by Paul Nurse
Contrary to popular belief, there is no limit to the number of wishes genies may grant—no “three wishes and done” as depicted in most popular versions. Whoever possesses the lamp has an inexhaustible treasure trove at their disposal, although there are limits to supernatural generosity. When Aladdin is tricked into ordering a roc’s egg be hung from the dome of his palace, the Genie of the Lamp grows angry and threatening at his presumption, since rocs are masters of genies. It is only because the genie is aware that the request did not originate with Aladdin himself that he, his family and his palace are not reduced instantly to cinders.
That “Aladdin” is among the most famous wealth fantasies in existence—the Genie of the Lamp is practically a template of sudden riches—is beyond dispute, but the popularity of this story is also due to the fact that it embodies a favourite scenario found in fairy tales all over the world. An individual of common, even lowly, origins is transformed to a significantly higher state by the intrusion of the uncommon or the fantastic into their everyday reality, meeting and vanquishing troubles until an ultimately happy existence is reached.
The origins of “Aladdin,” however, are a matter of dispute. No Arabic manuscript of this story prior to the eighteenth century has ever been found, and the only information regarding the tale in the Muslim world comes from Galland, who had his from Hana Diab with no apparent explanation concerning its age or origins. Matters are not helped by Galland’s admission in his journal that he substantially changed the scenario of the “Aladdin” he published in Les mille et une nuits from the shorter version Diab gave him (in true Arabian Nights fashion, Diab’s original Arabic version has vanished). As well, in keeping with his belief about the uplifting possibilities of literature, Galland even has Scheherazade deliver a short speech at the end concerning the story’s moral, pointing out the rewards and punishments incurred by its characters, and running perilously close to ruining the reader’s enjoyment. Where Hana Diab heard the story he called “The Lamp” has never been revealed. All Arabic versions of “Aladdin” postdate Galland’s adaption, making it very likely that the most famous story in the entire Thousand and One Nights, in whatever form Galland had it from Hana Diab, was retranslated into Arabic sometime after its appearance in the West, to thus become part of the eastern Nights.
So famous and beloved is the story of Aladdin that it has attracted the attention of fraud artists. In the years following the appearance of Les mille et une nuits, two manuscripts purporting to be original Arabic texts of “Aladdin” were forged by copyists, who translated Galland’s version into Arabic with enough changes to make them seem genuine originals of the tale. But as no true Arabic version has ever been found, the odds are greater than even that the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp is as much a product of Antoine Galland’s own imagination as it is—perhaps—the expansion of a story originating somewhere in the eastern hemisphere. This would make an Enlightenment Frenchman the true author of the most famous story in the entire Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
The second celebrated tale Galland adapted from Hana Diab is nearly as famous as “Aladdin,” and for much the same reason. In its depiction of a lowly person transformed to a higher status, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” is also a classic cautionary tale about the perils of greed. When the poor woodcutter Ali Baba enters the thieves’ treasure-cave through the magic passwords “Open, Sesame!” he takes only what he can carry on his benighted mules, treating his new-found wealth as a gift from Allah while maintaining his personal traits of humility and generosity.
But Ali’s brother Kasim, a wealthy merchant, is consumed with greed once he learns of the cave’s location, and becomes so besotted by the immense riches he plans on hauling away with ten sturdy horses that he forgets the magic words required to open the cave from the inside as well as from without, and is slain by the returning thieves. In classic folklore manner, “Ali Baba” features a pair of contrasting siblings or relatives of opposing station and temperament who act in markedly different ways to an unforeseen circumstance. Ali’s constancy is—ultimately—rewarded, while his brother’s selfish venality causes his downfall.
The common perception is that the world of the Nights is one where men reign supreme at the expense of women, so it is significant that it is not Ali who is the ultimate hero of the tale: the story’s full title is “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and How They Were Destroyed by a Slave.” The brigands, who have marked Ali for death after learning he has been in their hideout, are thwarted by the wit and ingenuity of Ali’s slave-girl Marjana (or Morgiana). She comes up with the plan of scalding to death the thieves who, hiding in huge oil jars, were preparing to kill her master, and then also slays the disguised bandit chieftain intent on murdering Ali. In this way she not only saves the Baba family but also wins her freedom and becomes Ali’s daughter-in-law.
There are a number of such females in The Thousand and One Nights, starting with Scheherazade herself. These women exhibit the superior wit and courage, more often associated with male heroes, necessary for bringing dangerous situations to safe conclusions. In “The Ebony Horse,” a princess feigns insanity to thwart a marriage proposal from the Sultan of Kashmir; in the tale of “Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis,” the title character selflessly insists she be sold as a slave to pay her husband’s debts; in “The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman,” Kamar’s wife Budur, a princess of China, disguises herself as her vanished husband to complete his journey and make a political match. The Syrian-born academic Rana Kabbani claims that because the Nights were recounted originally for all-male audiences desiring ribald entertainment—something never entirely true either in stories or settings—female characters within the tales tend to belong to one of two categories. They are either crafty, untrustworthy types—whores, adulteresses, sorceresses, manipulative relatives—or mild, pious, sexually unthreatening figures who don’t drive the plot forward but act as mere narrative accoutrements.
To be sure, there are female characters in the Arabian Nights who demonstrate such elevated levels of envy, greed or hate that their portrayal verges on misogyny (Crafty Dalilah and her daughter in “The Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and her Daughter Zaynab” and the jealous sisters in “The Eldest Lady’s Tale”), but they are counterbalanced by numerous other women who are “more remarkable for decision, action and manliness than the male” characters in many Nights stories. Taken as a whole, the charge that the majority of females in the work are simple projections of male desires does not hold water amidst the plethora of good, bad and neutral figures found throughout the book. With thousands of characters populating hundreds of stories, such a profusion practically guarantees a broad range of human types, not just across age and class lines but also between genders.
Like “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba” was an orphan story Galland expanded from a brief synopsis given him by Hana Diab. It also proved popular enough to attract fraud artists, one of whom rewrote the tale into Arabic with changes before presenting the manuscript as an authentic, newly discovered Arabic version. But even this does not mean the story of Ali Baba is a complete fabrication, for in the 1870s the English Arabist Edward Henry Palmer claimed to have found an altered version of the tale current among the Bedouin of the Sinai peninsula. It is true that over a century and a half the story could have found its way from Galland to Egypt, but as another imaginative writer might say, “Curiouser and curiouser.”
Other orphan stories such as “The Tale of Prince Ahmed and the Perie Banu” and “The Ebony Horse” were similarly given to Galland by Hana Diab and have since become standard parts of the Nights. But like “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” the story of “The Ebony Horse” cannot be found in Arabic manuscripts prior to Les mille et une nuits, although there are strong reasons for believing it to be genuine, since echoes of this tale involving a flying steed crop up in stories appearing from Europe through North Africa to India, all of which predate Galland. As for “Prince Ahmed,” Galland also changed this tale
substantially from the version he was given by Diab, padding the plot with material from a fifteenth-century Arab travel book and inserting a personal speech denouncing the custom of arranged marriages, which were still widespread in France at that time.
It is reasonable, then, to say that many of the tales in the Arabian Nights that spring quickest to readers’ minds are also the ones burdened by the biggest question marks. There is no proof that these stories ever existed in Alf Laila wa Laila, and in some cases they are either part or total fabrications of the work’s first European translator. If so, it is one of literature’s great jokes that “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” are largely European pastiches of Alf Laila wa Laila stories—western takeoffs of the original Nights that have long since surpassed the earlier Arabic tales in fame and popularity.
Yet here is another twist. Following the publication of Les mille et une nuits, a number of Galland’s orphan stories, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” were translated into eastern languages and have since become accepted as true Thousand and One Nights stories across all of the Middle East and Asia. They exist today in as many eastern editions of the Nights as they do in the West, and are as familiar. This is sublime proof of the Nights’ power to adapt itself for its readers, wherever they may be found.
Even more than Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Stories, the popularity of Galland’s Les mille et une nuits was immediate, immense and ultimately far-reaching. Rather than the familiar settings of western fairy tales, the Nights presented readers with a world that had been all but unimaginable a short time before. Published in their initial European incarnation over a period of thirteen years, the Nights’ cultural influence has now spanned centuries, becoming an identifiable source for a significant amount of western thought, perception and popular fiction concerning the Muslim East.
But in a curious echo of the Arab literati’s earlier apathy toward Alf Laila wa Laila, the French establishment practically ignored this first publication of the tales. With few exceptions, the small number of literary presses that actually bothered to review Les mille et une nuits alternated between regarding the book as either too learned for general readers or too frivolous for serious students of literature. Those few periodicals that reviewed the work positively, like the august Journal des savants, were reflexively considerate to a respected fellow littéraire, remarking that in addition to their pleasing aspects, Galland’s stories were also useful to students of eastern folklore and customs.
Hardly ringing endorsements, but the public didn’t care. They took to the Nights like manna in the wilderness, reading, discussing, dreaming and otherwise embracing the tales until The Thousand and One Nights became part of Europe’s storytelling fabric. These were biblical wonder tales without the religious baggage, as well as welcome successors and additions to the West’s own body of folklore. On the book’s appearance the first volumes sold out, were reprinted and sold out again, soon running to a higher-than-usual number of editions. With individual volumes reprinted as soon as they sold out, booksellers were often forced to offer entire sets of individual books for sale whenever they had them in stock, making it nearly impossible to determine what comprises a true “first edition” of Les mille et une nuits.
Unassuming as he was, Antoine Galland did not lack for some basic marketing skills. His carefully chosen subtitle, Arabian Tales Translated into French, was designed to capitalize on the longstanding fascination with “the East,” particularly the fabled land of Arabia. Since ancient times the western world had been bewitched by images of “Araby the Blest”—home to unicorns, phoenixes and fragrant gums, as well as the precious spices preserving and flavouring often-gamy European food. From time immemorial the West had viewed Arabia as a land apart; a place, Europeans told one another in hushed tones, where the very air breathes perfume and spice-smells.
Galland knew full well what he was doing by invoking the magical name “Arabia” in his title. After a lifetime spent searching the Levant’s shops and bazaars for the oriental collectibles coveted by France’s elite, no one understood better that using terms like “Arabian” or “Arabic” to describe a book was a near-guaranteed selling point, even if he of all people knew that in reality, his Nights was a compilation of stories from various times and places. But nothing was better designed to appeal to the exotic tastes of the eighteenth-century public than a package of “Arabian” stories of whatever origin. Within a few decades, the collection began to be known by alternative titles: the Arabian Tales, the 1001 Arabian Nights or simply the Arabian Nights.
After 1706, the appearance of new volumes of Les mille et une nuits slowed as Galland’s other obligations took precedence and, perhaps, his enthusiasm began to wane. By then he had published seven volumes and long since exhausted the contents of his Arabic manuscripts, as well as making no headway in his search for a non-existent complete Arabic text. In the three years following the publication of Volume 7, Galland was able to provide his publisher with only one new story (“The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub,” translated from an unidentified source), which by itself would not be enough to make another volume.
But such was the continuing demand for more Nights that in 1709, Claude Barbin committed fraud. Without Galland’s knowledge or permission, and to his subsequent very great annoyance, the firm unscrupulously used two Turkish stories translated by Galland’s fellow orientalist François Pétis de la Croix to release an eighth volume of Les mille et une nuits.
This was not done with Pétis de la Croix’s knowledge, either. He had translated the tales for a book of his own, and yet the publisher used them as Nights fodder and inserted—or rather, forged—the Scheherazade links Galland outlined in his tales to make these ones appear like additional stories from Les mille et une nuits. Thus Pétis de la Croix’s translations of “Zayn al-Asnam” and “Khudadad and his Brothers” were placed in the text alongside “The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub” to create Volume 8 of the Nights.
When he discovered the deception from Pétis de la Croix, Galland was livid. What words he had with his publisher are not recorded, but so enraged was Galland that for a time he seriously considered suspending further publication of the Nights to deprive Claude Barbin of future earnings. In the end he swallowed his anger and stayed with the work, but not with the firm. Volumes 9 and 10 were published by another Parisian publisher, Florentin Delaune, in 1712, with the final two, posthumous volumes released five years later in Lyon by Antoine Briasson.
At the start of Volume 9, Galland informs the reader heatedly that the final two stories in the previous book are “not part of the Nights,” stating that he was unaware of “the infidelity done to him” until after the volume was on the streets. Besides the problem of not having a complete Arabic edition as a sourcebook, this was the reason for the long hiatus between the appearance of Volume 8 in 1709 and the publication of the remainder of the work.
All the same, the unwarranted insertions so publicly repudiated by Galland remain a standard part of Les mille et une nuits and its translations to this day, and are now considered as integral to the work as those other stories of doubtful provenance that have become recognized parts of the Nights, “Sindbad,” “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba.” Irony again: so much wrangling over a work with no author or set stories, by an individual who was partially unaware of the nature of the text, but who nevertheless fashioned a book that has come to be accepted as a complete work by fifteen generations of readers.
Then there is the nature of Galland’s translation. For an academic, Antoine Galland was a born storyteller, possessing to “a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more captivating than culture or scholarship.” But as a scholar, Galland was also acutely aware that he was presenting material of some complexity to a non-specialist audience, one that could not be expected to either understand or appreciate those complexities. Words can fly further than any bird. In the same way as travellers venture physically from one geographical realm to another and move between cultures
as they do so, so too are translated works ferried by vessels of language from one geographical or cultural locale to another.
Depending on the date of their first appearance, this transportation can also function as an act of time travel, with texts originating in the near or distant past being revived in another period through the translator’s efforts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, European translation was in a state of debate regarding its function and purpose. Humanists did not consider accurate transcription from one language to another to be the ultimate end of the translation process; rather, they argued that if he is capable, the translator has the added responsibility of improving the original text by polishing or revising it to a state suitable for contemporary readers. This idea applied particularly to the translation of classical literature, from Homer’s epics to the Bible, where it was felt a restrained European decorum was preferable to a warts-and-all approach of rendering precisely each word and nuance. In some cases, such as Alexander Pope’s version of The Iliad, the translated work stands by itself as a recognized classic, but many books rendered with “improvement” rather than linguistic fidelity in mind are less than useful today for conveying anything of the original, and can be viewed more as adaptions than actual translations as the term is currently understood.