42 
J. Beames — Translations from Ghand Bardai's Epic. [No. 1, 
Translations of selected portions of Boole I. of Ghand Bardai's Epic. — By 
John Beames, B. C. S., M. E. A. S., etc. 
After the severe strictures passed on my translation of the 19th hook by 
Mr. Growse, (which, however, ho subsequently retracted) I think it necessary 
again to point out that in a poem constructed like this, absolute accuracy of 
translation is impossible. The lines generally consist of a string of crude 
forms of nouns without any inflectional terminations, or signs of case. In 
languages destitute of such grammatical formations, the order of words in a 
sentence often supplies the requisite clue to the meaning. This is not the 
case with Ghand. His words, if taken in the order in which they stand, 
often yield no meaning at all. In some cases turn the words as we may, it 
is not easy to make out any clear sense. The verbs when they occur do 
certainly exhibit some signs of tense ; thus we have the singular masculine of 
the preterite in -yaw, the feminine in - i , the plural masculine in -e, the plural 
feminine in -in ; but more frequently all tenses and persons are rudely ex- 
pressed by the indefinite participle in -i, as Icari, delclii, which serves alike for 
past, present, and future time. 
There are two other difficulties. Archaic words which neither occur in 
the modem languages, nor can be traced to any known Sanskrit root ; and 
the insertion of arbitrary letters to eke out the rhythm, such as la, su, ha, 
which have no meaning whatever. 
When to all this is added the extreme difficulty of dividing the words, 
I think I am not asking too much from critics, if I request that they will 
confine themselves to politely stating that they think I am mistaken ; in- 
stead of at once taxing me with ignorance of a language which I have studied 
for fourteen years, and whose difficulty I appreciate as much as any one can. 
I have recently leamt from a missionary at Ajmir that even the pro- 
fessional hards of that place admit their inability to understand more than 
the general drift of Chand’s poems. 
The secret of this loose careless archaic patois will only be discovered, 
when our researches into the vast and ancient language of which it repre • 
sents one phase have been established on a firm footing. To that end some 
few of us are devoting our spare time. The following efforts at a render- 
ing are perhaps premature, but even so they may yield some fruit of assist- 
ance to the greater task, and may even prove in some sort a guide to those 
who in time to come may approach the subject with a better apparatus 
criticus than we possess at present. The Latin and Greek scholars of the 
fifteenth century knew very little compared with those of the present day ; 
yet the world is not without some debt to Erasmus and Eeuchlin, or even to 
