Eastern Dreams

by Paul Nurse

  This last edition, Calcutta II, is the most extensive of printed Arabic texts, and has become the chief source from which unabridged translations have been made. In addition to the Bulaq Text, the main editor, the East India Company linguist and political officer William Hay Macnaghten (his 1841 murder at Kabul, Afghanistan, helped spark the First Afghan War), also used Calcutta I and the Breslau Text for comparison and correction, besides relying heavily on an Egyptian manuscript that belonged to the Anglo-Irish army officer and Persian specialist Major Turner Macan.

  Because Macnaghten and his associates used more sources than their predecessors, Calcutta II is often thought the most complete and accurate Arabic edition of the Nights in existence. But it too has its errors and problems, not the least of which are unresolved questions concerning the so-called Macan Manuscript. This had been purchased following Macan’s death by a Charles Brownlow, who submitted it to an examination by the Asiatic Society of Bengal for authenticity. All the examiners, including Macnaghten, pronounced it genuine, recommending that it be edited and published. But they still could not pin down definitively where the text originated, or to which branch of Nights manuscripts—the Syrian or the Egyptian—it belonged.

  Not that they tried all that hard or even cared, wanting only to print an Arabic text with 1001 Nights. Confusing things even more is the inclusion of material taken from the Breslau Text, further broadcasting its (to put it kindly) questionable contents, and meaning that translations of the Arabian Nights based on Calcutta II are either heavily “contaminated” from the early Nights, as some believe, or simply include more supplementary material added to the body of the original tales, as ancient storytellers and scribes constantly did.

  The whole thing now seems pretty incestuous, with editions using material already available in texts or manuscripts regardless of its often-dubious lineage. Yet how bad this situation seems depends on one’s viewpoint. Given that Antoine Galland altered his sources to create essentially new Nights stories or inserted independent material wherever he chose fit, it can be argued that using other material, even that which is known to have been forged, is not much different from the way the Nights first appeared in the West: as a series of anonymous, Arabic-language stories.

  But it can also be argued that—questions of absolute invention aside—the West’s augmentation of the book takes the Nights’ development one step further from the fluid use of stories by the rawi and the scribes committing them to paper. If the core of the Arabian Nights lies in the Arabic Alf Laila wa Laila, then the West has carried on the tradition of enlarging the work as did those easterners that came before, creating a kind of “Greater Arabian Nights” extending from its original geographical and cultural parameters to encompass the whole world. This “Greater Nights” is like a cone, with the earliest stories in Hazar Afsanah forming the bottom tip and the remainder expanding upwards into Alf Laila wa Laila, after which the work’s western history adds further expansive mass to its figure.

  Although the information surrounding these printed editions appears to be technical, not one is “scholarly” in the traditional sense, since their editors simply revised available material by correcting obvious mistakes and making stylistic changes before setting the type. Little supporting material regarding sources is offered; prefaces and introductions are perfunctory at best. But they still remain of vital importance by assembling in printed form many Alf Laila wa Laila stories bouncing around the eastern world for centuries in various manuscripts, producing something approaching standard Arabic compilations of a work that, before the nineteenth century, effectively had none.

  If this seems curious for such a durable work as the Nights, it should be remembered that Alf Laila wa Laila held no special place in Muslim society. Popular and enduring as its stories were, it never set the imagination of the eastern world on fire as it has done so profoundly in the West. It is the western world that has put the Nights on its pedestal, encouraging the creation of three of the four Arabic texts (Calcutta I, Breslau and Calcutta II), while also defining its basic history.

  Of equal importance, these printed texts provide the basic materials for scholars to continue the work of reading, translating and studying the gossamer work that is The Thousand and One Nights. In this sense, for all his padding and insertions, Calcutta I’s editor, Sheikh Shirwani, was right. Anyone today wanting to learn Arabic could do far worse than consult these editions and their translations as their personal Rosetta Stones.

  The growth of empire characterizing the period during which these Arabic texts were printed saw a simultaneous and significant change in western perceptions regarding the eastern world. Whereas previous generations viewed the East as a source of wealth and knowledge, they also had a sincere desire to become better acquainted with non-Christian cultures. With the Arabian Nights aiding in a better popular presentation of Asian societies, old images of Muslims and other easterners as corrupt and immoral gave ground to new curiosities about cultures fast becoming linked to the West.

  This was not to last. A change of attitude occurred as the West grew more technologically adept and internationally dominant and its involvement with Asia became more directly political and economic. The former picture of the East as a bewitching land of enchantment was slowly replaced by a belief in this same region’s essential stagnation. What was true of the oriental world a thousand or two thousand years ago, it was believed, is true today and probably always will be. The Romantic notion of this very timelessness was now held as evidence of the East’s inferiority relative to a progressive Europe and North America—a West shrugging off old cultural habits as it embraced the future.

  As Europe, especially, came to identify itself with republicanism or constitutional monarchy, practicality and racial vigour, common images of the Orient now focused on presumptions of cultural inertia. The medieval world of the Arabian Nights was hardly the only, or even the most significant, factor in this changing perception, but the book’s popular portrayal of an immemorial East no doubt played some unconscious role in the new perspective. By appearing to confirm cultural differences, western editions of the Nights and the oriental tale genre helped solidify Europe’s sense of an oriental Other—an everlasting realm that may have its special attractions, but which cannot be considered an intellectual or cultural equal of the dynamic West.

  Special attractions, indeed. Aside from its economic attractiveness, the eastern world still held an allure, one now based not on sacredness but on expectations of a natural sexual heat emanating from a region where the senses were thought to reign supreme. Images of western men consorting with eastern women—the familiar coupling with the exotic—predate the appearance of the Nights by centuries. Jason and Medea, Solomon and Sheba, Antony and Cleopatra; each of these affairs is the by-product of a western identification with the East as a repository of sexually available women. The concept of “dusky maidens” housed in intrigue-riddled seraglios or pining for absent lovers like Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid was a picture delighting western imaginations—an eastern sexual fantasy created by the West for its diversion. Although he was writing satirically, Oliver Goldsmith still spoke for many when remarking, “I am told they have no balls, drums nor operas in the East, but then they have got a seraglio…. I am told, your Asiatic beauties are the most convenient women alive, for they have no souls….”

  In our time, the Nights has been criticized for its alleged misogyny and praised as a proto-feminist book. Evidence for both viewpoints can be found within so expansive a work, but what cannot be denied is the pervasive erotic element colouring unexpurgated editions. Besides such ribald stories as “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” and “The Goodwife of Cairo and her Four Lovers,” Scheherazade’s own frame story is based on the existence of adulterous relations. In the stories themselves, sexual adventures often figure as plot devices. Lovers and spouses cheat on each other, men visit brothels, sexual predators target young boys, lesbian relations occur in
harems, slave girls are the playthings of kings and men chase women simply because men chase women.

  There can be no doubt that European expectations of unscrupulous sexuality played some part in the West’s embracing of the Nights’ unspoken promise of novel pleasures. It has been noted that the Galland version and the numerous abridged editions are conspicuously clean compared with the actual Arabic Alf Laila wa Laila. All the same, independently gathered information about harems, communal baths, slave markets and veiled beauties helped heighten a historical sense of the East as a land glutted with erotic offerings, and the world of the Nights provided the backdrop for innumerable carnal fantasies about a place where western sexual standards were unimportant and very much unwanted.

  By the early Victorian Age, the existence of printed Arabic editions of the Nights and the growing numbers of western Arabic readers made it clear that the full flavour of the work incorporated much more than was generally available in older translations. Once again the Arabian Nights was transforming—or perhaps re transforming is the better term—as it began turning away from its fairy-tale persona to assume more of its true nature as a treasure-house of story for all ages and sensibilities.

  The accumulation of Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts and the creation of printed Arabic compendiums played a decisive role in redirecting the Nights. By the late 1830s, attempts to produce uncensored versions gathered steam. The German Arabist Gustav Weil issued a part-translation (no verse) between 1837 and 1841 using the Bulaq and Breslau texts, as well as manuscripts held in the library of the dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the family’s Prince Albert married Queen Victoria; their descendents reign together as Britain’s royal family), but saw many potentially offensive passages changed by an editor his publisher hired to make the work more saleable. Weil was not pleased, but could do nothing.

  In English, the first attempt at translating a completely unexpurgated version—prose, poetry and ribald parts all together—was undertaken by the lawyer and East India Company civil servant Henry Whitelock Torrens. Torrens began work in 1838 at Simla (now Shimla), the summer seat of the Indian government, using the Turner Macan Manuscript then being edited into Calcutta II. Despite his limited grasp of Arabic, Torrens was intent on rendering both the prose and verse portions of the work (the sexuality he leaves in, but tones down), yet found the task so onerous that after publishing the first fifty Nights at Calcutta and discovering that the great English scholar Edward William Lane had embarked on a similar project, he stopped work altogether, leaving a translation that included only a part-version of the first stories in Calcutta II.

  Torrens wasn’t really wrong to abandon his project, for Lane was one of his century’s great Arabists. The son of a clergyman, he had been privately tutored in classics and mathematics, becoming so advanced that when he went up to Cambridge to study for the math tripos, he discovered he could already do them all and so left the university to train as an engraver in London. Diagnosed with a mild form of tuberculosis, Lane sailed for Egypt in search of better health at twenty-four, spending several years in Cairo assembling an array of materials for his projected career in lithography. He also became immersed in eastern studies and saw his career undergo another course correction.

  With a deep background in Arabic culture (in later life, Lane returned to Cairo to work on his monumental Arabic–English Lexicon, a dictionary of Arabic words and their English equivalents), in 1836 Lane published Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, a hugely influential work presenting as full a picture of contemporary Egyptian life as was possible within the confines of print.

  This early work is an ethnological classic, and one of the most detailed and sympathetic portraits of eastern life ever to appear. But it also has its flaws. In a reflection of the western belief in the East’s inability to progress—at least without help—Lane includes a chapter on storytelling where he notes that oral recitations of The Thousand and One Nights in Cairo are rare and copies of Alf Laila wa Laila hard to come by, but he still believes that the stories contained in the work continue to represent much of Cairo life as it had existed practically unchanged for more than a millennium.

  Partly for this reason, Lane returned to Egypt in 1838 to begin work on a new English translation of the Nights—something he viewed as a semi-sequel to Modern Egyptians. Working mostly from the Bulaq Text, Lane envisioned the work partly as a manual for Britons on Muslim life and so annotated the text extensively, providing supplementary footnotes on everything he felt relevant. Lane’s notes were later published as a separate volume entitled Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from the Thousand and One Nights, making this last work a kind of companion piece to Modern Egyptians. As Lane progressed with what he admitted was a version of the Nights meant strictly for the drawing-room, changing and even omitting offensive material, his edition started appearing in monthly instalments between 1838 and 1841, when it was published in London as a three-volume book.

  Reviewers and readers were kind. The critic and writer James Henry Leigh Hunt called it “a most valuable, praiseworthy, painstaking, learned and delightful work,” and Thomas Carlyle read Lane’s Nights avidly while preparing his lecture on Muhammad for Heroes and Hero-Worship. But it left a bad taste in the mouths of those who loved the Galland version, since Lane tries hard to push his own edition by disparaging his predecessor, claiming that Galland had “excessively perverted the work” with his insufficient knowledge of Muslim customs. By employing a heavy, pseudo-biblical style he feels appropriate to the subject, Lane contends that vernacular adaptions like Galland’s are not in keeping with the spirit of the original Nights, since they are altered extravagantly (today he might just say “dumbed down”) to suit European readers. This argument was taken up later by Lane’s nephew and future editor, Stanley Lane-Poole, who took Galland to task for his “lameness, puerility and indecency”—three nasty traits few other observers have ever noted about either Antoine Galland or his Nights.

  Arguments and even quarrels are part and parcel of intellectual life. Once interested orientalists began creating independent versions of the Nights, it was inevitable that some would take issue with Galland’s altered paraphrase of Alf Laila wa Laila. Less forgivably, as a devoted partisan of Egypt, Lane missed the historical boat entirely by insisting that the Nights is most likely the product of one or two author-compilers who created the work in either Syria or Egypt between 1475 and 1525 CE, and that the Bulaq Text printed in his beloved Cairo contains the final or “actual” text of Alf Laila wa Laila. Lane provides little evidence for either contention, outside his strong personal preference for Arabic Egypt.

  Edward Lane might have blasted Galland, but his own version received a drubbing from a formidable Arabist. Lane’s translation and especially his theories about the Nights’ history were hotly contested by the English polymath Richard Francis Burton. While acknowledging Lane as an “amiable and devoted Arabist,” Burton nevertheless skewered him for producing an expurgated edition that was “garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsouled.” By making his “drawing-room” translation, Lane cut many of the tales in the Bulaq Text and rewrote parts of others, causing Burton to snort that Edward Lane had done nothing but convert “the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters.”

  Lane’s contention that the Nights is entirely an Arab work earned Burton’s particular scorn. “When he [Lane] pronounces The Nights … purely ‘Arab’ … his opinion is entitled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African … from Arabia….” From consultation with Hermann Zotenberg and careful examination of many of the surviving Nights manuscripts in Europe, Burton knew that the theories of von Hammer-Purgstall and others in his camp were right. The Arabic version of The Thousand and One Nights is only a secondary stage in the work’s evolution; the book’s origins extend back far further than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the oldest stories predate the ninth century CE.

  By Burton’s day, a thousand years after the appearance of the first Al
f Laila wa Laila collections, enough historical work had been done on the Nights that few researchers believed an original Arabic edition containing 1001 Nights existed anywhere, or that the figure accurately described the book’s contents. The Arabian Nights is no more the product of a single place or person than is jazz; it developed over centuries from the seeds of the storytelling tradition to become literature’s great shape-shifter.

  By the Victorian Age, it no longer mattered much. The creation of printed Arabic texts revealed that Alf Laila wa Laila bore a different tone to western versions of the Nights. It was now acknowledged among those familiar with Arabic that there existed a wide gap between the European and original Nights; the West had so far seen something less than the whole—only a kind of shadow Arabian Nights.

  The creation of the Arabic recensions, while each contains problems, nevertheless served a dual purpose by providing the Arabic world with comprehensive editions of Alf Laila wa Laila and the West with the resources to fashion translations including previously expurgated material. Henry Torrens had begun in a tentative way to approach this issue by creating an unexpurgated Nights translated directly from the Arabic before passing the baton to Lane who, despite his criticism of Galland, nevertheless trod the same path as the Frenchman by reserving the “right to omit such tales, anecdotes, etc., as are comparatively uninteresting or on any account objectionable.”

  With a mass of printed and handwritten material now available to work with, the stage was set for bolder attempts to render the full flavour of The Thousand and One Nights into western languages. By the late Victorian Age, two scholars of vastly different temperaments and experiences resolved separately to do exactly that, although both ran the risk of disgrace or even imprisonment for their efforts.