Zend Avesta Part 03

Author(s): L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford

Page 47

xliv
THE GÂTHAS.
unevenness in lines. The language would be vigorous and idiomatic. and of unusual value as a fragment of ancient phrase, but the metre would have suffered.
Then as to conjectured texts; after texts have been improved from all available relics of ancient tradition, or scholarship, as afforded by the Pahlavi translations, and from the evidence of metre, we are at times still left with readings before us which could not have been original. The composers have indeed here and there constructed sentences which they either could not, or would not, make easy, but as a general thing we may say, that where the text, as it stands, gives no satisfactory sense to us, after we have exhausted the resources of previous Asiatic scholarship, or direct analogy, in our efforts to explain it, it is in that case not the text as the composer delivered it. We are then reduced to conjecture, for how are we to translate a text before we are certain that it is integral? Our first efforts should be directed to the detection of losses; for a text may still be of great value when considered as a mass of broken sentences, for, if we are certain that such is its character, we can often fill out the missing members with much probability. But whether we insert supplementary conjectures, or merely bracket later interpolations, we must by all means in cases of real necessity make the effort to amend the text (as also in the Veda).
Even if we fail in our attempted improvements, we are often little worse off than before, for whereas it is possible, or even probable, that the composers wrote what we suggest, it is sometimes not possible that they wrote exactly what stands in our texts. We should even suggest alternative readings where our present ones are only less probable (for the suggestion of an alternative is not the wholesale destruction of a sentence), while even when we declare their outcoming meaning totally unsatisfactory, the MSS. still remain to other writers to begin on afresh. And in estimating what would be reasonable meanings, we should guard carefully against both extremes, and we should especially exercise a strong negative criticism against the recognition of
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