<P> The Latin version was translated into Italian by Antonfrancesco Doni in 1552 . This translation became the basis for the first English translation, in 1570: Sir Thomas North translated it into Elizabethan English as The Fables of Bidpai: The Morall Philosophie of Doni (reprinted by Joseph Jacobs, 1888). La Fontaine published The Fables of Bidpai in 1679, based on "the Indian sage Pilpay". </P> <P> It was the Panchatantra that served as the basis for the studies of Theodor Benfey, the pioneer in the field of comparative literature . His efforts began to clear up some confusion surrounding the history of the Panchatantra, culminating in the work of Hertel (Hertel 1908, Hertel 1912, Hertel 1915) and Edgerton (1924). Hertel discovered several recensions in India, in particular the oldest available Sanskrit recension, the Tantrakhyayika in Kashmir, and the so - called North Western Family Sanskrit text by the Jain monk Purnabhadra in 1199 CE that blends and rearranges at least three earlier versions . Edgerton undertook a minute study of all texts which seemed "to provide useful evidence on the lost Sanskrit text to which, it must be assumed, they all go back", and believed he had reconstructed the original Sanskrit Panchatantra; this version is known as the Southern Family text . </P> <P> Among modern translations, Arthur W. Ryder's translation (Ryder 1925), translating prose for prose and verse for rhyming verse, remains popular . In the 1990s two English versions of the Panchatantra were published, Chandra Rajan's translation (like Ryder's, based on Purnabhadra's recension) by Penguin (1993), and Patrick Olivelle's translation (based on Edgerton's reconstruction of the ur - text) by Oxford University Press (1997). Olivelle's translation was republished in 2006 by the Clay Sanskrit Library . </P> <P> Recently Ibn al - Muqaffa's historical milieu itself, when composing his masterpiece in Baghdad during the bloody Abbasid overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty, has become the subject (and rather confusingly, also the title) of a gritty Shakespearean drama by the multicultural Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al - Bassam . Ibn al - Muqqafa's biographical background serves as an illustrative metaphor for today's escalating bloodthirstiness in Iraq--once again a historical vortex for clashing civilisations on a multiplicity of levels, including the obvious tribal, religious and political parallels . </P>

Who is the writer of panchatantra stories in hindi