Although it is missing at the beginning of the Arabic text from which this translation has been made, the manuscript from which Antoine Galland made his translation opens with an address to the reader. The first part runs:
Praise be to God, the Beneficent King, the creator of the world and man, who raised the heavens without pillars and spread out the earth as a place of rest and erected the mountains as props and made the water flow from the hard rock and destroyed the race of Thamud, ‘Ad and Pharaoh of the vast domain…
Thamud was the name of a pagan people who dwelt in north-western Arabia and rejected the call of Allah’s prophet Salih to repent and turn to monotheism, and who were consequently destroyed in an earthquake. The ‘Ad were an ancient and arrogant tribe that dwelt among the sand dunes. Their fate is recounted in the Nights in the tale of Iram, ‘City of the Columns’. Their ruler, Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, ordered the building of a city in imitation of Paradise. Its building took three hundred years, but no sooner was it completed than God destroyed it with a rushing single wind, the ‘Cry of Wrath’. Centuries later, a certain ‘Abd Allah ibn Abi Qilaba stumbled across its ruins. Pharaoh appears in the Bible and in the Quran as the ruler who, having rejected Moses’ mission, was punished together with his people. The reader was expected to take warning from such stories: power and wealth are transitory and all things perish before the face of God.
The storytellers of the Nights and their audiences lived in the vicinity of ruins. Tales were told in the shadows of Tadmur, Petra, Ikhmim, Luxor and Giza. In the story of al-Ma’mun and the Pyramids of Egypt, the ‘Abbasid caliph orders his workmen to break into a Pyramid, but after an awful lot of digging he discovers a cache of money that is exactly equivalent to the amount that he has expended in digging towards it. In the story of the City of Brass, the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik commissions an expedition to North Africa to seek out one of the stoppered vases that were reputed to contain the jinn imprisoned by Solomon centuries earlier. The expedition led by the emir Musa sets off into the desert, but loses its way for a year before entering the ancient lands of Alexander and, after several strange encounters, they arrive at the City of Brass. After reciting verses from the Quran, Musa’s party enters the city only to find that it is populated by the dead, while at the heart of the labyrinth that is the royal palace they find the mummified corpse of the queen to whom the deceptive semblance of life has been given by quicksilver in her eyeballs. This was once the city of Qush, son of Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, and all its wealth could not save it when God declared its doom. So take warning from that. Inside the City of Brass the expedition finds a gold tablet with the following inscription: ‘Where are the kings of China, the masters of might and power? Where is ‘Ad, son of Shaddad,* and the buildings he raised up? Where is Nimrod, the mighty tyrant?’ The dead and their ruined habitations are present in the world of the living to guide men to repentance.
At a more mundane level, the stories of Nights carry warnings against dissemblers, charlatans, tricksters and adulterers. They give lessons on how to detect cheats, deal with gate-crashers and how to avoid the wiles of women. The cunning of women is not the least of the many marvels of the Nights, and many of the stories that are superficially about sex are more profoundly about cunning and the celebration of cunning. As the opening address of the Galland manuscript has it: ‘This book, which I have called The Thousand and One Nights, abounds also with splendid biographies that teach the reader to detect deception and to protect himself from it…’ The importance of not being cheated loomed large in the minds of the shopkeepers of Cairo and Damascus and the frequenters of the coffee houses who were the primary audience of the Nights.
Let us return to the merchant who sits minding his business when a veiled woman enters his shop and summons him to follow her. He is a man who has been waiting for a story to happen to him. The Arabian Nights should be understood as the collective dreaming of commercial folk in the great cities of the medieval Arab world. It seems clear from the marginal jottings made on manuscripts of the Nights that have survived that most of their borrowers and readers were shopkeepers and other people engaged in trade in the big cities – Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Cairo and Damascus. It is not surprising that there are as many merchants and sons of merchants in these stories as there are princes and princesses. Money, debts and loans play a much larger part here than they do in European fairy stories. A number of tales celebrate the entrepreneurial and innovative qualities of the Muslims. And, despite the impression given by Hollywood films, Sindbad was not a sailor but a merchant.
At times, the stories go into some detail about commercial transactions. There is, for example, the Christian broker’s tale, in which the Christian trading in Cairo is offered by a young man the brokerage on a large quantity of sesame at the rate of one ardabb for a hundred dirhams, but before going round to collect it from the Khan al-Jawali (a warehouse and hostel for visiting merchants), he checks the going rate for sesame with other buyers and finds it to be a hundred and twenty dirhams for a single ardabb. He is then offered a brokerage commission of ten dirhams on every ardabb, from a total of fifty ardabbs of sesame that he will be handling for the young man. The details of this mundane transaction serve as the frame for the young man’s tale of sexual ensnarement, financial ruin and mutilation.
Some stories pander to the tradesmen’s fascination with commodities. Consider the porter of Baghdad who is hired by a dark-eyed young woman to load his basket with the things that she is going to purchase: first ‘an olive-coloured jar of strained wine’; then in a fruiterer’s shop ‘where she bought Syrian apples, Uthmani quinces, Omani peaches, jasmine and water lilies from Syria, autumn cucumbers, lemons, sultani oranges, scented myrtle, privet flowers, camomile blossoms, red anemones, violets, pomegranate blooms and eglantine’. The lovingly catalogued shopping spree continues at the butcher’s, the grocer’s, with the sweetmeat seller and the perfume seller. Or consider the shop that ‘Ala’ al-Din Abu’l-Shamat buys and which was ‘furnished with rugs and cushions, and stored there he discovered sails, spars, ropes and chests, together with bags filled with beads, shells, stirrups, axes, maces, knives, scissors and other such things, as the previous owner had been a secondhand dealer’. Among later storytellers perhaps only H. G. Wells, himself the son of a shopkeeper, has given so much prominence to the small shopkeeper in fiction. Wells, and before him the anonymous storytellers of the Nights, celebrated the culture of tradesmen who wish for something better than minding the store and dream of making something of themselves in a world from which routine has been banished.
The stories of the Nights were composed and collected for the entertainment of city dwellers, and the city is the usual setting for those stories. The streets are narrow and the upper storeys often have corbelled and enclosed projecting balconies. High mashrabiyya windows allow the inhabitants to observe the street without being seen. Narrow, densely packed alleyways often end in cul-de-sacs. Parts of the city consisted of harat, or secure quarters, whose gates were closed at night. In the daytime, the streets are crowded. The shopkeepers usually sit on mastabas (stone platforms) at the front of their stores. The mosque is more than a place for prayer; it is where public business is conducted and where travellers, unable to find lodgings elsewhere, sleep (as did the man who became rich again because of a dream). The hammam, or public bath, is usually close to the mosque. Visiting merchants lodge in caravanserais, hotels-cum-warehouses, in which their goods are usually stored on the ground floor while they sleep in the upper galleries. Prosperous domestic houses usually present austere outer façades that belie the wealth and ornamentation to be found within. The more prosperous dwellings are often built around a central courtyard with the reception room on the first floor. The poor sleep in tenement buildings, shanties or holes in the ground.
Less frequently, the adventures of the Nights take place outside the city. The storytellers had only a slight interest in the lives of the fellahin or peasants (though there are a few stories a
bout them). Beyond the walls of the city of the storytellers lay mostly wasteland and desert, populated by huntsmen, woodcutters, bandits and ghuls. The storytellers and their listeners rarely ventured beyond the city and into the desert. It was rarely that they entered a palace, and never its harem; certainly they never visited the Valley of Diamonds or the Island of Waq-Waq with its trees bearing human fruit. The wastelands, as much as the palaces and remote islands, were sites of improbable adventures – places urban shopkeepers and artisans could only dream about.
In ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, the heroine (who is a narratologist)
was accustomed to say in lectures that it was possible that the human need to tell tales about things that were unreal originated in dreams and that memory had certain things in common with dreams; it rearranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling.
Ultimately it is the dream-like quality of The Arabian Nights which appeals. The dream, like Shahrazad, can only continue in existence as long as it tells a story. Once things stop happening in a dream, that dream, perforce, is ended.
Robert Irwin
London
The life of the fictional Shahrazad depended on her ability to produce stories night after night, leaving them carefully unfinished at appropriate points so as to be asked to complete them later. In real terms throughout the Arab world, the reciters of such tales were concerned not with life but livelihood, for their audiences had to be encouraged to return, night after night, to attend the performances and reward the performers. As can be seen in the search for a text of the tale of Saif al-Muluk in Volume 3, the stories had manuscript backing, although sadly many of these manuscripts have been destroyed, lost or left unstudied and unedited. Edward Lane noted in his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) how the reciters would allow themselves to take liberties with whatever texts they had to suit the taste of their audience. Successful accretions could be added to the conflated versions, so adding to the repetitions, non sequiturs and confusions that mark the present text. Except where textual justification can be found, no attempt has been made to superimpose on the translation changes that would be needed to ‘rectify’ these. This leaves a representation of what is primarily oral literature, appealing to the ear rather than the eye.
Success for the reciters did not depend merely on creativity, important as this is, but on the introduction of ingredients that their audiences would recognize and find attractive. Tautology, standard phrases and repetition help this process, while colours add to and at times replace imagery – ‘brown’ is applied to a spear, for instance, and ‘white’ to a sword. Such details can be multiplied at will but behind them lie universal questions of narrative technique. Specifically, in The Arabian Nights the structure of the language itself did much to point the way. Arabic, with its infusion of words from surrounding cultures, has a vast vocabulary, providing a range of virtual synonyms and almost unlimited access to rhyme words. Its clauses are characteristically attached rather than subordinated to one another, and sentences resemble an accumulation of wavelets rather than the sound of single breakers. Assonance and rhyme duplicate sounds, and the strength of the linguistic effect these produce derives characteristically from repetition rather than innovation.
In Arabic popular literature, this effect is designed to mesmerize the audience by the use of rhythm and sound, adapted to a pace that is deliberately slow. The hypnotized listeners are not encouraged to look forward or back, but to immerse themselves in the reciter’s present. By contrast, a reader not only can assimilate more words in a given space of time, but he is in control of his own pages and can look wherever he wants. For example, more often than not, characters of the Nights are introduced with their full names and descriptions whenever they occur – A son of B, the king of C, and so on. For identification the reader will find this unnecessary, as, even if he has forgotten to whom a name refers, he can look back and find out. Similarly, one of the main effects of rhymed prose, as well as the introduction of poetry, is not only its direct appeal to the ear but its ability to slow down the pace of the narrative, the opposite of what is attempted here.
The translators Richard Burton and Enno Littmann have shown in their versions of the Nights that it is by no means impossible to reproduce the element of rhyme, but whether this helps to duplicate the mesmeric force of the original is more doubtful, and in the present translation no such attempt has been made. Here the object has been to speed up the pace of the narrative to what is hoped to be more nearly adapted to the eye rather than the ear of the modern reader. In no case has the sense been deliberately falsified, but, where possible, its presentation has been simplified and accelerated. This does not apply to the poetry, which some translators have curtailed, thinking it inessential. It does, however, form so important a part of the reciters’ presentation that it has been included in full, although no attempt has been made to risk further distortion by imposing on the English version rhyme schemes omnipresent in Arabic.
What has been sacrificed is the decorative elaboration of the original, as well as the extra dimension of allusiveness that it provides. In the latter case, it is not merely that one incident will recall another, either within the Nights themselves or, more widely, in the huge corpus of Arabic popular literature, but a single phrase, one description or one line of poetry must have served to call other contexts to the mind of the original audience. To explore these intricacies, however, is the task of a commentary rather than of a translation.
Beneath the elaboration of the text are fundamental patterns of the genre of storytelling. Not only are these responsible for the basic structure of the Nights, but it is they that serve to underline the importance of the work, firstly as an immediate source of popular literature and, more generally, in the universal history of storytelling. It is these patterns that, it is hoped, this translation will help to make more accessible.
In any English version, the transliteration of Arabic names and words presents familiar problems. Here it has been decided not to enter in most cases the diacritical markings that distinguish matching consonants as well as long and short vowels. For Arabists these are unnecessary and for the general reader they may be thought to add confusion rather than clarity. Similarly, on a more restricted point, academic rectitude suggests that in many cases y should be used in place of i, as in the case of Zayd for Zaid, but here i has been preferred throughout as appearing simpler and less exotic.
The purely academic problems connected with the compilation of The Arabian Nights lie outside the scope of this work. It represents accretive literature, changing from place to place and from age to age, and so there can be no ‘perfect’ text. Although it would be possible to produce a conflated version, adding and subtracting from manuscripts and printed texts, here a choice has been made of the Macnaghten text (Calcutta 1839–42 or Calcutta II). This has been translated in full, and to it have been added stories from Galland’s French version. For those interested in individual points, the notes of the translators Edward Lane and Richard Burton, with their wide-ranging experience in this field, are of prime importance. In this translation, notes have been reduced to a minimum and have only been added to help with the reading or, in the case of the Quran, to provide references. In most cases these cover individual points. More generally, entries in the Glossary supply information on characters and terms found throughout the text.
No translator can fail to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to his predecessors, and, in the present case, to contemporary translators of the Nights such as Husain Haddawy. Unfortunately, the recent Pléiade edition of Les Mille et une nuits by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel (2005) came to my attention in time to be admired but too late to be used. Particular use has been made of the excellent German version, Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten, by Enno Littmann (1921–8). Finally, all scholars in this field owe an especial debt to R. Dozy, who used the Nights as one of the sources of his magister
ial Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (1877–81), in which almost all its obscure words are explained. In general, the sense of the Arabic is clear, but there are occasions when even Dozy admits that he does not know what a word means, and others in which it is impossible to be certain of what was the original meaning of an idiomatic phrase or term.
*
My own most grateful thanks are owed to Robert Irwin, the protagonist of this project, who has not only helped with checking the translation, but has added introductions, a glossary and notes of his own. A similar debt of gratitude must happily be acknowledged to Hilary Laurie of Penguin Books, whose friendly skills and editorial encouragement have helped to smooth difficulties at every stage in the work’s production. Unstinted gratitude is also owed to Kate Parker and Caroline Pretty, who have been confronted with the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stable of the text. Finally, my wife Ursula is responsible not only for the translation of Galland’s French but has used her Arabic expertise to add invaluable help to what would otherwise have been an infinitely slower and more tedious task. Quae mihi praestiteris memini.
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1 Page 2