The Arabian Nights in Chinese

34 Pages·2010·0.22 MB·English

The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations:
Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter

Wen-chin Ouyang
SOAS, University of London

I
Introductory Remarks
In the 1980s a two-volume translation of The Thousand and One Nights, called Tian Fang Ye
Tan, appeared in Taipei. According to the general editor of ‘world literature series’ for
Gueiguan Publishing Company, a PhD in comparative literature, it is a literary masterpiece
worthy of canonization around the world.1 The author of the ‘readers guide’, also a PhD in
comparative literature, asserts the same but makes an interesting observation. In comparison
with a six-volume translation from Burton published in Beijing in 1982, some say 1984, the
Taipei version is in effect an adaptation. Many stories are now very different from the
original. In fact, the structure of the original is no longer recognizable in the two-volume
‘translation’ published in Taipei. The frame-within-frame narrative structure of the original
Arabic Nights has given way to discreet stories organized in a linear fashion but in no
particular order.2 This said, the two ‘prefaces’ assert, the distortions found in the Taipei
version, however, should not prevent readers from enjoying the stories, getting a flavour of
the Nights as a work of literary art from the ‘Middle East’(referred to as Tian Fang in the title
of Chinese translations) and learning about life in the medieval Arabic-Islamic society.
The two ‘prefaces’ to the Taipei translation hint at an interesting history of the
Chinese translation, reception and assessment of the The 1001 Nights that transcends political
boundaries and, more important, the contemporary theoretical binary—of colonized and

1 Wu Qienchen, ‘Kuanlan huanqiu wenshue de qitsai kuangpu’, Tian Fang Ye Tan (Taipei: Gueiguan, 1999
[1981, 1984, 1985, 1994, 1997]), i-viii.
2 Su Qikang, ‘Gushi zhong de gushi—Tian Fang Ye Tan’, Tian Fang Ye Tan (Taipei: Gueiguan, 1999 [1981,
1984, 1985, 1994, 1997]), ix-xvii.
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colonizer—in taking stock of, grappling with and coming to terms with cross-cultural
encounters and exchanges. This history, which has yet to be thoroughly researched, mapped
and written, opens up new vistas for the ways in which we may comprehend cross cultural
encounters and exchanges. It demands that we re-theorize ‘Orientalism’ differently. In the
first instance, how would we re-theorize ‘Orientalism’ in a case where cultural encounter
occurs outside the colonizer-colonized framework and is, more often than not in the
contemporary context, mediated by a third part. In another, second instance, how would we
theorize ‘translation’ as a site of cross-cultural encounter and exchange? How would
‘translation’ refine and give nuance to our understanding of intercultural encounter that has
thus far been narrowly located either in the dominant paradigm of ‘Western’ influence on the
‘East’ found in the all pervasive and overwhelming discourses on ‘modernity’ and
‘modernization’ of the ‘East’, or in the marginalized and underwhelming attempts at drawing
attention to the instrumental role played by the ‘Orient’—the culture of the ‘East’—in what
Raymond Schwab calls the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ in the ‘West’.
The theoretical or analytical paradigms for the discussion of intercultural encounters I
have mentioned above must, it goes without saying, be more specifically situated in the
particular context of the machinery of production of knowledge located in Middle East
Studies within ‘Western’ Academe which has been dominated by the imitative or antagonistic
reverberations of Edward Said. Even translation—what texts get translated and how a text is
translated—has not escaped the hegemony of these paradigms. What gets chosen for
translation of how a text is transformed during translation are theorized as implicating an
‘Orientalist’ ideology operative behind production of knowledge, whether one is engaged
with the scrutiny of market forces driving what Bourdieu calls ‘field of cultural production’,
or of the intricate processes of thinking and making language choices behind a translated text.
The findings seem to confirm Said’s thesis that in the ‘West’ the ‘East’ is necessarily
2
explicitly or implicitly represented as its other, which representation is subject to its will to
power, and that any kind of representation the powerful self makes of the powerless other,
generally speaking, is willy-nilly seen as governed by a master-slave relationship, with the
powerful doing all the distortions of the powerless. The translations of The 1001 Nights into
English have not escaped this paradigm. Said has a particular axe to grind with Edward Lane
and Richard Burton, whose English renditions of their respective Arabian Nights Said finds
conforming to ‘Orientalist’ organization of knowledge and reductive of the ‘Orient’, their
exoticizing and eroticizing of the Orient fanning their own fantasy of mastery of their subject,
or their other.3
Although cultural theories have made inroads into interrogating and subverting Said’s
paradigm, giving more complex and nuanced discussions of the relation between ‘East’ and
‘West’,4 they remain under the influence of, haunted by the paradigmatic binary of self and
other, powerful and powerless, colonizer and colonized that lies at the heart of Said’s

3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). The figures of Burton and Lane as ‘Orientalists’
cast long shadows on Said’s text, which is pervaded with references to them, their travels to the Orient, their
role in cultural and academic Orientalism, and the ways in which their translations of The Thousand and One
Nights played into the Orientalist agenda of European imperialism.
4 See, for example, Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London:
Reaktion Books, 1997) and The Renassiance Bazaar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); John M. Ganim,
Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York and
Houndmills, 2005); Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Lisa
Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996); Lisa Jardine and Jerry
Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Reina
Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996) and
Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004);
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1991); John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 1995); Gerald MacLean, Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East
(New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and
the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992); Geoffrey Nash, From
Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830-1926 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005); and
Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2006).
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‘Orientalism’ and subsequent post-colonial theories and studies.5 Is there no way out of this
intellectual impasse? From our personal experiences, especially those of ‘Arabists’ and
‘Orientalists’ tell us that the ways in which we—intellectuals, scholars, academics, writers,
artists, even hunters for the exotic—respond to our cultural other(s) varyingly, contradictorily,
complexly, and not always informed by our will to power in the same fashion, especially
those of us who are multi-lingual and multi-cultural. Whether we are powerful or powerless,
we do not always desire to dominate the other; sometimes we even prefer to give in to the
power, or allure, of the other even if the other is powerless. And then, how do we understand
and define power, really? I do not want to belabour these points here. I would instead pursue
a line of inquiry that, I hope to show, is more productive for understanding and analyzing
processes of cultural encounter and exchange and, more importantly, the attendant production
of knowledge. I want to move away from the contentious and contested area of Middle East
studies so caught up in preoccupations with power and power relations, understandably given
the recent colonial history that continues to exert its influence on the region, and shift focus
to a site where the power and its machinery has less immediate affect on defining the
relationship between two different cultures.
I place emphasis on difference because it is the very assumption that lurks beneath
any discussion of intercultural encounters. It seems to lay at the heart of contentions and
contestations, at least in discussions of the relations between the ‘Western world’ and the
Middle East, the world of ‘Araby’.6 What lessons would we learn from another experience of
intercultural encounter, that of the Middle East and China, two equally formidable empire

5 See, for example, Sylvette Larzul’s discussion of French translations of The Thousand and One Nights in Les
traductions françaises des Mille et une nuits : étude des versions Galland, Trébutien et Mardrus (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1996), and ‘Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland: traduction, adaptation, creation’, Les Mille
et Une Nuits en partage, ed. Aboubakr Chraibi (Paris: Sindbad Actes Sud, 2004), 251-266.
6 A term used to refer to the Middle East in medieval England. See Dorothee Metlizki, The Matter of Araby in
Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
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complexes. The cultural traffic between these two ‘imperial’ cultures, mediated by the
Arabic and Chinese languages, has never really come to a halt, not in the past despite the
distance or at present despite the ascendance of the ‘West’ and the ‘eclipse’ of the ‘rest’. I
will look at the reception of The 1001 Nights in Chinese, but always in comparison with
English translations, and use the lessons I shall learn from this endeavour to re-think the
theoretical and analytical paradigm derived from Said’s Orientalism, often to the detriment of
his intellectual rigour and profound humanism, and put forward in an array of less-than-
carefully-thought-out post-colonial studies informed by knee-jerk impulses for decolonization,
offensively or defensively, a majority of the Middle Easterners’ eagerness to condemn
‘Western’ machinery of power and the ‘wrongs’ it has done to and in the ‘East’,7 and a
minority of Westerners’ earnestness in unravelling Said’s scholarship, therefore, the
intellectual threads in Orientalism, pointing to the admiring intentions of the Orientalists,
their positive attitude towards the ‘East’8 and, more importantly, the centrality of the ‘Orient’
in ‘Western’ modernity.
The reception of the Nights in Chinese may not be a typical example of the encounter
between Arabic and Chinese because, unlike their pre-modern relations, it is today mediated
by a ‘distant’ third party, the ‘West’ or, more particularly, Europe; for the popularity of The
1001 Nights in Europe was what prompted the Chinese to translate the stories from European
languages but perhaps not until 1900, even though European, especially English translations
of the Nights must have been available in China at the latest by 1870, when Kelly and Walsh,
the first foreign bookshop, was founded in Shanghai. The Japanese, who translated the
Nights into Japanese from as early as 1875, seemed to rely on Kelly and Walsh got their

7 See, for example, Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London: Macmillan, 1986),
revised as Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Pandora, 1994).
8 See, for example, Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane,
2006).
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supply of European books. Tanizaki Jun’inchiro (1886-1965), one of the most celebrated
novelists in first part of the twentieth century in Japan, makes a reference to the role of Kelly
and Walsh in making available English translations of the Nights. In the sixth chapter of
Tade kuu mushi (Some Perfect Nettles, 1929), the protagonist of his novel, Shiba Kaname,
‘receives a complete set of Burton’s edition as a gift from his friend Takanatsu, who has just
returned from Shanghai. Takanatsu tells him how hard it was for him to get it there at Kelly
and Walsh… and bring it back to Japan’.9 The implication of ‘Europe’ in the spread,
translation and reception of an Arabic work in Chinese is precisely why it would be
interesting, and hopefully edifying, to look at this encounter. For despite the surface
resemblance of the trajectory of Chinese translation and reception of The 1001 Nights to its
European counterpart, the translated texts, upon close scrutiny, tell a different story.

II
Orientalism by Proxy?:
The 1001 Nights in Chinese
As in the West, The 1001 Nights, famous and popular among the Chinese, is known as
children’s stories. In fact, an abridged version of The 1001 Nights called Tian Fang Ye Tan
was the first story book I ever read when I was learning Chinese in Libya as a child. Tian
Fang, as I have already mentioned, is the ‘classical’ Chinese term for a region that is perhaps
best conveyed by the medieval English term ‘Araby’.10 Ye Tan means night talk, nothing like
serious discussion but more like ‘table talk’, or casual exchange of news and stories, or
simply chatter. ‘Sindbad the Sailor’ and ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp’ are the two most

9 See Hideaki Sugita, ‘The Arabian Nights in Modern Japan: A Brief Historical Sketch’, The Arabian Nights
and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, ed. Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio (London and New
York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 116-153, 138.
10 Su Qikang, ‘Gushi zhong de gushi—Tian Fang Ye Tan’, Tian Fang Ye Tan (Taipei: Gueiguan, 1999 [1981,
1984, 1985, 1994, 1997]), ix-xvii, ix.
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memorable stories that I recall with fondness even today. When asked about Tian Fang Ye
Tan, any Chinese would immediately reply, ‘oh, yes, the famous children’s stories from the
Arab world’. This is how The 1001 Nights is popularly known in Chinese. There are
innumerable versions and editions of children’s Tian Fang Ye Tan, all attributed to an
anonymous ‘Arab’ author, ‘yi ming’, and come in a plethora of shapes and sizes with little or
next to no information on the sources and ‘authors’—compilers and translators—of the
volumes. There is even less accounting for why some stories are chosen and others left out.
The 1001 Nights found its way into Chinese as early as 1900, most likely through
translations from European languages, especially Burton in English (1885-88). A Zhou
Gueishen translated a selection of stories from the Nights in 1900, which he called Yi Qian
Lin Yi Ye.11 I also found a record of a four-volume translation by a Xi Rou published in
Shanghai in 1906 during a search of Chinese Union Library Catalogue. These and other
translations as well as adaptations from translations and adaptations from adaptations, all
invariably given the titles Tian Fang Ye Tan or Yi Qian Lin Yi Ye, have been in continuous
production until today. There is, it seems, a steady stream of Arabian Nights books in
Chinese throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Tian Fang Ye Tan is practically a literal
translation of Arabian Nights entertainments including the archaic and exotic ‘twang’, or
slant Burton has given the Nights in his translation. This is not to say that the Chinese do not
know of Antoine Galland, Edward Lane or John Payne—these names are all mentioned in the
various introductions to the various Chinese ‘texts’ I have at my disposal at present. There is
also the possibility of translating from Japanese translations, especially in Taiwan, a former
Japanese colony, where early multi-volume Japanese translations (as early as 1875) may have
been known and available. It is all very difficult to know at present. For one thing, more

11 See Li Weizhong’s ‘Introduction’ to his 2000 translation directly from Bulaq published electronically on the
publisher, Yuan Liu’s website: http://www.ylib.com/search/pre_show.asp?BookNo=P3022.
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research is needed before any conclusion can be reached, and for another, what is available in
the market never tallies with academic pronouncements, mainly in introductions to various
Chinese versions, which are given not by specialists in Arabic or Middle Eastern Studies but
by comparative literature academics working primarily in the areas of European literatures,
clearly dominated by the Anglophile, even when it comes to transmission and dissemination
of translations from the Arabic original.
In the 1930s, during Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation, another stream of
translations from the Arabic ‘original’, primarily Bulaq, began to appear under the title Yi
Qian Lin Yi Ye, a literal translation of the Arabic ‘one thousand and one nights’. Two names
emerge as ‘heroes’ of such an enterprise. A Mr. Na Xun, apparently a Chinese Muslim, who
made a five-volume translation in the 1930s known at the time as Tian Fang Ye Tan. In the
1950s a three-volume translation by the same Mr. Na appeared as Yi Qian Lin Yi Ye. Finally,
a six-volume translation, a complete translation according to his Beijing publisher, appeared
in 1982. This 1982 Beijing edition by Na Xun is the source text of the two-volume Taipei
edition I have mentioned purportedly translated by a Zhong Si. Zhong, according to ‘readers’
guide’ written by a Su Qikang, associate professor of English literature at Zhongshan
University, at most edited Na’s translation, restructured the work and reorganized the stories.
Zhong’s translation, however, has been very popular.12 There is a continuous demand for it
since it first appeared in 1981. It is at least in its sixth reprint (81, 84, 85, 94, 97 and 99).
And finally a ten-volume translation of the Bulaq text was made by now professor of Arabic
at Beijing’s Language Institute, Li Weizhong, was published in Taipei in 2000. It was
apparently a limited edition and is now out of print. This translation is given the title of Yi
Qian Lin Yi Ye.

12 Su Qikang, ‘Gushi zhong de gushi—Tian Fang Ye Tan’, Tian Fang Ye Tan (Taipei: Gueiguan, 1999 [1981,
1984, 1985, 1994, 1997]), ix-xvii, xii.

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From this very brief and sketchy overview, one may infer that Chinese translation of
The 1001 Nights comes after and follows the trajectory of European reception of the Nights,
echoing the European popular reception, its recent scholarship, academic priorities and
intellectual agenda. From importing it as children’s literature, then elevating it to a
masterpiece of world literature, to eventual insistence on identifying that one source text for
translation despite an awareness of the Nights as a cross-cultural composite work, and finally
using it as a ‘text’ to introduce the ‘wonderful’ and ‘fantastic’ world of Arabic-Islamic
civilization in a ‘political correct’ global environment that insists on placing some emphasis
on an ‘education’ in non-‘Western’ cultures and histories.13 In 2005 book on the history and
civilization of the ‘Arab World’, Ah La Puo, appeared under the title Yi Qian Lin Yi Ye, with
the additional subtitle of The Arabian Nights in English. This book, pitched for the popular
market, purports to take the reader in a tour, or ‘promenade’, san pu, of the civilization of
Araby in the company of one of the ‘classics’, ‘masterpieces’, or even ‘scriptures’, jin dian,
of the world. This book, I dare say, goes against the regular grain of books about the Arab
world and Arabs in town. While it attempts to extol what it calls ‘Arabic civilization’, the
knowledge it imparts is contradictory. It smacks of the kind of uncritical, popular
‘Orientalism’ one finds often in American and British bookstores, where Arab(ic), Persian
and Turkish, not to mention others, are lumped together without distinction. And, at the end
of the book, pages on belly-dancing, tea, bread and ‘Arab’ terrorism, all adorned with
photographic clips, are added as a way of introducing the reader to the contemporary Arab
world. The illustrations accompanying the book are made up of ‘Oriental’ and ‘Orientalist’
materials haphazardly distributed across the visual landscape of the book usually without
explanation. If I may be crude here for the sake of brevity and clarity, what one finds is

13 I have not found any reference to The 1001 Nights as ‘adult’ (pornographic) literature in Chinese. This does
not necessarily mean there is no bifurcation of The 1001 Nights into ‘children’s literature’ and ‘adult literature’,
as in the Japanese case, but rather that at the present stage of my research I have not found similar evidence.
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wholesale importation of the kind of ‘vulgar’, mainly ‘kitch’ Orientalism or Orientalia one
finds in the ‘West’. The emphasis on ‘Araby’s’ cultural difference from the ‘Middle
Kingdom’, or China, even though this difference is never particularized; it belongs to the kind
of fuzzy difference that also distinguishes the rest of the world, past and present, from China,
from Chinese culture, or what one may call ‘self-defining othering’. This comes across most
strikingly in the illustrations found in the Chinese translations, the ‘styles’ of which are
invariably borrowed from a hodgepodge of ‘Islamic’, ‘Biblical’, ‘Ancient Greek’, Medieval
European traditions of ‘miniatures’, and more often than not, from recent Japanese or
European ‘re-fabrications’ of these traditions.
But can we trust this ‘contextual’ inference of what I would call ‘Orientalism by
Proxy’ as inherent in Chinese translation, both as a field of cultural production and as an
instance of textual migration? What I mean by ‘Orientalism by Proxy’ is the migration of
‘Western’ Orientalism into Chinese view of the Islamic Middle East, especially ‘Araby’, that
defines the ‘civilized’ self against an other that is both exoticized and eroticized, that fits into
a stereotype of ‘the noble savage’, ‘less civilized’ other or ‘religious’ other,14 or that
rationalizes cultural change, modernization in this case, by projecting the otherness of the
past onto the ‘non-West’,15 or that opens up a cultural space for certain freedoms by deferring
taboo issues to another site.16 If I have read into the Chinese translations of the Nights, in this
case as a cultural field of production, the Orientalist impulses so familiar in Said’s works and
in the current frenetic ‘Orientalism’ industry, would I find corroboration in the Chinese

14 See Sylvette Larzul, ‘Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland: traduction, adaptation, creation’, Les Mille et
Une Nuits en partage, ed. Aboubakr Chraibi (Paris: Sindbad Actes Sud, 2004), 251-266
15 See John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural
Identity (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillans, 2005).
16 See Robert L. Mack, ‘Introduction’, Oriental Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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