Origin of Serendipity
Cristoforo Armeno or Christopher the Armenian, born in Tabriz in the 16th century, was a translator of Persian. He is credited with the first translation from Persian into Italian of Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo (Travels and adventures of the three princes of Serendip), in its editio princeps in Venice by the printer Michele Tramezzino in 1557.
The word Serendipity was created by Horace Walpole, in 1754, thanks to his translation that made the book famous!
The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip is based upon the life of Persian King Bahram V, who ruled the Sassanid Empire (420–440). Stories of his rule are told in epic poetry of the region (Firdausi’s Shahnameh of 1010, Nizami’s Haft Paykar of 1197, Khusrau’s Hasht Bihisht of 1302), parts of which are based upon historical facts with embellishments derived from folklore going back hundreds of years to oral traditions in India and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. With the exception of the well-known camel story, English translations are very hard to come by.
In chapter three of Voltaire‘s 1747 novel Zadig, there is an adaptation of The Three Princes of Serendip, this time involving, instead of a camel, a horse and a dog, which the eponymous Zadig is able to describe in great detail from his observations of the tracks on the ground. When he is accused of theft and taken before the judges, Zadig clears himself by recounting the mental process which allows him to describe the two animals he has never seen: « I saw on the sand the tracks of an animal, and I easily judged that they were those of a little dog. Long, shallow furrows imprinted on little rises in the sand between the tracks of the paws informed me that it was a bitch whose dugs were hanging down, and that therefore she had had puppies a few days before. »
Zadig’s detective work was influential. Cuvier wrote, in 1834, in the context of the new science of paleontology:
Today, anyone who sees only the print of a cloven hoof might conclude that the animal that had left it behind was a ruminator, and this conclusion is as certain as any in physics and in ethics. This footprint alone, then, provides the observer with information about the teeth, the jawbone, the vertebrae, each leg bone, the thighs, shoulders and pelvis of the animal which had just passed: it is a more certain proof than all Zadig’s tracks.
Cuvier
T. H. Huxley, the proponent of Darwin’s theories of evolution, also found Zadig’s approach instructive, and wrote in his 1880 article « The method of Zadig »:
What, in fact, lay at the foundation of all Zadig’s arguments, but the coarse, commonplace assumption, upon which every act of our daily lives is based, that we may conclude from an effect to the pre-existence of a cause competent to produce that effect?
Edgar Allan Poe in his turn was probably inspired by Zadig when he created C. Auguste Dupin in « The Murders in the Rue Morgue », calling it a « tale of ratiocination » wherein « the extent of information obtained lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. » Poe’s M. Dupin stories mark the start of the modern detective fiction genre. Émile Gaboriau and Arthur Conan Doyle were perhaps also influenced by Zadig.
