پژوهشی دربارۀ ترجمۀ فارسی التّنویر فی الطّب

The Persian translation of al-Tanwīr, a rendering of al-Tanwīr fī al-Ṭibb by Abū Manṣūr Ḥasan ibn Nūḥ al-Qumrī al-Bukhārī, is among the valuable yet little-known works of Persian literature in the fields of medicine and translation. In addition to its medical and scientific significance, the work occupies a distinguished position in the history of the Persian language, the history of translation, scientific terminology, and the study of early Persian prose. Despite its importance, only a single Persian manuscript of the text has survived. Owing to the relatively late date of its transcription and its transmission through multiple stages of copying, the manuscript exhibits numerous problems, including inconsistencies in lexical forms, disorder in the arrangement of entries, and displacement of definitions. Consequently, establishing the original text is impossible without systematic comparison with the Arabic original and consultation of contemporary and related medical works. The present study aims to provide a critical examination of the Persian translation of al-Tanwīr, identify its textual deficiencies, reconstruct damaged passages, and clarify the work’s place within the tradition of Persian medical writing and translation.
The first part of the study surveys the history of medical lexicons and encyclopedic works in the Islamic world and in Persian, situating al-Tanwīr within this broader intellectual tradition. The structure of the work, its organizational principles, the author’s objectives, and its principal contents are then examined. Drawing upon biographical and bibliographical sources, the study also investigates the life, works, and scholarly standing of Abū Manṣūr Ḥasan ibn Nūḥ al-Qumrī al-Bukhārī, one of the leading physicians of the Samanid period and a probable teacher of Avicenna. His extant and attributed works are likewise introduced. The identity of the translator and the possibility that the translation was produced by the author himself are subsequently discussed. Based on linguistic and textual evidence, various scholarly views concerning the authorship of the translation are evaluated. Stylistic features of the text—including the frequent use of the particles andar and hamī, the simplicity of its syntactic structures, the high frequency of prefixed verbs, and the relatively limited use of Arabic vocabulary—strongly suggest that the translation was produced in Transoxiana during the fourth/tenth century.
The principal method of the study consists of a comprehensive comparison between the Persian translation and both the published Arabic text and the extant Arabic manuscripts. This comparison demonstrates that the translator made a deliberate effort to find precise Persian equivalents for Arabic medical and scientific terminology, thereby creating a valuable corpus of early Persian technical vocabulary. Terms such as payvandgāh (“joint”) for mafṣil, pušt-māzah (“spinal cord”) for nukhāʿ, negāhdār (“protection, prevention”) for wiqāya, ābgīr (“urine vessel”) for the urine flask, fazūnīhā (“excesses”) for faḍalāt (waste products), and angošt-e khord (“little finger”) for khinṣir, together with many other examples, testify to the capacity of Persian to express specialized medical concepts during the early Islamic centuries. This aspect of the study demonstrates that the Persian translation of al-Tanwīr constitutes one of the earliest and most important documents of scientific terminology formation in Persian.
A substantial portion of the article is devoted to identifying and analyzing the textual problems of the surviving Persian manuscript. The findings reveal that the text contains numerous errors and deficiencies. These include incorrect readings of entries, partial or complete omission of entries and definitions, displacement of words and phrases, incomplete translations, conflation of two or more definitions, transfer of definitions from one entry to another, influence from divergent Arabic recensions, and extensive scribal corruptions at both lexical and phrasal levels. Through systematic reference to the Arabic text of al-Tanwīr, its manuscripts, and related works such as Hidāyat al-Mutaʿallimīn, Dhakhīra-yi Khwārazmshāhī, Baḥr al-Jawāhir, Ḥaqāʾiq Asrār al-Ṭibb, the Qānūn, and other medical and lexicographical sources, the present study proposes corrected readings and reconstructions for many of these problematic passages. Examination of numerous examples indicates that some of these deficiencies originated in scribal errors during the process of manuscript transmission, while others resulted from omissions, misreadings, and editorial interventions introduced by copyists at different stages of the text’s history.
The findings further demonstrate that the Persian translation of al-Tanwīr is significant not only for linguistic studies and the history of translation but also as an important source for the study of medical terminology, methods of medical instruction, the transmission of scientific knowledge, and the development of specialized scientific language in medieval Iran. Comparative analysis of the Persian and Arabic texts enables a more accurate reconstruction of the work, a clearer understanding of its linguistic and stylistic features, and a deeper appreciation of the scientific and medical traditions of Transoxiana during the early Islamic centuries. Accordingly, the Persian translation of al-Tanwīr should be regarded as one of the most important surviving documents in the history of medicine and Persian scientific prose. Its critical edition and detailed study have the potential to open new avenues of research in Persian linguistics, the history of science, and Islamic manuscript studies.