Hikayat Saif-al-Yezan. 



By the Eight Be v. Bishop Hose, 



Introduction. 



When I was living in Malacca (1868 to 1873) I employed 

 as Munshi a man named Abdullah, commonly known as 

 'Tambie Dullah.' In the course of his visits he used some- 

 times to recite long passages from stories to which he had so 

 often listened that he had got a considerable part of them by 

 heart. Amongst these was the story of S&if-al-Yezan. I was 

 interested in the extracts I heaid in this way, and at last my 

 Munshi told me that a friend of his possessed the work in 

 manuscript. It was, he said, so precious that his friend would 

 neither sell nor lend it ; but he thought he could persuade him 

 to let it be copied for me. Of course this, was the seller's 

 craft to enhance the price. Eventually I did secure a copy, 

 but the scribe was careless, and probably the text before him 

 was not faultless. The result is that the MS. cannot always 

 be made out, and bad spelling, repetitions of whole paragraphs, 

 and one or two obvious omissions have made the work of 

 editing and transliterating difficult. 



It is not a good specimen of literary Malay, but with all 

 its loose construction, its verbosity, and constant repetition of 

 a few sonorous phrases, it probably represents fairly well the 

 style of the average story-teller reciting from memory to an 

 uncritical audience. 



The work itself is of some considerable interest. It is a 

 w 7 ell-known popular Arabian romance. Lane says of it 

 (Thousand and One Nights, ch. XX, note 83) that in his time 

 it had become extremely scarce, but that he purchased a copy 

 in Cairo on his second visit to that city. " Some of the public 



Jour. S. B. R. A. Soc, No. 58, 1911. 



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