This book contains an English translation on the medieval Georgian novel in verse ‘The Man in the Panthers skin” a glorious love-poem, one of the most beautiful known to man, — by Shota Rustaveli, the 8th centenary of whose birth is being celebrated in September, 19. Shota Rustaveli is the greatest poetical genius of the Georgian people. His romantic epic, the story of a “midjnur” — a man possessed by love and driven to distraction by it, who roams over the world in quest of the lady of his heart (a precursor of Ariosto’s “Orlando jurioso”) has contributed more than any other literary work to the moulding of the Georgian soul and the formation of the Georgian mind.
The book is highly valued not only by Georgian people but by every one who is interested in problems of world literature on account of its great and noble beauty and astonishing maturity of taste and thought.
It is the first English prose translation by the famous English writer Marjory Scott Wardrop (18b9-1909) who dedicated almost the whole of her life to the study of Georgian literature and, in particular, the text of the poem. The translation was published after the death of the translator by her brother Sir Oliver Wardrop (1864-1948) in the Oriental Translation Fund, New Series, vol. XXI, London, 1912.
This translation, in spite of the fact that some places were not understood quite correctly, even so, remains the most exact and the closest to the original, although, of course, there is no reflection in it of the beauty of the Georgian verse and Georgian rhymes with which no other rhymes in world literature can compare in richness.
The text is reprinted from the first English edition, word for word without any changes. Only the preface is slightly shortened: those places are omitted which for a period of more than 50 years have fallen too much out of date.
