The growing interest in Oriental literature has led me to think that a reprint of my father’s translation of the Shah Nameh would be acceptable to the public. As one of the “ Chandos Classics ” it will be brought in a cheap form before a class of readers who would otherwise have no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the “ Iliad of
the East.”

My father’s work was the first attempt to translate the Shah Nameh into English. It was printed by the Oriental Translation Fund in 1832, and was honored by the Royal Gold Medal. The eminent Orientalist, the late Professor
H. H. Wilson, in a notice of my father’s literary and artistic labors, says, “His most considerable work was an abridged version and epitome of the great poem of Firdausi, the Shah Nameh; the narrative in its level passages being translated in prose, and many, rising into poetry and passion, in blank verse or occasionally in rhyme. At the end the episode of Sohrab is reprinted.

The great length, and in many respects tediousness, of the entire Shah Nameh, renders it little likely that a
translation of the whole poem would ever be acceptable to an English public, and from, this abridgment they may be able to appreciate with some degree of accuracy the merits of the composition.”

Mughal Library