The Case of the Missing Holograph and Amir Khusraw’s Vasat al-Hayat: An Eclectic Approach as a Means of Establishing Authorial Intent

The textual critic who works in the traditional manner is not unlike the archaeologist or detective. Each is trying to reconstruct, from various artifacts or clues, a faithful rendering of an original “event” – a manuscript, a monument, a murder. The difference is that the textual critic rarely works with original material, but rather, with facsimiles. Instead of piecing together sherds of clay pots from a dig or DNA evidence from bloodstained fabrics, her material often consists of multiple copies of the same text, many of which were produced decades or even centuries after the original (lost) text was written. In what is often a maddeningly slow process, she weighs a passage from one copy against another, trying to determine which is the most authentic. This process is known as the “eclectic” approach to editing, and it aims at producing a text that is as close as possible to that penned by the author. But is textual authenticity a chimera? In this paper, I will briefly outline different schools of textual criticism, including those that aim primarily to reproduce authorial intent, and those that see value in the changes wrought on texts as they passed through hands other than those of the author – privileging, then, the “social” text. I will discuss how scholars have applied these various approaches to their editing of classical Persian works of literature. Then I will describe my own experience in producing an edition of the medieval Indian poet Amir Khusraw’s Dibachah-yi Divan-i Vasat al-Hayat (the Preface to the Collection of the Middle of Life), an autobiographical work written in about 1285. Specifically, I will show how I relied on several different “witnesses,” including a printed edition and three 16th-century manuscripts, in an attempt to recapture Khusraw’s original words. While this approach allowed me to piece together many phrases damaged by scribal intervention, it nevertheless became clear to me as I worked that, as poststructuralist critics have argued, a text is a living thing that inevitably changes as it is read, interpreted, and translated. Even the editor who does her best to wrestle it into its original form leaves her mark upon it. Without sacrificing the quest for accuracy, I found that I needed to acknowledge that the gap between the “authorial” and the “social” approach was less wide than it first appeared.