Content area
Abstract
This thesis is a comparative study of the earliest and the latest English translation of an ancient collection of fables in Sanskrit called the Panchatantra. Thomas North translated the first English descendant of the Panchatantra, known as the Moral Philosophy of Doni, from Italian in 1570 C.E., and a recent English translation of the Panchatantra by Chandra Rajan appeared in 1997. This study aims to compare and contrast the structure and the content of the text in two translations that represent two different journeys from Sanskrit to English. The Moral Philosophy of Doni is an English translation of the Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of the Latin version of the Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi translation of the Sanskrit text (Jacobs xi). Accordingly, North’s translation is linked to the Panchatantra through Kalila wa Dimna and is comparable to Rajan’s translation of Edgerton’s reconstruction of the lost Sanskrit text.
