The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 6
In 1923 the publisher Jonathan Cape proposed to T.E. Lawrence that he translate Mardrus into English. Lawrence replied enthusiastically, describing the Mardrus version as ‘Much the best version of the “Nights” in any language (not excepting the original which is in coffee-house talk!) and it’s ambitious to make a still-better English version: and yet I think it’s possible. Better, I mean, as prose. The correctness of Mardrus can’t be bettered. The rivalry in English isn’t high. Payne crabbed: Burton unreadable: Lane pompous.’20 T.E. Lawrence’s breezy praise of Mardrus’s translation calls his judgement into question (not for the first time, of course) and it makes one wonder how good Lawrence’s knowledge of Arabic really was. For all his love of the Arabs of the desert, Lawrence showed little knowledge of or interest in Arabic literature. In the end, nothing came of the Lawrence/Mardrus edition, and Mardrus’s French was translated by E. Powys Mathers. Powys Mathers did a good job on Mardrus’s French, but whether the job was worth doing in the first place is another matter.
Although the key translations of the Nights were into English and French, the stories have of course been translated into most of the world’s written languages (though not often directly from the Arabic). In the twentieth century, German readers have been well served by Littmann’s complete and very capable six-volume translation (1921–8). Enno Littmann (1875–1958) was an academic philologist with a good grasp of Arabic – and of Hebrew, Amharic, Syriac, Persian, Italian, Latin and Greek. He translated the whole of the Nights, except for the poetry, though he translated the most obscene bits not into German but into Latin. His translation was based on Calcutta II, and he seems to have made use of Burton as a crib for his rendering. Despite this partial dependence on Burton, Borges, while conceding that Littmann’s translation was accurate and perfectly scholarly, still condemned it for its colourlessness: ‘In Littmann, like Washington incapable of lying, there is no other thing than German probity. It is little, it is so little. The intercourse between the Nights and Germany should have produced something more.’21 (German readers I have talked to tend to confirm Borges’s judgement.)
In Italy, the distinguished Arabist Francesco Gabrieli presided over a team of anonymous translators who translated Bulaq collated with Calcutta II. Gabrieli took a bracingly critical view of the material which was being translated, criticizing the stories for their intellectual poverty, their puerility, their psychological shallowness, their lack of internal logic and their too easy resort to magic and marvels.22 Gabrieli’s view of the stories is excessively downbeat. However, both Gabrieli’s introduction and his translation can be recommended to Italian readers. Russian readers too are apparently well served – in their case by a translation by M.A. Salier, which appeared in the years 1929–33. This translation was published by the Akademia publishing house in Moscow under the patronage of Maxim Gorky. The Akademia project was set up by Gorky in order to save writers and academics from starvation.
As has been noted in the Introduction, most recently we have a translation into English by Husain Haddawy of the Mahdi edition of the Galland manuscript. Published in 1990, Haddawy’s translation covers only 271 nights, ending with ‘The Story of Jullanar of the Sea’, and of course it does not include any of the ‘orphan stories’ or any of the Nights Apocrypha. Some readers may therefore prefer the wider range of tales translated for Penguin from the second Calcutta edition by N.J. Dawood.23 However, Haddawy’s translation is both accurate and a pleasure to read. Moreover, the Mahdi text, from which Haddawy translates, contains many artful details which have been lost in the versions printed in Calcutta and Bulaq. For those wishing to sample the Nights and get a true impression of the style and art of the stories, Haddawy’s translation cannot be too highly recommended.
2
The Book without Authors
Can textual criticism add anything to our pleasure in reading ‘The Story of the Three Apples’ or ‘The Barber’s Tale’? It seems doubtful. However, arguments about the oral or literary nature of the Nights, its folk sources and oriental prototypes, its narrative techniques, its social and political content and much else are arguments conducted in a vacuum unless one has some notion of what early versions of the Nights may have looked like and some notion too of how this corpus of tales came together in an Arab compilation. Besides, it will become apparent (I hope) that the arcanum of textual criticism and editorial technique has its own dry charm. Textual criticism is detective work, a mixture of routine foot-slogging and the occasional inspired deduction, at the end of which the suspects are narrowed down, identities are unmasked, and there are even ‘criminals’ to be apprehended; for, as we shall see further, the history of the textual transmission of the Nights has been muddied by forgers and compilers of pastiche manuscripts of the stories.
The very existence of the Nights was unknown in western Europe until Galland began to publish his translation in 1704 (even though, as we shall see, individual stories from the Nights had been included in medieval and Renaissance story collections). At first the stories were read for entertainment and studied only as a source for parodies and pastiches of eastern fairy tales. The investigation of such matters as the source or sources of the stories, the date of their compilation and the identity of their possible author only began in the early decades of the nineteenth century. That is to say, the serious study of the Nights coincided with the development of orientalism as an academic discipline. Bonaparte’s brief occupation of Egypt in 1798–9, the East India Company’s need for good linguists, the growing interest of theologians in Semitic languages related to Hebrew, and the foundation of the Société Asiatique in 1821 and the Royal Asiatic Society in 1823 all helped to stimulate a growing interest in the language and literature of the Arabs.1
It was European interest in the work that led to the production of the first printed Arabic text of the Nights. This was printed in two volumes in India in 1814–18 under the patronage of the East India Company’s College of Fort William.2 The text, which covered the first 200 nights, is known today as Calcutta I. Sheikh Shirwanee, a teacher at the college and the compiler of Calcutta I, did not indicate what his manuscript source was. Shirwanee was not attempting to produce a scholarly text, but rather an entertaining text to be used by Englishmen and others learning Arabic. Indeed, he believed the tales had originally been produced by a Syrian Arab for the use of people learning Arabic. As we have seen, the next printed version was produced in Breslau by Habicht and Fleischer (1824–43).3 The availability of these and yet later printed versions of the Arabic stories helped fuel scholarly debate about their origins.
Louis Mathieu Langlés was the founder, in 1795, of the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes in Paris. In 1814, in a preface to a text and translation of Les Voyages de Sinbad le marin et la ruse des femmes, Langlés had suggested that the stories of the Nights had ultimately an Indian origin, and he cited evidence from al-Mas‘udi to this effect. His suggestion was developed further by Baron von Hammer-Purgstall (whose career and translation of the Nights have been discussed in Chapter 1). In articles in the Journal asiatique in 1826 and 1839, von Hammer-Purgstall stressed the role of Persia and the Persian language as the conduit by which the Indian stories had reached the Arab lands (no later than the tenth century). Von Hammer-Purgstall’s arguments did not impress Silvestre de Sacy. Baron Antoine Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), Jansenist, royalist, positivist, great linguist, expert editor of texts, author of the Grammaire arabe (1810) and successor to Langlés as director of the École des langues orientales vivantes, was the teacher of a whole generation of Arabists. (His protégés and pupils included Maximilian Habicht, Heinrich Fleischer, Jean Warsy and Michael Sabbagh.) In 1817 Silvestre de Sacy published a review of the Calcutta I edition. In the review, he rather offhandedly discounted the evidence from al-Mas‘udi that the stories had a Persian and, ultimately, an Indian source. The stories seemed to him to be too Arab and too Islamic ever to have come from India. In a subsequent article published in the Mémoires of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, he argued that the work had been composed in Syria in the thirteenth century, but that its author had left the work unfinished.4
In 1835 a new recension of the Nights was printed in two volumes by the Bulaq press in Egypt.5 Although an Arabic printing press had been set up briefly in Cairo by Bonaparte when the French invaded Egypt in 1798, the printing press set up under the direction of Muhammad Ali’s regime in 1821 in the Bulaq suburb of Cairo was the first indigenous printing press in Egypt and one of the first in the Arab world. A certain Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Safti al-Sharqawi saw the Nights through the press. His edition of the stories gave no indication of its manuscript source, but the Bulaq text was to be the source of most subsequent printed versions of the Nights and was the basis of Lane’s translation. Unlike the other printed versions of the Nights, the Bulaq text does not look like a composite one. Rather, it is thought to have been based on a single Egyptian manuscript of the eighteenth century, now lost. The Arabic of Bulaq’s source was generally more correct than the garbled and semi-colloquial renderings given by the manuscripts used in the compilations of Calcutta I and Breslau. The Bulaq text was also used as a source for the fourth and last of the historically important printed versions. This was produced in Calcutta in four volumes (1839–42) and is usually referred to as Calcutta II.6 Macnaghten, who compiled it, made use not only of the Bulaq edition, but also of the two other printed versions, as well as of an eighteenth-century Egyptian manuscript. Since it used more source manuscripts, Calcutta II appeared to be the ‘fullest’ version of the Nights and hence it was chosen by Torrens, Payne, Burton and Littmann as the basis for their translations. Although scholars of sorts were involved in the production of these printed texts, none of the editions were scholarly editions in any meaningful sense. Their ‘editors’ simply put the script into type, correcting what they judged to be errors of grammar and spelling, while adding new errors of their own.
The appearance in 1838–41 of Lane’s abridged and expurgated translation of the Bulaq text provoked a new flurry of speculation about the provenance and nature of the tales. Lane’s own opinion was that, while the collection may have had a Persian prototype, the work, as we now have it, was that of one or two authors writing in Egypt around the end of the Circassian Mamluke period – that is, around 1500. When Burton produced his translation, he denounced Lane’s theory with characteristic vigour.7 Burton argued that the original core of the stories had come into the Arab lands from Persia. The stories had no single author, but were the work of many hands over a long period of time, the last additions probably being made in the sixteenth century. Burton, who can now be seen to have had the better of the argument, in coming to the conclusions that he did, was greatly assisted by his friendship with Hermann Zotenberg. Zotenberg, who looked after oriental manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, was the first scholar to attempt a comprehensive survey and comparison of the surviving manuscripts of the Nights.
At least twenty-two Arabic manuscripts of Alf Layla wa-Layla are known to have survived to the present day, and most of these were examined by Zotenberg.8 The majority of the surviving manuscripts were identified by Zotenberg as having been written in Egypt, but a few were produced in Syria, and one manuscript seemed to be a copy of a Baghdadi prototype (and hence of particular importance, for most scholars were agreed that the first Arabic version of the Nights must have been put together in medieval Iraq). A large proportion of the manuscripts were of a late date and had ended up in European libraries. It is possible that many of those written in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were produced to meet the demands of European manuscript-hunters in the Near East. (That relatively few manuscripts survived in the Near East might be taken as an indication that the work was not particularly popular there. On the other hand, one can argue that it was precisely the popularity of the work which led to the disintegration of its manuscripts in the hands of avid readers and hard-working professional storytellers.)
Zotenberg has many discoveries to his credit. Perhaps his most important achievement was to identify the main manuscript source used by Galland in his translation. This was a three-volume manuscript (though, as has been noted, there was perhaps once a fourth volume, now lost). These were the volumes which had been sent to Galland from Syria in 1701. Not only was this manuscript the main source for most of Galland’s stories, but Zotenberg (correctly) judged it to be the oldest surviving manuscript of the Nights. The script, paper and language of the manuscript all pointed to it having been produced in Syria in the Mamluke period (mid-thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries). Furthermore, an inscription in the margin listed several of the work’s owners. The earliest was a Sheikh Taj who had lived in Hama in (probably) the late fifteenth century. His grandson certainly possessed the manuscript in the Muslim year 943, corresponding to the Christian year AD 1536 or 1537. On the basis of the script, however, Zotenberg deduced that the manuscript was actually written in the late fourteenth century, and he later pushed this back to the early fourteenth century.
However, the three-volume manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale did not include all the stories that had appeared in Galland’s translation, nor did it include more than a minority of the stories known to readers of Lane’s or Burton’s translations of the Nights. The Galland manuscript contained 281 nights or about forty stories (give or take a few, depending on what one judges to be a story unit), and the third volume of the manuscript broke off halfway through the story of ‘Qamar al-Zaman’. The stories about Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, Crafty Dalilah and Prince Ahmed, and scores of others, are not included in it. It seems fairly clear that Galland also had access to another early manuscript which has since been lost. Galland’s translation gives a fuller version of the opening frame story than the Bibliothèque nationale manuscript does, and the additional details furnished by Galland (such as the name of Shahriyar’s father) are unlikely to have been invented by him (and in fact they also appear in later Egyptian manuscripts). John Richardson’s A Grammar of the Arabick Language . . . Principally Adapted for the Service of the Honourable East India Company (1776) casually refers to Galland’s work as ‘an imperfect translation of not quite one half’, before giving an Arabic text for ‘The Tale of the Barber’s Fifth Brother’. The manuscript which Richardson quoted from in his grammar, which once belonged to the notable orientalist Sir William Jones but is now lost, seems to have resembled the surviving Syrian group of manuscripts while being twice their length.
Other Syrian manuscripts, in the Vatican and the British government’s India Office, break off where the Bibliothèque nationale manuscript does, and their texts are so similar to it that all three manuscripts must ultimately derive from a common manuscript source. Zotenberg also examined the more numerous Egyptian manuscripts. He found that they had many more stories, but that they tended to give more condensed versions of the story-line than did the Syrian manuscripts (though this is not always the case). Moreover, some of the stories were so garbled that they hardly made any sense at all. The Egyptian manuscripts (which are known collectively as Zotenberg’s Egyptian Recension, or ZER) were mostly produced around 1800, almost a hundred years after Galland’s translation. Zotenberg also discovered an Arabic version of ‘Aladdin’ in a manuscript copy of a Baghdadi version of the Nights. However, as we shall see, this discovery was not what it seemed.
In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early eighth century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or ‘The Thousand Nights’. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the ninth or tenth century, this original core had Arab stories added to it – among them some of the tales about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Also, from perhaps the tenth century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation, such as the epic of Omar bin al-Nu’uman and the Sindibadnama (or, as the latter cycle features in the Burton translation, ‘The Craft and Malice of Women’). Then, from the thirteenth century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria or Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring up its length to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book’s title. At the same time older stories were modernized in small ways, so that one finds references to guns, coffee-houses and tobacco in some stories which certainly pre-date the invention or discovery of those things.
