The Secret History of The Mongols - Rediscovery and Translations

Rediscovery and Translations

The only surviving copies of the work are transcriptions of the original Mongolian text with Chinese characters, accompanied by a (somewhat shorter) in-line glossary and a translation of each section into Chinese. In China, the work had been well known as a text for teaching Chinese to read and write Mongolian during the Ming Dynasty and the Chinese translation was used in several historical works, but by the 1800s, copies had become very rare.

Baavuday Tsend Gun (1875-1932) was the first Mongolian scholar to transcribe The Secret History of the Mongols into modern Mongolian, in 1915-17. The first to discover the Secret History for the west and offer a translation from the Chinese glossary was the Russian sinologist Palladiy Kafarov. The first translations from the reconstructed Mongolian text were done by the German sinologist Erich Haenisch (edition of the reconstructed original text: 1937; of the translation: 1941, second edition 1948) and Paul Pelliot (ed. 1949). B. I. Pankratov published a translation into Russian in 1962. Later, Tsendiin Damdinsuren transcribed the chronicle into Khalkha Mongolian in 1970.

Arthur Waley published a partial translation of the Secret History, but the first full translation into English was by Francis Woodman Cleaves, The Secret History of the Mongols: For the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary. The archaic language adopted by Cleaves was not satisfying to all and, between 1971 and 1985, Igor de Rachewiltz published a fresh translation in eleven volumes of the series Papers on Far Eastern History accompanied by extensive footnotes commenting not only on the translation but also various aspects of Mongolian culture. (Brill released de Rachewiltz' edition as a two-volume set in 2003.) The Secret History of the Mongols has been published in translation in over 30 languages by researchers.

In 2004 the Government of Mongolia decreed that the copy of the Secret History of the Mongols covered with golden plates to be located to the rear part of the Government building.