The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 33
Today, of course, any edition of the Nights also has to compete with film and television for the public’s attention. However, the ‘selfish word-strings’ which comprise the stories of the Nights, in continuing to mutate, have made the successful transition on to film. As early as 1905 the pioneer film-maker Georges Méliès drew on the pantomime tradition to present in Le Palais des Mille et une nuits an opulent, if now quaintly dated, vision of the gorgeous East. Other films have followed, with such titles as A Tale of the Harem, The Cobbler and the Caliph, Kismet and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Most filmed adaptations of stories from the Nights are frankly trashy, but a few, including the two versions of The Thief of Baghdad (1924 and 1940) and Pasolini’s Il fore delle Mille e una notte (1974), rank high among the masterpieces of world cinema. Thus the Nights continues to adapt, increasing in bulk and replicating its stories in new and strange forms. As much a cultural amphibian in the modern West as it was in the medieval Near East, the inspiration of the Nights flourishes not only in novels by intellectuals but also in films aiming at mass entertainment. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s epigraph for his wonderful film will serve for this book as well:
La verità non sta in un solo sogno, ma in molti sogni.
(One does not find truth in a single dream, but rather in many dreams.)
Chronology
c. 18th–16th centuries BC Westcar Papyrus.
5th century BC Oldest surviving version of the Jataka.
AD c. 250 Seng-Houei’s Kieou Tsa P’iyu King.
630 The Prophet Muhammad conquers Mecca.
632 Death of Muhammad.
630s and 640s Defeat of Byzantine and Sassanian Persian armies and occupation of their lands by the Arabs.
661 Beginning of Umayyad dynasty.
710 Muslim invasion of Spain.
711 Muslim occupation of Transoxania and northern India.
750 Beginning of Abbasid dynasty of caliphs.
c. 750 Kalila wa-Dimna translated from Persian into Arabic.
762–6 Baghdad is founded and becomes Abbasid capital.
c. 800 Sindibad cycle put together.
c. 800–900 Kitab Hadith Alf Layla put together.
831 The poet al-Asma’i dies.
836 Samarra is founded and becomes Abbasid capital for a while.
c. 850? Earliest surviving fragment of the Nights written.
869 The essayist al-Jahiz dies.
910 Fatimid caliphate founded in North Africa.
942 Al-Jahshiyari, compiler of a no-longer-extant rival story collection, dies.
956 The cosmographer and historian al-Mas‘udi dies.
969 Fatimid occupation of Egypt and foundation of Cairo. Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa (‘Letters of the Brethren of Purity’) written.
987 Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist, a catalogue of books, completed.
994 Al-Tanukhi, compiler of the story collection Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda, dies.
1085 Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara.
early 12th century Heroic epic Sirat Antar put together.
1110 Petrus Alfonsi, compiler of the Disciplina clericalis, dies.
1122 Al-Hariri dies.
1143 Koran translated into Latin.
1171 Saladin brings to an end Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and founds Ayyubid dynasty.
1200 Ibn al-Jawzi dies.
early 13th century Al-Jawbari’s exposé of rogues’ tricks, the Kashf al-Asrar, written.
1250–60 Collapse of Ayyubid principalities in Egypt and Syria and their replacement by Mamluke sultanate.
1252–84 Alfonso the Wise reigns in Castile.
1253 The pornographer al-Tayfashi dies. Sindibad translated into Spanish.
1258 Mongols sack Baghdad. Execution of last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad.
1260–77 Mamluke Sultan al-Zahir Baybar reigns over Egypt and Syria.
1311 Shadow-play author Ibn Daniyal dies.
1330 Nakhshabi’s Tutinameh.
1353 Boccaccio’s Decameron written.
1367 Al-Yafi‘i, collector of Sufi tales, dies.
1384 Don Juan Manuel dies.
1387 Chaucer begins Canterbury Tales.
c. 1410 The pornographer al-Nafzawi floruit.
1412 Al-Ghuzuli, compiler of the belles-lettres collection Matali al-Budur, dies.
1424 Sercambi dies.
1486 Ahmad al-Danaf, notorious Egyptian criminal, executed.
1516 Ottoman Turkish occupation of Mamluke Syria. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso published.
1517 Ottoman Turkish occupation of Mamluke Egypt. Execution of Tumanbay, last of Mamluke sultans.
1549–59 Heptameron compiled by Margaret of Navarre.
1634–6 Basile’s Pentamerone.
1646 Birth of Antoine Galland.
1697 D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale posthumously published under Galland’s supervision. Perrault’s Contes de la mère l’Oye published.
1704 Galland begins publishing his translation, Les Mille et une nuits. (The last volume appears in 1717.)
1708 Probable date of first chap-book edition of Galland in English translation.
1715 Death of Galland.
1721 Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.
1742 Le Sopha by Crébillon fils. Les Mille et une fadaises.
1748 Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets. Voltaire’s Zadig.
1759 Johnson’s Rasselas.
1761 Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet.
1764 Ridley’s Tales of the Genii.
1765 Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.
1767 Sheridan’s Nourjahad.
1772 Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux.
1776 Richardson’s Grammar of the Arabick Language.
1786 English edition of Beckford’s Vathek.
1792 Cazotte guillotined.
1794 Alexander Russell’s Natural History of Aleppo.
1795 Foundation of the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes, Paris.
1796 Death of the orientalist Sir William Jones. M.G. Lewis’s The Monk.
1798–1801 French occupation of Egypt.
1799 Von Hammer-Purgstall in Istanbul.
1800 Southey’s Thalaba.
1804 Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Murad the Unlucky’.
1804–5 First part of Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript.
1810 Silvestre de Sacy’s Grammaire arabe. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama.
1811 Jonathan Scott’s translation of the Nights.
1812–22 Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen.
1812–32 Byron’s Giaour.
1813 Brothers Grimm publish their Märchen.
1814–18 Calcutta I edition of the Nights.
1815 Suicide of Potocki.
1817 Moore’s Lalla Rookh.
1820 Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.
1824–43 Breslau edition of the Nights.
1825 Al-Jabarti dies. Habicht begins to publish his version of the Nights. German version of von Hammer-Purgstall’s translation of the Nights published.
1832 Washington Irving’s Legends of the Alhambra.
1835 Bulaq edition of the Nights.
1836 Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.
1837 Weil begins his translation of the Nights.
1838 Torrens’s translation of the Nights.
1838–41 Lane’s translation of the Nights.
1839–42 Calcutta II edition of the Nights.
1840 Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
1844 Kinglake’s Eothen.
1851 Nerval’s Voyage en Orient. Melville’s Moby Dick.
1855 Meredith’s The Shaving of Shagpat.
1863–93 Lane’s Arabic–English Lexicon.
1882 Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights.
1882–4 Payne’s translation of the Nights.
1885–8 Burton’s translation of the Nights.
1899–1904 Mardrus’s translation of the Nights.
1911 Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen.
1921–8 Littmann’s German translation of the Nights.
1928 Vladimir Propp’s Morfologija Skazki.
1943 Death of D.B. Macdonald.
1974 John Barth’s Chimera.
1978 Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales.
1984 Mahdi’s edition of Alf Layla wa-Layla.
Notes
Introduction
1 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, in idem, Labyrinths (London, 1970), p. 48; idem, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’, in idem, Seven Nights (London, 1980), p. 50.
2 R.A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (London, 1907), pp. 456–9; H.A.R. Gibb, Arabic Literature: An Introduction (2nd revised edn, Oxford, 1963), pp. 148–9.
3 Mia I. Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden, 1963).
4 Muhsin Mahdi, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Leiden, 1984), 2 vols.
5 Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (London and New York, 1990). For famous tales (such as ‘Sinbad’, ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ma’aruf the Cobbler’) which are not found in the oldest manuscript and therefore do not feature in Haddawy’s translation, the reader may wish to consult the modern translation, in Penguin Books, by N.J. Dawood, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (London, 1973).
6 Richard Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Now Entitled the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Benares = Stoke Newington, London, 1885), 10 vols; and Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Benares = Stoke Newington, London, 1886–8), 6 vols. (In later reprints of the Supplemental Nights it is common to find that the third volume has been split into two. However, the pagination in supplemental volumes 3 and 4 is continuous.)
1 Beautiful Infidels
1 On the Arabic language in general, see A.F.L. Beeston, The Arabic Language Today (London, 1970); and Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edn), s.v. ‘Arabiyya’.
2 On the life and work of Galland, see Mohamed Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland, sa vie et son ouevre (Paris, 1964); Georges May, Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland (Paris, 1986); Claude Hagège, ‘Traitement du sens et fidelité dans l’adaptation classique: Sur le texte arabe des Mille et une nuits et la traduction du Galland’, Arabica, 27 (1980), pp. 114–39.
3 On the life and work of d’Herbelot, see Henry Laurens, Aux sources de l’orientalisme: La Bibliothèque orientale de Barthélemi d’Herbelot (Paris, 1978).
4 On Beckford and Southey, see Chapter 10.
5 On translations of the Nights in general, see D.B. Macdonald, ‘On Translating the Nights’, The Nation (1900), pt 1, pp. 167–8, and pt 2, pp. 185–6; idem, ‘A Bibliographical and Literary Study of the First Appearance of the Arabian Nights in Europe’, Library Quarterly, 2 (1932), pp. 387–420; Nikita Elisseef, Thèmes et motifs des Mille et une nuits (Beirut, 1949), pp. 69–84; Hagège, ‘Traitement du sens et fidelité’; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Translators of The 1001 Nights’, in Borges: A Reader, ed. E.R. Monegal and A. Reid (New York, 1981), pp. 73–86; Wiebke Walther, Tausendundeine Nacht (Munich, 1987), pp. 36–53.
6 On English translations of Galland, see especially C. Knipp, ‘The Arabian Nights in England’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 5 (1964), pp. 44–74.
7 On the life and works of von Hammer-Purgstall, see Baher Mohammed Elgohary, Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, 1774–1856: Ein Dichter und Vermittler orientalischer Literatur (Stuttgart, 1979); Bernard Lewis, The Assassins (London, 1967), pp. 12–13; Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and their Myth (Oxford, 1982), pp. 138–45.
8 On Habicht’s translation, see D.B. Macdonald, ‘Maximilian Habicht and his Recension of The Thousand and One Nights’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1909), pp. 685–704.
9 On the life and works of Lane, see Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of his Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East (London, 1978); A.J. Arberry, Oriental Essays (London, 1960), pp. 87–121; R. Irwin, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Times Literary Supplement (26 April, 1985), p. 474.
10 On the life and work of John Payne, see Thomas Wright, The Life of John Payne (London, 1919).
11 On nineteenth-century British pornographers, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London, 1966), esp. ch. 2.
12 Wright, Life of John Payne, p. 269.
13 There are four modern biographies of Burton in English worthy of consideration (each has its own slant and its particular problems): Byron Farewell, Burton (London, 1963); Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives (New York, 1967); Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York, 1990); Frank McLynn, Burton: Snow upon the Desert (London, 1990). For reviews of the latter two books, see R. Irwin, ‘The Many Lives of Ruffian Dick’, Washington Post Book World (20 May, 1990), pp. 3, 6; and idem, ‘A Passion for the Unknowable’, Times Literary Supplement (12 October, 1990), pp. 1089–90. Richard Francois Gournay’s L’Appel du Proche-Orient: Richard Francis Burton et son temps is a more penetrating study than any of the English biographies. James A. Casada’s Sir Richard F. Burton: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1990) is excellent.
14 On Urquhart, see Sir Thomas Urquhart, The Jewel, ed. R.D.S. Jack and RJ. Lyall (Edinburgh, 1983); Richard Boston (ed.), The Admirable Urquhart: Selected Writings (London, 1975).
15 Borges, ‘The Translators of The 1001 Nights’, pp. 73–86.
16 Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (London and New York, 1990), p. xxv.
17 Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (London, 1986), pp. 45–66; cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), pp. 194–7.
18 Henry Reeve, ‘The Arabian Nights’, Edinburgh Review, 164 (1886), p. 184.
19 On the life and works of Mardrus, see Emile-François Julia’s (to all intents and purposes unreadable) Les Mille et une nuits et l’enchanteur Mardrus (Paris, 1935); and cf. Rana Kabbani, ‘Turkish Delight’, Observer (13 July 1986), p. 53. For less rhapsodic views of Mardrus and his translation, see Macdonald, ‘On Translating the Nights’, pt 2, pp. 185–6; V. Chauvin, ‘Les Mille et une nuits de M. Mardrus’, Revue des bibliothèques et archives de Belgique, 3 (1905), pp. 290–95; I. Cattan, ‘Une traduction dite “littérale”: Le Livre des mille et une nuits par le docteur J.-C. Mardrus’, Revue tunisienne, 13 (1906), pp. 16–23; Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland, pp. 208–13; Suhayr al-Qalamawi, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Cairo, 1976, in Arabic), p. 23; Hagège, ‘Traitement du sens et fidelité’, pp. 129–32.
20 Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1989), p. 719.
21 Borges, ‘Translators’, p. 86.
22 Francesco Gabrieli, ‘Le Mille e una notte nella cultura europeana’, in idem, Storia e civiltà Musulmana (Naples, 1947), pp. 99–107.
23 N.J. Dawood (trans.), Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (London, 1973). Michael Beard, in a review of Haddawy’s translation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 112 (1992), pp. 144–5, while praising Haddawy’s work, contrasted it with the Dawood translation in the following terms: ‘in general, Dawood is nimbler, choosing to frame clusters of action between strong pauses which allow the reader to stand back from the action. Haddawy’s tendency is to accumulate actions in small unsorted units, sometimes confusingly’. Of course, it must be borne in mind that the two translators are working from different texts; and, in the end, it all depends what you are looking for in a translation.
2 The Book without Authors
1 On the rise of orientalism, see Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950) (though Schwab concentrates mainly on India). Also: Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle and London, 1987); Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991). Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (London, 1978) is a stimulating book. For some of the criticism it has stimulated, see B. Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books (24 January 1982), pp. 49–56; R. Irwin, ‘Writing about Islam and the Arabs: A Review of E.W. Said, Orientalism’, I & C (formerly Ideology and Consciousness), 9 (Winter 1981–2), pp. 103–12; E. Sivan, ‘Edward Said and his Arab Reviewers’, in idem, Interpretations of Islam, Past and Present (Princeton, 1985), pp. 133–54.
2 The Arabian Nights Entertainments in the Original Arabic: Published under the Patronage of the College of Fort William by Sheykh Uhmud bin Moohummud Sheerwanee ool Yumunee (Calcutta, 1814, 1818), 2 vols. On the early printed editions in general, see Nikita Elisseef, Thèmes et motifs des Mille et une nuits (Beirut, 1949), pp. 65–8; Muhsin Mahdi, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Leiden, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 14–22.
3 Tausend und Eine Nacht Arabish: Nach einer Handschrift aus Tunis Herausgegeben von Dr Maximilian Habicht (Breslau, 1825–38), 8 vols. Four further volumes were published by R. Fleischer in 1842–3.
4 Silvestre de Sacy, ‘Compt-rendu du tome 1er de la première edition de Calcutta’, Journal des savants (November 1817), pp. 667–86; idem, ‘Memoire sur l’origine du recueil de contes intitulés les Mille et une nuits’, Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 10 (1829), pp. 30–64.
5 Alf Layla wa-Layla (Bulaq, Cairo, 1835), 2 vols.
6 Book of the Thousand and One Nights Commonly Known as the ‘Arabian Nights Entertainments’ Now for the First Time Published Complete in the Original Arabic, ed. W.H. Macnaghten (Calcutta, 1839–42).
