by Paul Nurse
If so, it proved a boon to literature, for in time Galland’s many fascinations would lead him to the Nights and spur its translation. In the Enlightenment atmosphere where talent muted class, Antoine Galland typifies Baudelaire’s famous definition of the superior man. Emphatically “not a specialist,” his multifarious interests and phenomenal output would one day contribute to the worldwide dissemination of an astoundingly enduring classic.
Curiously, there has never been the slightest indication during any of his years in the Levant that Galland either read or even heard of Alf Laila wa Laila, or that if he did hear the title, that he ever gave it any passing thought. Some of his journals for these years mention books in Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew (for which Galland sometimes provides titles and summaries), but there is no mention of Alf Laila wa Laila, though his interest in storytelling, frequent rambles in Constantinople and journeys through the Ottoman domains would have provided him with ample opportunity to cross paths with the Nights, either in oral or written form. But such appears to be the case.
Three years after arriving in Constantinople, Galland accompanied Ambassador de Nointel on a long tour of the Levant, passing through Greece and the Aegean islands before travelling to what was then Ottoman Syria, visiting famous sites of the Holy Land. Along the way, Galland copied epigraphs and sketched monuments as he continued collecting manuscripts and antiques as part of his royal commission. When de Nointel returned to Constantinople in 1675, Galland went back to France for a short time, having spent the better part of five years working in the Turkish empire. His published memoir of his Levant tour, as well as an exhibition of his ancient coins, drew attention from antiquarians, further establishing his name as an authority on the eastern world.
By now nearly thirty, Galland was in the prime of life. Beyond his having a limitless capacity for work, Galland continued to be blessed with that element of luck, or right-timing, mentioned earlier. Coming of age at a time when increased contact with the East created a vogue for oriental collectibles (particularly manuscripts), Galland was able to reap benefits from an emerging new field. There was no better time for a young orientalist to be working than the latter part of the seventeenth century and, consciously or not, Galland made the most of it, so much so that within a year he was sent back to the Levant on a second journey, this time charged with the sole purpose of gathering further collectibles for Louis XIV and Colbert’s collections. This, the briefest of Galland’s three eastern excursions, was spent mainly in Syria, searching for artifacts, and lasted only some months; certainly less than a year. Yet as he wrote to a relative at the time, this was a new journey in more ways than one, since he was now on his own as a responsible agent of the crown, answerable directly to the king and his chief minister for his actions and purchases.
As usual, Galland did not disappoint. In the short time he was in the Levant, he accumulated sufficient collectibles that on his return he was able to deliver a sizeable stock of items to the Cabinet du roi—the king’s personal collection—kept at the royal residence of Versailles, where they were met with much favour and appreciation. Enough, in fact, that Galland was soon dispatched on his last and longest journey, lasting almost a full decade (1679 to 1688). Employed for part of that time by the French East India Company, he returned to Constantinople in the company of another outward-bound ambassador, Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, Vicomte de Guilleragues, an associate of many French literary figures and someone whose kindness Galland recalled years later when he dedicated the first volume of his Nights to his patroness, the Marquise d’O (de Lavergne’s daughter). This time, Galland was awarded the official title “Antiquary to the King of France” to facilitate his researches.
Galland spent more than half of this last trip in Constantinople, where, under de Guilleragues’s supervision, he continued his buying while performing sundry other tasks such as teaching the ambassador’s young daughter (the future marquise) Romaic. If Galland’s first stay in Constantinople had been something of an apprenticeship, this last sojourn proved his master class. The capital was a clearing house for literature and manuscripts from all over the Muslim world and Galland haunted Turkish shops as never before, learning to deal with booksellers while negotiating for prices and materials, seeking out the choicest items and employing knowledgeable agents as intermediaries, all activities that would later prove useful when hunting for Arabic copies of the Nights. Although he spent most of his time in Constantinople, Galland did not restrict himself to the capital, also visiting Egypt and Syria in his search for materials. Once, just as he was about to leave Smyrna, his luck nearly ran out when an earthquake that killed fifteen thousand of the town’s inhabitants collapsed Galland’s house on top of him, trapping him beneath the rubble. He spent twenty-four hours imprisoned in the ruins, but luckily his stove had not been lit at the time so he didn’t burn or suffocate and was finally pulled to safety.
Even as he continued buying for the French elite, Galland was able to assemble his own collection of manuscripts and prepare various works for publication during these years. His ambition sometimes got the better of him, causing him to assume such large undertakings that friends were compelled to warn him he was taking on too much (such as a massive dictionary of oriental history Galland was forced to abandon because his various commissions would never allow him the time). It was only after his final return to France at age forty-two that Galland began translating in earnest, producing among other tomes a French version of a book of eastern maxims and proverbs, an unpublished translation of the Koran and the translation of an Arabic treatise on an eastern beverage just beginning to reach Europe—coffee. Since Ambassador de Nointel had taken him on in 1670, Galland had spent no more than three years of the last eighteen in his homeland.
For all his ceaseless efforts, though, Galland was hardly wealthy. Not until he was fifty did he receive anything by way of a state pension for his services, and that more as a recognition of his abilities than an adequate private income. The royalty system was not yet in place, so Galland would have made little or nothing from his publications, including the Nights. Possessing little money of his own (and spending most of that, it seems, on books and manuscripts), he relied on employment from those who did, and at times found funds tight. In at least one letter he asks that an ordered manuscript be held for him until he came to Paris to collect it, since the cost of packaging and shipping was too dear. Even in his later years, when he held a chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal, Galland sometimes had no money for days at a stretch, and one assumes little to eat, either.
Still, if he did not possess the means or the inclination for the sort of noxious overindulgence for which ancien régime aristocrats are famous, a lifetime of dedicated work placed Galland in the secure position of being able to reap other rewards from his industry. His studiously acquired reputation as a translator and numismatist, besides his services to a number of high government officials, did not go unnoticed in elite circles, where Galland’s talent and geniality won him the acquaintanceship of many scholars, travellers and literary figures. In the world of Enlightenment networking, these contacts recommended Galland to those who had need for his services, so that after his final return in 1688, he never lacked for work.
Within months of reaching France, Galland found himself employed as a translator and assistant to Melchissedech Thevenot, Keeper of the King’s Library in Paris. From there he went on to work for the orientalist Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville as an assistant and collaborator on d’Herbelot’s monumental Bibliothèque orientale, or “Encyclopedia of the Orient,” from earliest times to the present. D’Herbelot envisioned creating two works—a bibliothèque, or dictionary-cum-encyclopedia, and a companion florilège or anthology of relevant works, to follow, but only once the bibliothèque was completed. When d’Herbelot died in 1695, Galland assumed responsibility for finishing the Bibliothèque orientale, bringing it to press in 1697.
In an extended preface, Galland is careful to
differentiate between the real and the imagined in oriental matters, writing that here in the Bibliothèque orientale is actual, presented knowledge of the eastern world, not the sundry myths and legends that had grown up around the popular “marvels of the East.” With Johann Hottinger’s earlier Historia Orientalis (1651), the Bibliothèque orientale remained one of the two standard reference works on Islam for well over a century, consulted by scholars and writers searching for background material on the Orient. Once it was completed, Galland worked for a time as a librarian for Thierry Bignon, President of France’s Grand Council, before entering the employ of the intendant (“governor”) of Lower Normandy, the renowned statesman, archaeologist and man of letters, Nicolas-Joseph Foucault.
As librarian in the latter’s home, Galland was based in Caen for most of the next decade, although he made frequent visits to Paris on business or to continue his own researches, remaining a familiar figure in Parisian intellectual circles. Already admitted to the learned academies of Caen and Padua, by 1701 Galland’s services and many learned papers earned him the distinction of admittance to France’s ultra-prestigious Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, although he was still living in Lower Normandy at the time and unable to participate fully in the academy’s activities until he moved back to Paris five years later. Still, it’s not a bad career path for a poor peasant’s boy who hated working with his hands. And better was to come Antoine Galland’s way very shortly.
It is due at least partly to Galland’s continued presence in elite circles that he came across The Thousand and One Nights. Among his many Parisian friends and acquaintances were a number of mostly anonymous Syrians who, knowing of Galland’s passion for eastern stories, alerted him from time to time of a title he might be interested in, or even passed on actual manuscripts for his enjoyment and as possible material for translation. Sometime in 1698, during one of these visits, Galland received an Arabic manuscript concerning the voyages of an intrepid Baghdadi merchant named Sindbad, who undergoes numerous adventures during his travels, but always manages to return home alive, intact and usually enriched.
The original cycle of the Sindbad tales dates from tenth-century Persia. While the etymology of “Sindbad” is uncertain and there is no universally accepted origin, one theory holds that the name denotes a traveller in Sind, the southernmost province of presentday Pakistan. While the fictional Sindbad is portrayed as a citizen of Baghdad, it is notable that in the first-person narrative of his adventures, the seafarer merely refers to “my native place” as his land of origin without ever specifically mentioning the Abbasid capital, so it is possible that the most famous Muslim sailor of all time was by birth an Indian, or perhaps of a Persian family that had settled in the City of Peace.
Sindbad doesn’t find much peace on his travels. His adventures are undoubtedly based on stories of actual voyages undertaken by Muslim merchants trading from the Middle East to the Indies and China during the Abbasid caliphate. Unlike the majority of motion pictures, which portray Sindbad as the dashing captain of a sailing vessel, the original work has as its hero not a professional sailor but a merchant’s son who squanders his inheritance in easy living and must turn trader to recoup his fortune. For all that, this Sindbad definitely possesses a mariner’s wandering soul, since either through straitened circumstances or an inner restlessness, he repeatedly returns to sea for a total of seven eventful journeys before finally retiring to a luxurious private life in Baghdad.
Several times during his narrative, Sindbad remarks that even when he had money from trading, he would eventually grow weary of an indolent life on land, finding he could satisfy his roving spirit only by embarking on another voyage. “One day my mind will become possessed with the thought of travelling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands,” he might say, or he will allude to his being “seized with longing for travel and diversion” when “the bad man within me yearned to go … and enjoy the sight of strange countries.” Though a merchant by trade, over time Sindbad makes enough voyages that one and all bestow on him the nickname of “Sindbad the Seafarer.”
While Galland found the Sindbad voyages highly coloured adventure stories, there is also a moral to the tales that would not have been lost on a man who’d had to make his own way in life. After hearing a hammal—a porter—with the same name (to avoid confusion, in many versions the porter’s name is given as Hindbad) bemoaning his fate outside his gate, Sindbad invites the man inside his fine home, where over several nights he relates to this and other guests his nautical adventures—entertaining tales offered as object lessons in the difficulties the Seafarer has faced in accumulating his wealth.
It soon becomes evident that on each voyage, the Seafarer relies entirely on his own resources to extricate himself from his many predicaments, using ingenuity to escape shipwreck, man-eating giants, gargantuan serpents, the nest of the giant bird known as the roc and other assorted perils. Although a good Muslim, not once in his many adventures does Sindbad appeal to supernatural beings or agencies for help, but acts as the architect of his own salvation, as well as the gatherer of his own fortune.
The lesson for the porter and the other guests is clear. It does men no good to rail against their fate, for it is only by their own works that individuals rise and succeed. In this sense, Sindbad’s adventures are a direct refutation of the common western prejudice that the East is home to fatalistic values and attitudes opposed to—as well as inherently inferior to—European force and action. There are times when Sindbad’s resourcefulness puts western heroes like James Bond to shame, even as his generosity and forthrightness belie any so-called “oriental” duplicity.
Gently chastened, Sindbad the Porter admits the folly of complaining about his comparatively small troubles at the end of the tales, then leaves rich Sindbad’s home to ply his trade with renewed vigour, and with gifts of money from his new “brother” to help him on his way. “Know … that my story is a wonderful one,” Sindbad tells his guests at the start of his narratives, “for I came not to this high estate save after travail sore and perils galore … for whom what destiny doth write there is neither refuge or flight.” To the porter’s initial envy, his wandering namesake counters that a man may live well or poorly, but it is good to recall that a fortunate estate is seldom won without considerable effort and risk—as Sindbad the Seafarer made his prosperity over seven spectacular voyages on dangerous seas.
Charmed by the Sindbad stories, Galland devoted some of his evening hours to a French translation of the manuscript. Within a short time—probably a few months at most, and apparently before he settled permanently in Nicolas-Joseph Foucault’s house in Caen—Galland fashioned a manuscript he called Sindbad le marin—“Sindbad the Sailor.” Presenting a copy to his patroness, the Marquise d’O, daughter of Ambassador de Guilleragues and a distinguished lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse of Bourgogne, Galland won her support and sponsorship to have Sindbad le marin published early in 1701. The public response was highly favourable, earning Galland widespread notice and establishing his reputation as a translator of folklore.
Sindbad’s publication, however, was only the prelude to something greater. Just as it went to press, it appears that one of Galland’s Syrian friends informed him that the Sindbad tales were only a small part of a much larger Arabic collection known as The Thousand and One Nights. Hearing this, Galland actually recalled Sindbad le marin from the printers for a time while he began a search for this Thousand and One Nights storybook, hoping to inspect the Sindbad voyages in the larger work before his own book appeared and perhaps revise from it. This probably accounts for the delay between Galland’s completion of Sindbad le marin in the late 1690s and its eventual publication several years later. Since there is no credible evidence that the Sindbad tales ever appeared in Arabic collections of the Nights, it may be that Galland misheard his friend; that the Syrian only meant the Sindbad voyages were similar to other stories found within Alf Laila wa Laila, but were not an acce
pted part of the actual work. Or the Syrian might have meant that he had heard Sindbad was part of Alf Laila wa Laila but, never having read any such work himself, was operating on hearsay alone.
Whatever the actual circumstances of the reference, Galland was intrigued by word of this new book. At once he decided to procure a copy of Alf Laila wa Laila to see if its tales were as worth translating as the Sindbad stories. It looks to have taken quite some time, but by employing a Syrian buying agent in Paris, by December 1701 Galland had in his hands a three-volume Syrian manuscript dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. In an October 1701 letter to a friend, Galland makes his first recorded mention of the Nights: “Three or four days ago, a friend from Aleppo … informed me by letter that he had received from his country [i.e., Ottoman Syria] a book in Arabic I had asked him to get for me. It is in three volumes, entitled … The Thousand Nights [sic].” He goes on to describe the work as a “collection of stories people recite in that country…. I asked this friend to keep it for me until I came to Paris…. It will be something with which to amuse myself [translating] during the long [winter] nights.”
Once Galland had this new manuscript in his possession, it became evident that it contained much less than the 1001 Nights promised in its title, ending only at the 282nd Night. And so to his disappointment Galland believed he possessed only a part-version of Alf Laila wa Laila, and immediately began a second search for material to complete the work, becoming not only the first European translator of the Arabian Nights but also the first westerner to hunt for a mythical “full” version. In another letter written sometime in August 1702 he remarks, “I have only four or five hundred of the Nights … which arrived for me from Aleppo, and I am waiting for the rest to come from there.”