Small 4to. Without pagination, [72], Arabic text with the Latin translation of Thomas Van Erpenius, woodcut title-border, the first 12 leaves are taken up by the preface and the Alphabetum Arabicum, followed by 20 leaves, the Historia Josephi, with an interlinear translation (to be read backwards), and a freer rendering in the margin. Then 7 leaves by the Bibliander translation, as a specimen of how it should not be translated. Finally 31 leaves of Erpenius's learned annotations, and coronidis loco, plus 2 leaves text and translation with commentary of the first Sura, contemporary full vellum, soiled and stained, all edges red, light damp stain affecting margins of first 8 leaves, light soiling to endpapers and first 2 leaves, few pencil annotations in margins, Typographia Erpeniana, first edition, Leyden, 1617.

Synopsis

The first scholarly edition of any substantial chapter of the Qur’an, translated by the pre-eminent Arabist of the early 17th century.
Prior to the 19th century, European preoccupation with the Qur’an is normally associated with a desire to understand and refute rather than to appreciate. But in the case of the editor of this book, the interest in the Qur’an was primarily philological. Thomas Erpenius believed that the prerequisites for gaining a good initial grasp of Arabic were a grammar, a dictionary and the Qur’an. As the only Arabic text to be consistently fully vocalised, the Qur’an offers an ideal exercise for those wishing to improve their reading speed if not their understanding and it was to this end that Erpenius published the fully vocalised text of Surat Yusuf. Prefaced by some essential notes on phonetics and orthography (the tahajji) and accompanied by two Latin versions of his own: the interlinear, which follows the Arabic word for word; and the marginal, which is a freer rendering. There follows a third translation, taken from the medieval Latin version first printed in Basel in 1543, and his own detailed philological notes to the Arabic text. Erpenius also remarks, in a note to Arabists, that it was the inaccuracy of this medieval version – the so called Cluniac version and its even less faithful Italian and German derivatives – that had led to a demand for a fresh translation. This part of the book concludes with Al Fatiha (the text of the opening chapter of the Qur’an), his own two versions and the Cluniac translation, together with a fourth translation by Guillaume Postel, first printed in that eccentric Frenchman’s Gammatica Arabica (Paris, c.1543).
Bibliographic references: Smitskamp 89 b; Enay 114; Brockelmann, II, p. 237, I, p. 287, SII, p. 332; Schnurrer 52; 368; Balagna, p. 60; Krek; Le Livre et le Liban 67; Lettres 115 & 113; Zenker 1380.