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PENGUIN CLASSICS THE ARABIAN NIGHTS TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS VOLUME 1 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 1 Nights 1 to 294 Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS, with URSULA LYONS Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN CLASSICS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com Translation of Nights 1 to 294, Note on the Translation and Note on the Text copyright © Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008 Translation of ‘The story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves killed by a slave girl’ and ‘Translating Galland’ copyright © Ursula Lyons, 2008 Introduction, Glossary, Further Reading and Chronology 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/Museo Correr, Venice/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 including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-194350-3 Editorial Note Introduction A Note on the Translation A Note on the Text Translating Galland The Arabian Nights: Nights 1 to 294 The story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves killed by a slave girl Glossary Chronology Further Reading 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 story collection of The Arabian Nights has drawn on many cultures and sources – Indian, Persian, Greek. One of its parallel sources, which drew on the same ancient Indian materials, is a Sanskrit text known as the Kathasaritsagara, or ‘The Ocean of the Streams of Story’, compiled by the eleventh-century author Somadeva. The Arabian Nights is, like the Kathasaritsagara, a vast storytelling ocean in which the readers can lose themselves. One story, like a wave, is absorbed into the one that follows. The drift of the narrative tides carries us, like Sindbad, to strange places, and the further from home, the stranger those places are. Within the stories themselves, the sea operates as the agent of destiny which carries ships, men and magically sealed bottles and casts them upon unexpected shores: the Island of Waq-Waq where the women grow from trees, the island of the Magnetic Mountain presided over by its talismanic statue, the Black Islands of the Ensorcelled Prince and the islands of China. The tides are unpredictable, and men’s fortunes founder and are wrecked upon the sea of destiny. The vastness and complexity of the Nights is mesmerizing. In her story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994), A. S. Byatt has written: What delights above all in the Arabian Nights is its form. Story is embedded in story, story