, marvellously exact and concisely rendering by Georgian roots all those terms which in European languages are borrowed from Greek and Latin."
It was such a language that Rust'haveli used, with a perfection of art which makes a foreign student at first despair of perceiving even the outline of the story. A quatrain may have four quadrisyllabic endings apparently identical (e.g., asadages, 136), and no little knowledge and thought are needed to arrive at the sense in which each of them is to be taken. The beginner is occasionally tempted to believe that the poem is rather music than narrative, that it aims more at inspiring moods than speaking clearly to the intelligence; it is only after some labour that the logical unity of the fable is grasped.
Some controversy has arisen as to the dramatic story which forms the groundwork of the epic, and not a few inkhorns have been emptied by commentators on the passages, "This Persian tale now done into Georgian" (16) and "I, Rust'haveli, have composed this work by my art" (15). It may here suffice to say that no trace of such a Persian story has yet been discovered; and even if it were found, our author's fame would thereby suffer no more than Shakespeare's does from Luigi da Porto's novel. Perhaps Rust'haveli used a pre-existing fable; this, at least, seems the simplest way of accounting for the episode of Avt'handil's intrigue with P'hatman, which is treated with distaste, though it serves to throw a brighter light on Tariel as the faultless lover compared with his sworn brother the tactful, heroic man of the world, and the poet would hardly have invented it, or even used it, unless it had
- ↑ Ioann Petritzki, p. 35.
