These magnificent
volumes are the most ambitious and thorough translation
into English of the Arabian Nights since the age of Queen Victoria
and the British empire.
The translations
from Arabic by Malcolm Lyons, a former professor of Arabic at
Cambridge, are clear and idiomatic and neither prudish nor sleazy.
His wife, Ursula Lyons, as well as helping with the Arabic,
translates from 18th-century French three of the most famous
stories, "Aladdin", "Ali Baba and the 40 thieves killed by a slave
girl" and a Sindbad voyage, for which no old Arabic text survives.
Robert Irwin, a great devotee of the Nights, has supplied an
introduction to each volume on the character of the stories, their
transmission over the generations, and their influence on modern
European and eastern literature. It would make as fine a Christmas
present as any Christian could want.
The Arabian
Nights, or in Arabic the elf laila wa laila, "A thousand nights and
one night", are a compendium of stories of varying antiquity and
far-flung origin, from Sanskrit India, Iran, Khorasan, the Arab
world and even the Mediterranean. (Sindbad's third voyage, with its
man-eating giant like the Cyclops, echoes if not Homer's Odyssey at
least the legend of Odysseus.) These tales, which were originally
told rather than read off the page, are drawn from the same mass or
matrix of stories as such literary masterpieces as Jalaluddin
Rumi's Masnavi (Persian), the improving animal fables known as
Kalila wa Dimna (Arabic), the Decameron (Italian) and The
Canterbury Tales (English).
The famous
scaffolding or framework of the Nights, in which the Iranian bride
Shahrzad delays her execution by mesmerising King Shahriyar by
telling stories every night, is a hint that the compendium took
shape in Iran before the Arab conquests. In the course of time,
other stories with settings in the Arab commercial cities, such as
the Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate and Mamluk Cairo, were
absorbed into the compendium. Both the Shahrzad motif and the way
each story gives rise to another offer unlimited capacity for
expansion. For example, in the "Hunchback" series, Shahrzad saves
her life by telling the story of the tailor, and the tailor tells
the story of the barber, and the barber tells the stories of his
six unfortunate brothers and so on ad infinitum.
The stories are in
Arabic, though Persian names remain sometimes in rather garbled
form (Shahrzad, Sindbad). The tales have been made Muslim, but not
with complete success, and not to the extent of excluding all the
jinn, afreet, ghouls and other popular superstitions that canonical
Islam disdains. They are localised in the great cities of the Arab
golden age, fascinated by commodities and coined money, fabrics,
scents, confectionery, guilds and crafts, but uncomfortable in the
countryside and terrified of the open sea. (Sindbad is not, of
course, a sailor but a Baghdad merchant who knows nothing about
navigation and does not seek to know.)
The stories are
also, as Irwin puts it in his introduction to volume one, "suffused
by sex". The prudery and solemnity of Arab merchant life, the
stately procession from shop to mosque to bath and back again, is
subject to violent disruption by a flash of black eyes from behind
a lattice or the sudden appearance of a demon. Indeed, the two go
together, rather as in Shakespeare a dislocation of the social
order may have its consequences in the supernatural world (The
Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream). In "The woman and her five
would-be lovers", a merchant's daughter overturns the entire
medieval system of authority, locking up king, vizier,
superintendant and judge in compartments of a cupboard where they
urinate on one another.
For me, that is
the charm of the stories. Dispersed through the Nights or
flickering just at the edge of view is a picture of medieval city
life, with its sexual frustration, stock-in-trade and superstition,
that is without parallel in literature. The professional
storyteller (rawi in Arabic) domesticates or brings down to earth
the high world of courts and princesses and caliphs, rather in the
manner of the British nursery rhymes ("And what they could not eat
that night / The Queen next morning fried"). The people who told
these stories, and listened to them, have gone hungry. There are
fantasies of sugar and soft beds in the Nights, which is, no doubt,
why they have appealed so much to European children.
When the stories
passed from the storyteller to the scribe, nobody knows. The oldest
surviving manuscript containing some of the stories and the
Shahrzad motif, which is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, goes back only to the 15th century.
It was this
manuscript that the French antiquarian Antoine Galland discovered
and translated into French as Les Mille et une nuits between 1704
and 1717, thus launching the Nights' brilliant second career in
Europe and the Americas. To satisfy the public craze for Arabian
tales, he added the so-called "orphan" stories such as "Aladdin"
and "Ali Baba" that he said he had from a Syrian gentleman. In the
next century, which was interested in establishing canonical texts
in eastern languages in the manner of the Latin and Greek classics,
versions of the Nights were printed at Calcutta in 1814-18
("Calcutta I"), in Cairo in 1835 ("Bulaq") and in Calcutta again in
1839-42 ("Calcutta II").
English
translations were made by Edward William Lane (from Bulaq), and
John Payne and the traveller and explorer Sir Richard Burton from
Calcutta II. The translations by Lane and Burton are laden with
ethnographic commentary of truly 19th-century character. Whereas
Galland was interested (like his readers) in improving tales of
virtue and sentiment in a commercial setting, Lane expounds on
costume and burial customs and Burton on the African penis. (Partly
to keep clear of the Obscene Publications Act, Burton printed his
16 volumes in 1885-87 for private subscription.)
The Lyons have
also used for their translation Calcutta II. I can best recommend
these volumes by way of a comparison with Burton. Here is the old
reprobate attacking a difficult passage in "The porter and the
three ladies":
"Behold, there stood before him an honourable woman in a mantilla
of Mosul [footnote] silk, broidered with gold and bordered with
brocade; her walking shoes were also purfled with gold and her hair
floated in long plaits. She raised her face veil [footnote] and,
showing two black eyes fringed with jetty lashes, whose glances
were soft and languishing and whose perfect beauty was ever
blandishing, she accosted the Porter and said in the suavest tones
and choicest language, 'Take up thy crate and follow
me.'"
Here is the same
passage in the Lyons' translation:
"A woman came up
to him wrapped in a silken Mosuli shawl with a floating ribbon and
wearing embroidered shoes fringed with gold thread. When she raised
her veil, beneath it could be seen dark eyes, which, with their
eyelashes and eyelids, shot soft glances, perfect in their quality.
She turned to the porter and said in a sweet, clear voice: 'Take
your basket and follow me.'"
The improvements
are clear. The Biblical language in Burton, with its ludicrous echo
of the Pool of Bethesda ("Take up thy crate") has gone, along with
the superfluous Latinising ("mantilla" for shawl) and the faerie
English ("purfled"). Gone too is any attempt to reproduce the
Arabic rhyming prose known as saj ("broidered/bordered",
"languishing/blandishing") and the prurient or speculative
footnotes. The Lyons are clear as water at the expense of a very
slight flatness ("perfect in their quality"). That flatness or
evenness may be the Lyons' intention, for a reader can put by a
dozen of these Nights in a night. The same cannot be said for
Burton or Lane or even Galland.