Lexical and Philological Notes (6): “We Turtled Them”! — A Scribal Translation Error in a Manuscript of the Persian Translation of al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr and the Proverb of “shadurustnā”

This note examines a translation error found in a manuscript of the Persian translation of al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr, preserved under number 22396 in the Library of Āstān-i Quds-i Raḍawī (copied ca. 7th/13th century). In this manuscript, the Qurʾānic phrase kashafnā ʿanhum (Q 43:50) has been mistakenly translated as “sang-posht kardīm īshān rā” (“we turtled them”). It appears that the scribe derived the verb kashafnā from the Persian noun kashaf (= turtle, tortoise, sang-posht) and, instead of the correct rendering “we removed/lifted from them,” which appears in other copies, produced this strange mistranslation. This case may be compared with well-known anecdotes about scribes or Qurʾān reciters who, lacking sufficient knowledge of Arabic, made absurd errors by misreading or misinterpreting Qurʾānic expressions that resembled Persian words. Two famous examples are often cited: (1) The transformation of the Qurʾānic word shaghaltanā (“it kept us occupied”) into the nonsensical shadurustnā by a scribe or reciter who, believing that the Qurʾān could not contain the sound “ghalat” (“error”), replaced it with “durust” (“correct”). From this story arose the humorous proverb shadurustnā kardan, meaning “to make a wrong correction in an attempt to fix something.” (2) The case of a reciter who altered the Qurʾānic phrase kharr-a Mūsā (“Moses fell down”) into kharr-a ʿĪsā (“the donkey of Jesus”) because he misunderstood the Arabic verb kharr(a) (“he fell”) as the Persian noun khar (“donkey”) and, thinking that the Prophet known for having a donkey was Jesus rather than Moses, “corrected” the verse accordingly. The mistranslation “we turtled them” in this manuscript of al-Ṭabarī’s Persian Tafsīr thus represents not only a newly discovered instance of the shadurustnā phenomenon in Qurʾānic texts but also firm evidence of the occurrence of such errors in Persian-script Qurʾānic manuscripts copied by Iranian scribes. In other words, the anecdote of the scribe or reciter who performed a “shadurustnā correction,” though perhaps exaggerated, is by no means wholly fictitious; similar mistakes demonstrably occurred in Iranian Qurʾānic manuscripts from early periods.