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PREFACE
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re-discovered Turki text preserved in the Haidarabad Codex. Thus I have enjoyed an advantage no translator has had since 'Abdu'rrahim in 1589.
Concerning matters of style and diction, I may mention that three distinct impressions of Babur's personality are set by his own, Erskine's and de Courteille's words and manner. These divergencies, while partly due to differing textual bases, may result mainly from the use by the two Europeans of unsifted, current English and French. Their portrayal might have been truer, there can be no doubt, if each had restricted himself to such under-lying component of his mother-tongue as approximates in linguistic stature to classic Turki. This probability Erskine could not foresee for, having no access during his work to a Turki source and no familiarity with Turki, he missed their lessoning.
Turki, as Babur writes it terse, word-thrifty, restrained and lucid, comes over neatly into Anglo-Saxon English, perhaps through primal affinities. Studying Babur's writings in verbal detail taught me that its structure, idiom and vocabulary dictate a certain mechanism for a translator's imitation. Such are the simple sentence, devoid of relative phrasing, copied in the form found, whether abrupt and brief or, ranging higher with the topic, gracious and dignified the retention of Babur's use of " we " and " I" and of his frequent impersonal statement the matching of words by their root-notion the strict observance of Babur's limits of vocabulary, effected by allotting to one Turki word one English equivalent, thus excluding synonyms for which Turki has little use because not shrinking from the repeated word ; lastly, as preserving relations of diction, the replacing of Babur's Arabic and Persian aliens by Greek and Latin ones naturalized in English. Some of these aids towards shaping a counterpart of Turki may be thought small, but they obey a model arid their aggregate has power to make or mar a portrait.
(1) Of the uses of pronouns it may be said that Babur's "we" is neither regal nor self-magnifying but is co-operative, as beseems the chief whose volunteer and nomad following makes or unmakes, his power, and who can lead and command only by remittent consent
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