Suggested Emendations in a Number of Distiches from the Divān of Nāser-e Khosrow

There is a span of three centuries between the time Nāser-e Khosrow lived (5th/11th) and the date that appears in the earliest extant manuscript of his Divan (8th/14th). It seems self-evident that throughout these long centuries, as a result of numerous copying, so many errors, distortions and misspellings have found their way into the original text of his poetry. What, specially, may have aggravated the situation is his not so common choice of words, meters and grammatical patterns which, along with certain characteristics of his individual style, always made reading and comprehension of his poems more or less difficult for the readers and copyists alike. Therefore, one can hardly trust even the best critical editions of his Divan. Be that as it may, a number of literary scholars in the past few decades have come up with explanatory notes to, and emendations in, some of the problematical distiches of the Divan of Nāser-e Khosrow, a select list of which is presented in this article, in some cases with additional notes by the present author. Here are two examples: نه کفتاري “” for “بگفتاري” in the following distich: تو همی بینی کت پاي همی بندد پس چرا خامشی و خیره بگفتاريپشین “” for “بشیر” in the following distiche: استاده بدي به بامیان شیري بنشسته به عز در بشین شاري