A Comparative Editing or an Arbitrary Change? A Critique of a Re-edited Version of Atabat-ol-Kataba

Atabat-ol-kataba is a book written by Montajab-o-ddin Badi'e Joveini which includes samples of administrative and court-related correspondence as well as friendly letters of the Sultan Sanjar Saljuqi era. The book was edited and published in 1950 by Allameh Ghazvini and Eghbal Ashtiani based on a photo version of the book as the only existing version of the work in question. It was also reprinted in 2005. A re-edited version of the book including an index and commentaries has recently been published in 2017 by Maryam Sadeghi. She  has resorted to a comparative method based onthe version published by Ghazvini and Eghbal. The present paper aims to explore Sadeghi's method of editing and correcting and to criticize some shortcomings with her work as opposed to Ghazvini and Eghbal’s edition. The findings indicate that in spite of correcting several errors resulting from typesetting in Ghazvini and Eghbal’s work, when it comes to refining the text itself, Sadeghi has frequently deviated from the comparative methodology and has rather made subjective corrections. As a result, in many cases, she has changed Ghazvini and Eghbal’s correct choices on the basis of her own taste and subjective perception and has entered huge mistakes into the text. The paper examines some cases of such arbitrary changes.

The unique manuscript version of Atabat-ol-kataba belongs to the National Library of Egypt. A photo of the manuscript was transferred to Iran in 1931 by Allameh Mohammad Ghazvini and was edited and published in 1950 by the attempts of  Abbass Eghbal Ashtiani with an introduction by Allameh Ghazvini. The book was reprinted in 2005 by Asatir Publications in the form of an equally copied offset. Apart from this edition in which there have been some typos and shortcomings with the edition, no one re-edited Atabat-ol-kataba until 2017 when Maryam Sadeghi managed, once again, to re-edit and publish it by Negah-e Mo’aser Publications. Since she believes that “the text edited by Ghazvini is so incomplete and insufficient and does not provide a critically edited text and, thus, it cannot be profitable for the readers” (Joveini, 2017, p. 15), she has nictitated herself to re-edit the text in question so that “a totally edited and adorned text can be made available to readers” (Ibid, p. 66). Reprinting and re-editing scholarly works typically aim at reviewing and disambiguating the previous prints as well as approaching the written manuscripts of the respective authors as closely as possible. In the works edited on the basis of a comparative methodology, such a mission imposes on the editors a doubled responsibility and undertaking. While in the comparative methodology, the editor is allowed to make use of his/her own guessing capabilities, such guesses cannot be effective, if he/she is not trained in the areas of text research and knowledge of texts and if he/she is not attentive to linguistic, semantic, thematic, historical, and cultural issues and evidence within the work in question or other works of the era under investigation. Moreover, “some contemporary editors have regretfully confused the comparative methodology with arbitrary edition and have made their own arbitrary non-scientific changes under the title comparative edition” (Jahanbakhsh, 2011, p. 32). Since the re-edition of Atabat-ol-kataba has been made through a comparative method, it is necessary to explore the editor’s proposed choices and compare the cases of difference with their counterpart choices in the previous edition. Such comparisons could be useful both for the readers of the book and the upcoming editors in their further re-editions in the future.

As Sadeghi has based her edition of Atabat-ol-kataba on the basis of the printed edition by Ghazvini-Eghbal, this research also resorts to a comparison between Ghazvini-Eghbal’s edition and Sadeghi’s edited version through an analytical-descriptive methodology by making references to library resources. In the present study, after making the above-mentioned comparison, Sadeghi’s proposed choices have been contrasted against choices adopted by Ghazvini-Eghbal as the base version, and cases where Ghazvini-Eghbal’s adoptions have been preferable but Sadegi has mistakenly changed them, have been studied one by one under the title ‘Errors in the Edition of the Text’ along with an analysis of each and every item. So, an attempt has been made in analyzing the texts comparatively by making references to a wide variety of evidence from other comparable texts of the era in question as well as evidence from the text of the book under discussion. Furthermore, certain errors made in Ghazvini-Eghbal’s edition which have been well-discovered by Sadeghi but have not been rightly corrected by her are presented under the title ‘The Author’s Proposals’.

In her re-edition of Atabat-ol-kataba, Sadeghi has divided the book into three sections: ‘introduction’, ‘description of the text’, and ‘indices’. In the second section, she has edited the text of the book. A critical review of the ‘description of the text’, the typos, and editorial shortcomings with her work requires separate research. The present research aims at answering the following question: To what extent has Sadeghi been successful in her comparative edition of Atabat-ol-kataba and in presenting a well-edited text? The study has come up with the conclusion that she has managed to discern and resolve certain typos in Ghazvini-Eghbal’s edition but when it comes to her critical edition of the text, for several times, she has acted subjectively and has mistakenly changed the correct choices according to her own taste and subjectivity, despite the fact that she has labeled her method a ‘comparative methodology’. The present paper refers to some of these editorial errors so that the final outcome may be of some help both to potential readers of the book and to upcoming editors who may wish to re-edit the book in the future.