The Panchatantra: Translated from the Sanskrit

First Published in 1965, The Panchatantra is a reprint of Franklin Edgerton’s translation, first published in volume two of Panchatantra Reconstructed (1924), with some minor alterations. Probably no other work of Hindu literature has played so important a part in the literature of the world as the Sanskrit story collection called the Panchatantra. The title means ’the five books’, and most of the older versions and translations keep this division, although the last two books are much shorter than the first three. All the ’books’ contain at least one story, and usually more, which are ’emboxed’ in the main story, called the ’frame-story’. The original Sanskrit text is composed in a mixture of prose and stanzas of verse. The stories proper are told almost wholly in prose. This translation work is an important book for scholars and students of South Asian literature and Sanskrit studies.

Franklin Edgerton was an American linguistic scholar. He was Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale University (1926) and visiting professor at Benares Hindu University (1953-4).