The Arabian Nights- Tales of 1001 Nights vol 02

933 Pages·2016·6.52 MB·English

by  Malcolm C

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS
VOLUME 2
MALCOLM C. LYONS, sometime Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at
Cambridge University and a life Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, is a
specialist in the field of classical Arabic Literature. His published works include
the biography Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic: Heroic
and Oral Storytelling, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry and
many articles on Arabic literature.
URSULA LYONS, formerly an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Oriental Studies
at Cambridge University and, since 1976, an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy
Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature.
ROBERT IRWIN is the author of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their
Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, The Arabian Nights: A
Companion and numerous other specialized studies of Middle Eastern politics,
art and mysticism. His novels include The Limits of Vision, The Arabian
Nightmare, The Mysteries of Algiers and Satan Wants Me.
Volume 2
Nights 295 to 719
Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS,
with URSULA LYONS
Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN
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Translation of Nights 295 to 719 copyright © Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008
Translation of alternative version of ‘The seventh journey of Sindbad’
copyright © Ursula Lyons, 2008
Introduction and Glossary copyright © Robert Irwin, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translators and editor has been asserted
Text illustrations design by Coralie Bickford-Smith; images: Gianni Dagli Orti/Turkish and
Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul/The Art Archive
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
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ISBN: 978-0-14-194352-7
Editorial Note
Introduction
The Arabian Nights: Nights 295 to 719
Glossary
Maps
The ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century
Baghdad in the Ninth Century
Cairo in the Fourteenth Century
Index of Nights and Stories
This new English version of The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand
and One Nights) is the first complete translation of the Arabic text known as the
Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II since Richard Burton’s famous translation of
it in 1885–8. A great achievement in its time, Burton’s translation nonetheless
contained many errors, and even in the 1880s his English read strangely.
In this new edition, in addition to Malcolm Lyons’s translation of all the
stories found in the Arabic text of Calcutta II, Ursula Lyons has translated the
tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, as well as an alternative ending to ‘The seventh
journey of Sindbad’, from Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French. (For
the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories no original Arabic text has survived and
consequently these are classed as ‘orphan stories’.)
The text appears in three volumes, each with an introduction, which, in
Volume 1, discusses the strange nature of the Nights; in Volume 2, their history
and provenance; and, in Volume 3, the influence the tales have exerted on
writers through the centuries. Volume 1 also includes an explanatory note on the
translation, a note on the text and an introduction to the ‘orphan stories’
(‘Editing Galland’), in addition to a chronology and suggestions for further
reading. Footnotes, a glossary and maps appear in all three volumes.
As often happens in popular narrative, inconsistencies and contradictions
abound in the text of the Nights. It would be easy to emend these, and where
names have been misplaced this has been done to avoid confusion. Elsewhere,
however, emendations for which there is no textual authority would run counter
to the fluid and uncritical spirit of the Arabic narrative. In such circumstances no
changes have been made.
The medieval Arabic story collection of Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Thousand
and One Nights, is best known in English as The Arabian Nights. It is reasonable
to ask how old this classic work of Oriental fiction is, who wrote or compiled it
and how many stories it contains. But such questions are almost impossible to
answer. The collection was put together in a haphazard, unpoliced fashion over
many centuries.
In the opening story which frames all the other stories in the Nights, the
monarch Shahriyar, who has been sexually betrayed by his wife, cuts off her
head and, thereafter, he takes a different virgin to bed every night and has her
killed in the morning. In order to break the bloody cycle, Shahrazad, daughter of
the king’s vizier, volunteers to give herself to Shahriyar, but, in order to avert
her execution, she starts to tell a story to her sister, Dunyazad, whom she has
brought with her into Shahriyar’s bedroom. Shahrazad leaves her story
unfinished at the break of dawn, and Shahriyar spares her life in order to hear the
rest. And so things proceed, with Shahrazad finishing one tale only to start a new
one. This goes on night after night until, after a thousand and one nights,
Shahriyar repents of his decision to have her killed.
This frame story of a clever bride telling stories to a jealous king in order to
prolong her life goes back to a lost Sanskrit original dating from no later than the
eighth century. At some point, stories from this Indian story collection were
translated into Pahlavi Persian. The tenth-century Arab polymath al-Mas‘udi
refers to the Persian version, which was called Hezar Afsaneh, ‘A Thousand
Stories’. We do not know what was in this story collection. Although the
Sasanian Persians seem to have had an extensive literature of entertainment, no
examples have survived in their original Persian form. However, it seems likely
that the stories of the Hezar Afsaneh were mostly didactic fables, often adapted
from Indian originals (as was the case with the famous collection of animal
stories known as the Fables of Bidpai). Such stories of the mirrors-for-princes
kind gave guidance on good government and right conduct. The early Persian
prototype of The Arabian Nights was probably a bit boring, and the wilder tales
of marvels, monsters and mutilations were likely to have been the later
inventions of Arab storytellers.
The Persian stories of Hezar Afsaneh, probably quite small in number, were
in turn translated and adapted for an Arab audience. A ninth-century paper
fragment of the opening page of the Nights survives (its title is Kitab Hadith Alf
Layla, or ‘The Book of the Tale of One Thousand Nights’) but, though it
features an early version of Shahrazad telling stories to her sister, the plot device
of telling stories to prolong a life does not appear. However, Ibn Nadim’s tenth-
century discursive catalogue of books, the Fihrist (or ‘Index’), mentions the
story collection which he says derived from a Persian original, and he does give
the frame story of Shahrazad telling stories for her life. Although he claims to
have seen complete manuscripts of The Thousand and One Nights, he says that
these comprised less than two hundred stories.
The oldest substantial surviving Arabic version of the Nights is a three-
volume manuscript that today is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It seems
to have been put together in Syria in the late fifteenth century. It was this
manuscript which formed the basis of the epoch-making translation into French
by Antoine Galland (1646–1715), an antiquarian who had spent years in Istanbul
studying the various positions on the Eucharist taken by the Eastern Christian
churches. He also collected old coins and other antiquities for the Royal Library
(later to become the Bibliothèque Nationale) and the Cabinet des Médailles (a
collection of coins, medals and antiquities that belonged to the French king). In
the course of Galland’s sojourns in the Middle East in the years 1670–75, 1675–
6 and 1679–88, he had become fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
Back in France, Galland settled in Caen and published a number of
scholarly works. He also assisted the Orientalist Barthélemy d’Herbelot in
compiling the Bibliothèque orientale, a monumental work of reference mostly
devoted to Islamic culture that was finally published in 1697. Around 1698,
Galland translated the stories of ‘Sindbad of the sea’. Then someone told him
that the Sindbad stories were part of a much larger collection. This, he
eventually decided, must be a longer version of the Arabic story collection
known as Alf Layla wa-Layla, or, as he translated it, Les Mille et une nuits. (In
fact, no early Arabic manuscripts of the Nights contain the Sindbad stories. They
are found only in later manuscripts that were influenced by Galland’s choices.)
He used a Syrian manuscript of the Nights, though there are occasional instances
of Egyptian vocabulary and turns of phrase in the text. This manuscript, which
Galland bought from a friend in Paris and which ended up in the Royal Library,
is, as already noted, the oldest substantial, surviving manuscript of the Nights.
(The manuscript Galland worked from was probably in four volumes, but the
fourth volume has since been lost.) There is no such thing as a canonical text of
the Nights with a fixed number of stories in a fixed order.
The surviving three volumes of the manuscript translated by Galland
contained only thirty-five and a half stories and the number of breaks within the
stories into nights was well short of a thousand and one. Though he was
convinced that there must be a longer manuscript of the Nights, Galland was
unable to lay his hands on one. Therefore, in order to satisfy public demand, he
added stories which had been told to him by a Syrian informant. These stories,
the so-called ‘orphan stories’, include ‘Ali Baba’ and ‘Aladdin’. There are no
Arabic originals for them (though Arabic versions purporting to be the originals
were produced by forgers in the nineteenth century). Galland also added the
previously published Sindbad stories. In addition, in order to plump out his
collection, he seems to have drawn on one or more Egyptian manuscripts of the
Nights.
Galland probably intended that his translation Les Mille et une nuits (1704–
17) should serve as a sort of sequel to d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. The
stories offered fantasy and diversion, but edification also: ‘They should also
please by what they reveal of the manners and customs of Orientals, of their
religious ceremonies, both pagan and Mohammedan; and these subjects are
better brought out than in the authors who have written about them or in
travellers’ narratives.’ Thus Galland claimed that he had tried to preserve the
authentic way the Orientals spoke and felt – at least in so far as was compatible
with bienséance (decorum). In fact, Galland’s translation was elegant and
courtly, as the conventions of eighteenth-century literature demanded. It was
also heavily glossed; Galland, instead of using footnotes, sometimes explained
Oriental practices within the text of his translation. Also, in cases where it
seemed appropriate to him, he exaggerated the magnificence of palaces, royal
robes and jewellery.
Muhsin Mahdi, the Harvard professor who in the 1980s edited the Galland
manuscript of the Nights in the Bibliothèque Nationale, is particularly critical of
the liberties that the Frenchman took with his translation:
Abandoning the generally lean structure and fast movement of the original in order to create a more
prudish, sentimental, moralistic, romantic, or glamorous atmosphere, he was apparently willing to pay a
heavy price to make his Nuits popular. All this, along with his frequently imperfect understanding or
misunderstanding of the Arabic original and inexplicable significant omissions, reflects poorly on his
knowledge of the language he was trying to translate, acquaintance with the habits and the customs of the
Orientals he was trying to explain and art as a storyteller.
Be that as it may, precisely that quality of Galland’s stories – ‘prudish,
sentimental, moralistic, romantic, or glamorous’ – made them a great hit with the
French reading public. More specifically, they appealed in the first instance to
the ladies of the court and the salons. Galland had dedicated both the translations
of the Sindbad stories and Les Mille et une nuits to the Marquise d’O, a lady in
the service of the Duchess of Burgundy, and both these women took an interest
in promoting his translations. Galland’s earliest readers were mostly adult,
highly cultured and female. This was an age when women presided over literary
salons (an age which the cultural historian Jean Starobinski has characterized as
that of ‘the fictitious ascendancy of women’). Before Galland, Charles Perrault
had won acclaim with the same audience when he published his Contes (1691–
5), a collection of folk tales, including such famous stories as ‘Sleeping Beauty’,
‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Cinderella’, which were rewritten by him in an elegantly
mock-simple style.
Earlier, Perrault had launched the fiercely debated ‘Quarrel of the Ancients
and Moderns’, by claiming that seventeenth-century France had reached a higher
level of civilization than that of ancient Greece and Rome. He attacked the
ancients and, most specifically, Homer for barbarousness. Perrault’s fairy stories
had been collected and stylishly rewritten as a demonstration that there could be
a distinctively modern French literary culture that owed little or nothing to
classical precepts. Moreover, the fairy stories with his added glosses were, he
claimed, more moral than most of the stories found in ancient Greek and Latin
literature. Galland’s collection of stories was similarly admired for the fresh
repertoire of plots, settings and characters that it provided. ‘Read Sinbad and you
will be sick of Aeneas,’ the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole urged. Galland, like
Perrault, wished to moralize and, in a prefatory note to his translation, he
expressed the hope that those who read his stories would be ready to profit from
the examples of the virtues and vices found in them.
Galland’s French volumes were rapidly translated into English. The first
English translation of the early volumes of Les Mille et une nuits seems to have
been published London in 1708 in chapbook form. (A chapbook is a book or
pamphlet of popular stories of the kind originally sold by pedlars.) For a long
time, English readers were content with this translation of a translation. Only in
the years 1838–41 did a three-volume translation appear, taken directly from the
Arabic by Edward William Lane (1801–76). Lane, a distinguished Arabist, had