Eastern Dreams

by Paul Nurse

  Galland’s Mille et une nuits follows this tradition of elastic translation, to the extent that it cannot be considered an actual “translation” of Alf Laila wa Laila, but rather a European paraphrase of the Arabic original. In his learned works on coins or translations of texts like the Koran, Galland appears to have been meticulous in his approach. But in rendering popular folklore into vernacular French, he knew he was dealing with material inherently different from that requiring the scholar’s rigorous touch. While Galland adds the occasional explanatory note on cultural, political or geographical matters for the reader’s benefit, on the whole he refrains from making Les mille et une nuits anything but a storybook intended to entertain respectable readers. There is no pretense to verbal accuracy with the Arabic original; whatever Galland feels needs revision or deletion is revised or deleted, and he generally feels free to edit or alter whatever he believes proper for a comprehensively pleasing effect.

  Galland knew instinctively that as it was, many parts of Alf Laila wa Laila would not go over well with the public, and so he adapted his sources accordingly by dropping whatever he deemed inappropriate or difficult. These excisions include not only many of the sexually explicit passages (although it must be said that he is not as bad as subsequent adapters: Galland at least leaves in the frame story dealing with sexual misconduct, as well as the reference to incest involving brother and sister in “The First Kalandar’s Tale”) and some of the more violent or crude descriptions, but also anything Galland feels readers might find excessively exotic.

  This includes the Arab passion for poetry, which Galland believed would not be appreciated by francophone readers, particularly as the Arabic metre is nearly impossible to render accurately into European languages. So he dropped most of the poetical passages, producing not only an altered text but also one purposely streamlined for an audience Galland knew could not be expected to appreciate Arabic poetical refrains. But this amounts to deleting many thousands of lines of poetry—in extended Arabic versions, almost ten thousand—a considerable rearranging to accommodate French tastes and expectations.

  The frame story involving Scheherazade, Shahryar and Dinarzade also comes in for some revision. The rawi kept the traditional Dinarzade/Scheherazade request–response format as a way of identifying Alf Laila wa Laila recitations for their patrons, and for his first two volumes, Galland maintains the nightly breaks. But in Volume 3 he dispenses with Dinarzade’s request because readers complained that the constant repetition was boring, and by Volume 7 he drops Dinarzade’s nightly request altogether, especially since some Nights stories do not mention Scheherazade and Shahryar at all and therefore do not contain breaks. “It is sufficient,” Galland writes, “that readers be informed of the intention of the Arab author [sic] who fashioned the collection.”

  These deletions are not all. Like the storytellers of old who made a tale more meaningful by inserting local references, Galland inserts references to French culture to make his stories more appealing to his audience, feeling that while a certain amount of exoticism is desirable, too much is sure to confuse or, worse, bore the reader. Here he was simply following the tradition of his time; it was Charles Perrault who introduced the concept of the glass slipper to the traditional Cinderella story and used familiar, existing images such as the Château Ussé as a setting for “Sleeping Beauty.”

  Galland does the same thing, merging the fantastic with the familiar and adding any inventions that he felt helped carry a story forward. The best example of this is also likely the most famous: no one has been able to adequately trace its origins or decipher its meaning, so for all its fame as a magical incantation, it is likely that the command “Open, Sesame!” is simply a convenient invention of Antoine Galland’s to assist Ali Baba in getting in and out of the Forty Thieves’ hideout.

  The result is that Galland produced not so much a translation of Alf Laila wa Laila as a substantially modified paraphrase and expansion for French and other western readers. Understanding the prime difference between the complexities of academic study and the purposes of storytelling—entertainment, perhaps fused with instruction—Galland could never have known that his work would launch a three-hundred-year-long search for the Nights’ true origins and structure. Aiming to do no more than enchant, inform and provide moral instruction, he felt justified in doing whatever he felt necessary to create a pleasing effect. Galland made no apologies; we should attach no blame.

  By refashioning the Nights to ease its path into the West, Antoine Galland produced a classic. More than any other individual, he “created” the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as the book is known today. Even as the Arabian Nights has always remained a reservoir of stories from the East, it became a beloved literary classic only because of Galland’s efforts, sealing his place in the venerable tradition of storytelling. Apart from Scheherazade herself, Galland is, in fact, the first Nights storyteller whose life we know something about—the first actual Arabian Nights conteur known by name. Small wonder, then, when some feel that if The Thousand and One Nights has anyone in its long history who can be called its true author or synthesizer, it is Antoine Galland of France.

  The immense popularity of Les mille et une nuits did little to turn Galland’s head. His life proceeded much as always, a living testament to the Enlightenment ideal of acquiring knowledge as the best way to combat ignorance and superstition. In September 1706, still in Nicolas-Joseph Foucault’s employ and with the first seven volumes of the Nights issued, Galland returned permanently to Paris, where from 1709 he lived in a house called Au cerceau d’or (“The Golden Hoop”) on the Rue de Sept-Voies, the appropriately exotic-sounding “Street of the Seven Ways.” (This and other dwellings were later demolished to make way for the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and the new Collège Sainte-Barbe.)

  Even as Les mille et une nuits brought Galland his greatest fame, his letters and journals show that over time he came to resent the work in much the same way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of Sherlock Holmes, believing a somewhat flighty creation was taking him away from worthier endeavours. Complaining that he was wasting time working on further volumes of Les mille et une nuits that might be better spent on scholarly pursuits (to Gisbert Cuper, Galland remarked how “that nonsense work brings me more honour … than the most beautiful work I can compose about coins…. Such is the world!”), Galland grew at first weary, then annoyed, by the public’s continual demand for more stories. With atypical snobbishness, he wrote that this sort of nonsense was fit only for those court or society types who demanded easily digested literature, rather than those who gave proper weight to his learned papers and translations of serious texts.

  Unlike Conan Doyle, however, who tried to kill off Holmes in 1893 (only to be forced into literary resurrection by an infuriated public), Galland was not so irked that he actually abandoned work on the Nights, even as it rankled that such “frivolous” stuff had come to supersede a lifetime of dedicated scholarship. And like Doyle, Galland could not escape the notoriety of his most famous creation; in the public’s mind, his name was inseparable from that of the Nights. Whatever else he may have done, Antoine Galland was known then as he is known today: as the man who brought The Thousand and One Nights to the West.

  This fame sometimes had annoying consequences. In his earlier volumes, Galland employs Dinarzade’s request to Scheherazade that if her sister is not sleepy, could she then recite one of her marvellous stories? This innocuous remark came back to haunt Galland when readers took him at his word and learned where he lived. At least once during his later years in Paris, Galland was awakened at night by people yelling at his window to tell them one of his “Arabian” stories. A variation of this anecdote has a gang of young men throwing stones at the aging scholar’s window on a freezing evening, insisting that he recite one of his stories because now that he was up, he would be unable to sleep. One hopes Galland had a chamber pot handy.

  Grumbles aside, Galland was not forgotten by the scholarly co
mmunity. Nominated for the second chair in Arabic at the Collège Royal in 1708 for his many scholarly contributions, Galland had his nomination approved in June of the following year, and was herewith appointed Reader (Professor) in Arabic at the same institution where he had studied languages forty years before, joining his Nights “co-translator” Pétis de la Croix as one of two Arabic professors at the university. Perhaps aware that he may have received this position partly for his translation of the Nights as well as for his scholarly work, Galland used both Sindbad and the Nights in teaching Arabic to his students, confirming his belief that popular works are useful texts for the study of languages.

  Galland prepared material for the final two volumes of Les mille et une nuits in 1712 and 1713, during his tenure at the Collège Royal, although these were not published until after his death. For the next several years Galland discharged his duties at the university faithfully. By now, however, he was well into his seventh decade and his health was failing. Although he appears to have lived “simple in life and manners,” along with the normal wear and tear of age, Galland was plagued increasingly by asthma and heart problems.

  By early 1715, his condition had grown sufficiently serious that he sent to Picardy for his nephew, Julien Galland (later an interpreter in the Levant), to help prepare for the dispersal of his worldly goods. Since he had never really known his parents, Galland remarked that he believed he’d had three sires who had combined to make him the man that he was: the Collège Royal, where he studied and taught; the Bibliothèque du roi, where he worked; and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, which had now accepted him as a member.

  To these institutions Galland bequeathed most of his possessions. Following his death, Galland’s numismatic dictionary was given to the Académie, while his library of books and manuscripts, including the three volumes of Alf Laila wa Laila, was presented to the Bibliothèque du roi (now the Bibliothèque nationale). They reside there today as Nos. 3609, 3610 and 3611 of the library’s Oriental Collection (the Arabic manuscript of Sindbad that started it all is listed separately as No. 3645) and are known collectively as the “Galland Manuscript.”

  Aside from the ninth-century Alf Laila Fragment, the Galland Manuscript is the earliest surviving Arabic text of The Thousand and One Nights. The mysterious fourth volume Galland employed in his translation, and which is sometimes believed to have been a sequential part of his Syrian manuscript, has disappeared, so its contents may never be known, nor how much Galland relied on it.

  Following the making of his will, Galland’s health continued to go downhill, and by mid-February he was in extremis. At around 3 P.M. on February 17, 1715, “this excellent man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and litterateur” died of combined asthma and heart disease, two months shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. The next day, Antoine Galland—linguist, specialist in eastern history, Antiquary to the King of France, and Professor of Arabic—was buried close to the Church of St. Stephen of the Mount in Paris. His funeral convoy contained an odd assortment of mourners—respected scholars and university colleagues, but also a great number of poor French people whom Galland had helped financially, or whose children he had taught free of charge. Less than seven months later, Louis XIV himself died, ending a lengthy reign of seventy-two years. The lifespans of Galland and France’s Sun King, whose agent and dealer Galland had sometimes been, had roughly paralleled one another.

  More than two centuries after Galland’s birth, the town of Rollot erected a monument to its famous son, which stands today. It bears the simple inscription “Translator of the Thousand and One Nights.” In this case the word “translator,” in the sense of someone presenting an accurate rendition of something from one language to another, is problematic, although Rollot’s city fathers cannot be faulted for their misleading epitaph. Antoine Galland is as much the western messenger of the Arabian Nights as he is its adapter and sometimes-fabricator, reporting on a world lying culturally and geographically far beyond Enlightenment Europe.

  Although not a translator in the modern sense, Galland’s role as the first individual to publish a printed version of the Nights is in keeping with the fluid nature of the original work as it was developed by his medieval predecessors, making him not only the first European translator of the Nights but also the first western presenter of the tales in the tradition of those who came before him. By his efforts, Galland joins them in spirit around the desert campfires, in the marketplaces and in the coffee houses of the East, where for centuries stories from Alf Laila wa Laila were recited or read aloud to enraptured listeners.

  But with one notable difference. By making the Nights available to the West in a mass-produced printed form, over time Galland and his successors reached audiences their storytelling forebearers could not have imagined in their wildest flights of fancy. With first tens, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of readers, over the years Galland’s audience grew ever wider until it came to encircle the earth itself. Today the picture Galland paints of a world where “the glamour of imagination, the marvel of the miracles and the gorgeousness and magnificence of the scenery” has persisted for a hundred times the nearly three years it took for Queen Scheherazade to weave her lifesaving tales.

  *Galland’s belief that a complete Alf Laila wa Laila contains thirty-six parts was based on the idea that the first volume of his Arabic manuscript, consisting of sixty-nine Nights (and which corresponds to the first two volumes of his Nights), would need an additional thirty-five volumes to make a full set of stories. But if all thirty-six Arabic volumes contained the same number of Nights as the first volume, Galland would have a total of 2484 Nights, not 1001, so the source of his belief in a thirty-six part Arabic Nights remains somewhat obscure.

  *A fifth Arabic volume Galland mentions in a 1702 letter is likely the Sindbad manuscript given to him in Paris, indicating that Galland did believe the Sindbad voyages somehow comprised part of Alf Laila wa Laila.

  Chapter 4

  “THESE IDLE DESERTS”

  Never before have Eastern studies made such progress. In the time of Louis XIV everyone was a Hellenist; now they are all Orientalists …

  —VICTOR HUGO, LES ORIENTALES

  If timing isn’t actually everything, it is at least half the battle. With Enlightenment interest in the eastern world reaching full steam in the early eighteenth century, Les mille et une nuits arrived at exactly the right moment to become the Harry Potter of its day—a tremendously successful imaginative work enjoyed by all ages and classes. The Nights seemed to focus all the exotic promise of the East in a single book. Europeans taking holidays from their everyday reality by reading the work could detect a more glamorous, sensuous self in its tales, an oriental dopplegänger unburdened by cultural constraints. Through Antoine Galland’s free adaption of Alf Laila wa Laila, The Thousand and One Nights came to the West through two worlds—the historical East, where the stories derived, and an Enlightenment Europe opening itself to the possibilities of other cultures.

  So popular was Les mille et une nuits that it quickly attracted literary pirates. At a time when European copyright laws were in their infancy, even a halfway-successful book was guaranteed to be pirated, especially abroad, soon after its publication. Besides unlicensed extracts of Galland’s work circulating widely in France, volumes of the Nights were bought and sped off to other parts of the Continent soon after their release in Paris, where they were translated with almost indecent haste by anonymous, bilingual hacks. These versions were then issued in cheap editions that were nonetheless the first translations of the work to appear outside France. Even as volumes of Les mille et une nuits continued to be published during the first two decades of the new century, unauthorized translations began appearing in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Poland and Russia.

  Given the growing English presence abroad and the increasing importance of English as a language, the first and most important of these pirated editions appeared in Londo
n early in 1706. The subtitle of Galland’s work was modified from Arabian Tales, Translated into French to the full English title Arabian Winter-Evenings’ Entertainments or Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, thereby sealing the book’s common name in the English-speaking world. This is known as the “Grub Street” edition, a nod toward the London thoroughfare where writers, poets, pamphleteers and publishers plied their uncertain trade. Translators making no more than a shilling a page merely “pitchforked into Gallic English the French paraphrase of Galland,” receiving no royalties or acknowledgment for their work, and ensuring that the first English translator or translators of the Arabian Nights from Galland’s French version will remain forever unknown.

  Released by the bookseller Andrew Bell, the English Nights quickly followed the French original by creating a sensation, with the title page containing the following brief, if inaccurate, introduction:

  Arabian Nights Entertainments: consisting of one thousand and one stories, told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the execution of a bloody vow he had made to marry a lady every day, and have her head cut off next morning…. Containing a better account of the customs, manners, and religion of the Eastern nations … than is to be met with in any author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Mss. By M. Galland, of the Royal Academy, and now done in English.

  Here Bell seems to have taken Galland’s titular statement that the tales are essentially “Arabian” at face value, compressing the English title even as his introduction acknowledges that the book’s characters traverse national and ethnic lines. Perhaps there was also, as in France, an element of marketing involved, a sense that placing the name of a fabled region front and centre might increase sales. Whatever the reason, the French and English title changes would create a permanent association of the Nights with Arabia more than any other land.