Kalila and Dimna, Middle Persian version
composition: probableauthorship: traditional
witness: no Middle Persian manuscript survives; known through the Syriac and Arabic versions
An Indian frame-tale collection of animal fables is carried into Middle Persian at the Sasanian court, becoming the hinge through which it later reaches Arabic, Syriac and every European language.
- political counsel disguised as animal fable
- a frame narrative permitting dangerous advice
- translation as the mechanism of a text's survival, the original being lost
- one node through which an Indian collection reaches three continents
The physician Borzuya was sent to India, according to the tradition preserved with the text, to obtain the Panchatantra, and translated it into Middle Persian with added framing material. The Pahlavi version is lost, but from it descend the Syriac translation and, decisively, Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic Kalila wa Dimna in the eighth century, from which the collection spread across the Mediterranean and Europe. The stories teach statecraft through animals who argue, deceive and advise, and the frame allows a subject to say to a king what could not be said directly.
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