The Arabian Nights

497 Pages·2008·2.14 MB·English

by  Muhsin Mahdi

The
Arabian
Nights
TRANSLATED BY
Husain Haddawy
BASED ON THE TEXT OF THE
FOURTEENTH-CENTURY SYRIAN MANUSCRIPT
EDITED BY MUHSIN MAHDI
Dedication
For Mike, and for Myriam,
Peter, Christopher, and Mark.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
The World of The Arabian Nights
Dissemination and Manuscripts
The Printed Editions
The Mahdi Edition
Past Translations
The Present Translation
The Guiding Principles
The Prose
The Verse
Conclusion
A Note on the Transliteration
Map: The World of the Nights
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
Foreword
Prologue: The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Vizier’s Daughter
The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey
The Tale of the Merchant and His Wife
The Story of the Merchant and the Demon
The First Old Man’s Tale
The Second Old Man’s Tale
The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon
The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban
The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot
The Tale of the King’s Son and the She-Ghoul
The Tale of the Enchanted King
The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies
The First Dervish’s Tale
The Second Dervish’s Tale
The Tale of the Envious and the Envied
The Third Dervish’s Tale
The Tale of the First Lady, the Mistress of the House
The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One
The Story of the Three Apples
The Story of the Two Viziers, Nur al-Din Ali al-Misri and Badr al-Din Hasan al-Basri
The Story of the Hunchback
The Christian Broker’s Tale: The Young Man with the Severed Hand and the Girl
The Steward’s Tale: The Young Man from Baghdad and Lady Zubaida’s Maid
The Jewish Physician’s Tale: The Young Man from Mosul and the Murdered Girl
The Tailor’s Tale: The Lame Young Man from Baghdad and the Barber
The Barber’s Tale
The Tale of the First Brother, the Hunchbacked Tailor
The Tale of the Second Brother, Baqbaqa the Paraplegic
The Tale of the Third Brother, Faqfaq the Blind
The Tale of the Fourth Brother, the One-Eyed Butcher
The Tale of the Fifth Brother, the Cropped of Ears
The Tale of the Sixth Brother, the Cropped of Lips
The Story of Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar
The Story of the Slave-Girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Khaqan
The Story of Jullanar of the Sea
Translator’s Postscript
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Also Translated by Husain Haddawy
Introduction
Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The World of The Arabian Nights
IT HAS BEEN some years now since as a little boy in Baghdad I used to listen
to tales from The Thousand and One Nights. It sometimes seems like yesterday,
sometimes like ages ago, for the Baghdad I knew then seems now closer to the
time of the Nights than to our own times. It was on long winter nights, when my
grandmother was visited by one lady or another, Um Fatma or Um Ali, always
dressed in black, still mourning for a husband or a son, long lost. We would
huddle around the brazier, as the embers glowed in the dim light of the oil lamp,
which cast a soft shadow over her sad, wrinkled face, as if to smooth out the
sorrows of the years. I waited patiently, while she and my grandmother
exchanged news, indulged in gossip, and whispered one or two asides. Then
there would be a pause, and the lady would smile at me, and I would seize the
proffered opportunity and ask for a story—a long story. I used to like romances
and fairy tales best, because they took me to a land of magic and because they
were long.
The lady would begin the story, and I would listen, first apprehensively,
knowing from experience that she would improvise, depending on how early or
late the hour. If it was early enough, she would spin the yarn leisurely,
amplifying here and interpolating there episodes I recognized from other stories.
And even though this sometimes troubled my childish notions of honesty and my
sense of security in reliving familiar events, I never objected, because it
prolonged the action and the pleasure. If the hour was late, she would, in spite of
my entreaties, tell either a brief story or one of normal length, summarizing here
and omitting there. If I knew the story, I would protest, reminding her of what
she had left out, and she, smilingly, would promise to tell me the story in its
entirety the next time. I would then entreat her to narrate at least such and such
an episode. Sometimes my grandmother, out of love for me and her own delight
in the story, would add her voice to mine, and the lady, pleased to be appreciated
and happy to oblige, would consent to go on, narrating in a gentle, steady voice,
except when she impersonated a man or woman in a moment of passion or a
demon in a fit of anger, at times getting up to act out the part. Her pauses were
just as delicious as her words, as we waited, anticipating a pleasure certain to
come. At last, with the voice still steady but the pauses shorter and less frequent,
she would reunite the lovers or reconcile the hero to fate, bringing the story, alas,
to an end and leaving me with a feeling of nostalgia, a sense at once of
fulfillment and of loss. Then I would go to sleep, still living with magic birds
and with demons who pursued innocent lovers and haunted my dreams, and
often dreaming, as I grew older, of a face in Samarkand that glowed with love
and blessed my waking hours.
So has the drab fabric of life been transformed into the gossamer of
romance, as these stories have been spun for centuries in family gatherings,
public assemblies, and coffeehouses, in Baghdad, Damascus, or Cairo. (Indeed,
on a recent trip to Marrakech, I came across storytellers in a public square,
mesmerizing their audiences.) Everybody has loved them, for they enchanted the
young and the old, alike, with their magic.
In the Nights themselves, tales divert, cure, redeem, and save lives.
Shahrazad cures Shahrayar of his hatred of women, teaches him to love, and by
doing so saves her own life and wins a good man; the Caliph Harun al-Rashid
finds more fulfillment in satisfying his sense of wonder by listening to a story
than in his sense of justice or his thirst for vengeance; and the king of China
spares four lives when he finally hears a story that is stranger than a strange
episode from his own life. Even angry demons are humanized and pacified by a
good story. And everyone is always ready to oblige, for everyone has a strange
story to tell.
The work consists of four categories of folk tales—fables, fairy tales,
romances, and comic as well as historical anecdotes, the last two often merging
into one category. They are divided into nights, in sections of various lengths, a
division that, although it follows no particular plan, serves a dual purpose: it
keeps Shahrayar and us in suspense and brings the action to a more familiar level
of reality. The essential quality of these tales lies in their success in interweaving
the unusual, the extraordinary, the marvelous, and the supernatural into the
fabric of everyday life. Animals discourse and give lessons in moral philosophy;
normal men and women consort or struggle with demons and, like them, change
themselves or anyone else into any form they please; and humble people lead a
life full of accidents and surprises, drinking with an exhalted caliph here or
sleeping with a gorgeous girl there. Yet both the usual incidents and the
extraordinary coincidences are nothing but the web and weft of Divine
Providence, in a world in which people often suffer but come out all right at the
end. They are enriched by the pleasure of a marvelous adventure and a sense of
wonder, which makes life possible. As for the readers, their pleasure is vicarious
and aesthetic, derived from the escape into an exotic world of wish fulfillment
and from the underlying act of transformation and the consequent pleasure,
which may be best defined in Freudian terms as the sudden overcoming of an
obstacle.
Such an effect, which is contingent on merging the supernatural and the
natural and securing a willing suspension of disbelief, the storyteller of the
Nights produces by the precise and concrete detail that he uses in a matter-of-
fact way in description, narration, and conversation, bridging the gap between
the natural and supernatural situations. It is this quality, by the way, that explains
the appeal of these tales to the romantic imagination. For instance, the she-
demon is a serpent as thick as the trunk of a palm tree, while the demon is as thin
as a spear and as long as two; the transparent curtain hiding the gorgeous girl in
the bed is red-speckled; and the seductive girl from Baghdad buys ten pounds of
mutton, while the pious gardener buys two flagons of wine for the mysterious
lovers. Thus the phantasmagoric is based on the concrete, the supernatural
grounded in the natural.
Dissemination and Manuscripts
THE STORIES OF the Nights are of various ethnic origins, Indian, Persian, and
Arabic. In the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to conform to
the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them and to the
particular conditions of that society at a particular time. They were also
modified, as in my own experience, to suit the role of the storyteller or the
demand of the occasion. But different as their ethnic origins may be, these
stories reveal a basic homogeneity resulting from the process of dissemination
and assimilation under Islamic hegemony, a homogeneity or distinctive synthesis
that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam.
No one knows exactly when a given story originated, but it is evident that
some stories circulated orally for centuries before they began to be collected and
written down. Arab historians of the tenth century, like al-Mas’udi and ibn al-
Nadim speak of the existence of such collections in their time. One was an
Arabic work called The Thousand Tales or The Thousand Nights, a translation
from a Persian work entitled Hazar Afsana (A thousand legends). Both works
are now lost, but although it is not certain whether any of these stories or which
of them were retained in subsequent collections, it is certain that the Hazar
Afsana supplied the popular title as well as the general scheme—the frame story
of Shahrazad and Shahrayar and the division into nights—to at least one such
collection, namely The Thousand and One Nights.
The stories of the Nights circulated in different manuscript copies until they
were finally written down in a definite form, or what may be referred to as the
original version, in the second half of the thirteenth century, within the Mamluk
domain, either in Syria or in Egypt. That version, now lost, was copied a
generation or two later in what became the archetype for subsequent copies. It
too is now lost, but its existence is clearly attested to by the remarkable
similarities in substance, form, and style among the various early copies, a fact
that points to a common origin. Specifically, all the copies share the same
nucleus of stories, which must have formed the original and which appear in the
present translation. The only exception is the “Story of Qamar al-Zaman,” of
which only the first few pages are extant in any Syrian manuscript, and for this
reason I have not included it in the present translation.
From the archetype there evolved two separate branches of manuscripts, the
Syrian and the Egyptian. Of the Syrian branch four manuscripts are known to
exist. The first is the copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in three
volumes (nos. 3609-3611). It is of all existing manuscripts the oldest and the
closest to the original, having been written sometime during the fourteenth
century. The other three Syrian manuscripts were copied much later, in the
sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, respectively. They are, however,
very close to the fourteenth-century manuscript and similarly contain only the
nucleus and the very first part of “Qamar al-Zaman.”
If the Syrian branch shows a fortunately stunted growth that helped
preserve the original, the Egyptian branch, on the contrary, shows a proliferation
that produced an abundance of poisonous fruits that proved almost fatal to the
original. First, there exists a plethora of Egyptian copies all of which, except for
one written in the seventeenth century, are late, dating between the second part
of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century. Second, these
copies delete or modify passages that exist in the Syrian manuscripts, add others,
and indiscriminately borrow from each other. Third, the copyists, driven to
complete one thousand and one nights, kept adding folk tales, fables, and
anecdotes from Indian, Persian, and Turkish, as well as indigenous sources, both
from the oral and from the written traditions. One such example is the story of
Sindbad, which, though early in date, is a later addition. What emerged, of
course, was a large, heterogeneous, indiscriminate collection of stories by
different hands and from different sources, representing different layers of
culture, literary conventions and styles tinged with the Ottoman cast of the time,
a work very different from the fundamentally homogeneous original, which was
the clear expression of the life, culture, and literary style of a single historical
moment, namely, the Mamluk period. This is the more significant because the
Ottoman period is marked by a sharp decline in Arabic culture in general and
literature in particular.
The mania for collecting more stories and “completing” the work led some
copyists to resort even to forgery. Such is the case of none other than “The Story
of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.” This story is not among the eleven basic
stories of the original work, nor does it appear in any known Arabic manuscript
or edition, save in two, both written in Paris, long after it had appeared in
Galland’s translation. Galland himself, as his diaries indicate, first heard the
story in 1709 from Hanna Diab, a Maromite Christian of Aleppo, who may have
subsequently written it down and given it to Galland for his translation. The first
time the story appeared in Arabic was in 1787, in a manuscript written by a
Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysius Shawish, alias Dom
Denis Chavis, a manuscript designed to complete the missing portions of the
fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript. The story appeared again in a manuscript
written between 1805 and 1808, in Paris, by Mikhail Sabbagh, a Syrian
collaborator of Silvestre de Sacy. Sabbagh claimed to have copied it in turn from
a Baghdad manuscript written in 1703. Such good fortune, in retrieving not one
but two versions of a lost wonderful tale, might be cause for rejoicing, as it
indeed was among the scholars. However, a careful examination of the two
versions, both in the light of the general style of the Nights and in the light of
Galland’s translation, leads to a less joyful conclusion. Chavis fabricated the text
by translating Galland back into Arabic, as is manifest from his French syntax
and turns of phrase, and Sabbagh perpetuated the hoax by improving Chavis’s
translation and claiming it to be a Baghdad version. And this forgery was the
source used by Payne and Burton for their own translations of the story.
The Printed Editions