INTRODUCTION
1721
I am not about to write a
dedication, nor do I solicit protection for this work. It will be read,
if it is good; and if it is bad, I am not anxious that it should be read.
I have issued these first
letters in order to gauge the public taste; in my portfolio I have a goodly
number more which I may hereafter publish.1
This, however, depends upon
my remaining unknown: let my name once be published and I cease to write.
I know a lady who walks well enough, but who limps if she is watched.2
Surely the blemishes of my book are sufficient to make it needless that
I should submit those of my person to the critics. Were I known, it would
be said, “His book is at odds with his character; he might have employed
his time to better purpose; it is not worthy of a serious man.” Critics
are never at a loss for such remarks, because there goes no great expense
of brains to the making of them.
The Persians who wrote those
letters lodged at my house, and we spent our time together: they looked
upon me as a man belonging to another world, and so they concealed nothing
from me. Indeed, people so far from home could hardly be said to
have secrets. They showed me most of their letters, and I copied them.
I also intercepted some, mortifying to Persian vanity and jealously, which
they had been particularly careful to conceal from me.
I am therefore nothing more
than a translator: all my endeavor has been to adapt the work to our taste
and manners. I have relieved the reader as much as possible of Asiatic
phraseology, and have spared him an infinitude of sublime expressions which
would have driven him wild,
Nor does my service to him
end there. I have curtailed those tedious compliments of which the Orientals
are lavish as ourselves; and I have omitted a great many trifling matters
which barely survive exposure to the light, and ought never to emerge from
the obscurity proper to “small beer.”
Had most of those who have
given the world collections of letters done likewise, their words would
have disappeared in the editing. One thing has often astonished me,
and that is, that these Persians seemed often to have as intimate an acquaintance
as I myself with the manners and customs of our nation, an acquaintance
extending to the most minute particulars and not un-possessed of many points
which have escaped the observation of more than one German traveler in
France. This I attribute to the long stay which they made, without
taking it into consideration how much easier it is for an Asiatic to become
acquainted with the manners and customs of The French in one year, than
it would be for a Frenchman to become acquainted with the manners and customs
of the Asiatics in four, the former being as communicative as the latter
are reserved.
Use and wont permits every
translator, and even the most illiterate commentator, to adorn the beginning
of his version, or of his parody, with a panegyric on the original, and
to extol its usefulness, its merit, and its excellence. It should
not be very difficult to divine why I have not done so. One very excellent
reason may be given: it would simply be adding tediousness to what is in
itself necessarily tedious, namely, a preface.
1 Some of these letters
were added in the edition of 1754.
2 This lady
has been identified as the author's wife.