by Muhsin Mahdi
Burton declares in the introduction that his purpose is to produce a “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original.” That original, as I have mentioned earlier, uses a style that modulates between the colloquial and the literary. The literary is marked by metaphors and similes, formulaic epithets, parallelisms, and rhymed prose, and Burton literally preserves all this, including the jingling rhymes, merrily telling the reader that he has “carefully Englished the picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness.” And outlandish, indeed grotesque, they appear, both to English and to Arabic eyes. Having gone so far, Burton is unable to retrench in his rendering of the colloquial passages; therefore, he renders them in a pseudo-archaic style dear to the heart of many a Victorian translator, a style that is totally alien both to the style of the Arabic original and to any recognizable style in English literature. One may suppose that Burton follows a general Victorian tendency to archaize and make more colorful the “rude” works of primitive times and places; and subsequently one may trace the same tendency in the style of Payne’s translation of the Nights, in which Burton detects and admires a “sub-flavor of the Mabinogianic archaism.” But even a cursory comparison easily shows that the style of Payne’s translation, which was unfortunately published in a limited edition of five hundred copies and was therefore unavailable to the general reader, is by far more successful than Burton’s in reproducing both the letter and the spirit of the original. But what is more to the point here is that a careful and thorough comparison between Burton and Payne explains another reason for Burton’s choice of style. He himself admits in the introduction that Payne “uses the exact vernacular equivalent of the foreign word so happily and so picturesquely that all future translations must perforce use the same expression.” Burton consistently follows Payne’s translation, copying it almost verbatim but adding his own sauce and spices.
Thus Burton’s translation is akin to that of Galland, at least in one respect, for it is not so much a true translation of the Nights as it is a colorful and entertaining concoction. For instance, a passage that reads:
The curtain was unfastened, and a dazzling girl emerged, with genial charm, wise mien, and features as radiant as the moon. She had an elegant figure, the scent of ambergris, sugared lips, Babylonian eyes, with eyebrows as arched as a pair of bent bows, and a face whose radiance put the shining sun to shame, for she was like a great star soaring in the heavens, or a dome of gold, or an unveiled bride, or a splendid fish swimming in a fountain, or a morsel of luscious fat in a bowl of milk soup,
becomes in Burton’s hands:
Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel’s gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see. Her stature was straight as the letter I and her face shamed the noon-sun’s radiancy; and she was even as a galaxy, or a dome with golden marquetry or a bride displayed in choicest finery or a noble maid of Araby.
Another passage, which reads:
When I saw that he was dead and realized that it was I who had killed him, I let out a loud scream, beat my face, tore my clothes, and cried, “O people, O God’s creatures, there remained for this young man only one day out of the forty, yet he still met his death at my hand. O God, I ask for your forgiveness, wishing that I had died before him. These my afflictions I suffer, draught by bitter draught, ‘so that God’s will may be fulfilled.’”
becomes almost a parody or rather a self-parody:
When I saw that he was slain and knew that I had slain him, maugre myself, I cried out with an exceeding loud and bitter cry and beat my face and rent my raiment and said, ‘Verily we be Allah’s and unto Him we be returning, O Moslems! O folk fain of Allah! there remained for this youth but one day of the forty dangerous days which the astrologers and the learned had foretold for him; and the predestined death of this beautiful one was to be at my hand. Would Heaven I had not tried to cut the water melon. What dire misfortune is this I must bear life or loath? What a disaster! What an affliction! O Allah mine, I implore thy pardon and declare to Thee my innocence of his death. But what God willeth let that come to pass.’
Burton, having raised his style to such a pitch, is forced, when he comes to the more ornate verse passages, to raise it yet to a higher pitch, adopting an even more artificial and more tortured expression that is forced to slide downward. For instance, a humorous poem that reads:
Wail for the crane well-stewed in tangy sauce;
Mourn for the meat, either well baked or fried;
Cry for the hens and daughters of the grouse
And the fried birds, even as I have cried.
Two different kinds of fish are my desire,
Served on two loaves of bread, zestful though plain,
While in the pan that sizzles o’er the fire
The eggs like rolling eyes fry in their pain.
The meat when grilled, O what a lovely dish,
Served with some pickled greens; that is my wish.
’Tis in my porridge I indulge at night,
When hunger gnaws, under the bracelets’ light.
O soul, be patient, for our fickle fate
Oppresses one day, only to elate.
becomes:
Wail for the little partridges on porringer and plate;
Cry for the ruin of the fries and stews well marinate:
Keen as I keen for loved, lost daughters of the Kata-grouse,
And omelette round the fair enbrowned fowls agglomerate:
O fire in heart of me for fish, those deux poissons I saw,
Bedded on new-made scones and cakes in piles to laniate.
For thee, O vermicelli! aches my very maw! I hold
Without thee every taste and joy are clean annihilate.
Those eggs have rolled their yellow eyes in torturing pains of fire
Ere served with hash and fritters hot, that delicatest cate.
Praised be Allah for His baked and roast and ah! how good
This pulse, these pot-herbs steeped in oil with eysill combinate!
When hunger sated was, I elbow-propt fell back upon
Meat-pudding wherein gleamed the bangles that my wits amate.
Then woke I sleeping appetite to eat as though in sport
Sweets from brocaded trays and kickshaws most elaborate.
Be patient, soul of me! Time is haughty, jealous wight;
Today he seems dark-lowering and tomorrow fair to sight.
Burton hoped, by adapting such a procedure and such a style for his translation, by writing “as the Arab would have written in English,” to create a work that would be added to the treasures of English literature, for “the translator’s glory is to add something to his native tongue.” What Burton bequeathed to the nation, however, was no more than a literary Brighton Pavilion.
The Present Translation
The Guiding Principles
THREE CENTURIES HAVE gone by since Antoine Galland first introduced the Nights to Europe, and a full century since Richard Burton translated the work, in the last serious attempt to introduce it to the English reader. Much has happened in the world since then, a world in which, though technology seems hostile to romance, the ventures of science have become as fantastic as the adventures of fiction, and illusion and reality have become almost one. Nonetheless, it is science that has been largely responsible for the demand for authenticity, or truth, in facing our world, which is becoming threateningly small, recognizing the value of other cultures, and exploring their treasures. Now the flamboyant Victorian distortions of Burton seem closer to the disarming neoclassical liberties of Galland than to our modern functionalism, which needs a style more suited to our modern sensibility than the styles of Burton or Galland, the one still circulating as a Victorian relic, the other, though lively in its own day, now lying buried in the archives
of literary history.
The failure of past translations lies in assuming the work to be other than what it was intended to be, a collection of tales told to produce aesthetic pleasure in the Arabic reader. In translating the work as they did, they violated its integrity—Lane by emasculating it; Burton by reproducing its Arabic peculiarities and adding other idiosyncrasies of his own; and Galland by altering it to suit French taste, although this method comes the closest to producing the intended effect. Translation is the transfer of a text from one cultural context to another by converting its language into the language of the host culture. This requires command of the languages involved and of the literary idioms and conventions of both cultures. In converting the meaning of the text, the translators, who must act both as editors and as interpreters, offer a reading of it, designed for a given reader in a given language, and in the context of a given culture. They try to achieve equivalency, but since, due to the untranslatable difference in cultural connotations, associations, and other nuances, full equivalency is impossible, the translators try to achieve approximation by securing a willing suspension of disbelief that allows the reader to believe that the translated text is the original text. This is possible, especially since in literature, the translators must convey not only the meaning of the text but also its aesthetic effect on readers. They respond to the text as natives would, by identifying the means by which this effect is produced, and by finding the comparable linguistic and literary means available in the host culture to produce a comparable effect in the intended reader. Therefore, they should not, as translators from Dryden to Burton have advocated, try to write as the original author would have written in the host language, for such a creature can never be; instead, they should try to produce an equivalent text that will produce an effect on the intended reader comparable to the effect the original text produces on the native reader. For the aesthetic effect, which is grounded in human nature and which can be achieved by our knowledge of and skill in using the tools of the respective literary conventions, is the common denominator between the native and the host culture and the principal means of success in transferring the literary work from one context to another.
The Prose
IN TRANSLATING THE Nights, whose principal function is not to express the subtle nuances of experience and of our perceptions of it but to produce a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure, mainly by grounding the supernatural in the natural, adherence to the aesthetic effect becomes paramount. Such adherence has been the underlying principle of my translation. This does not mean, however, that I have taken liberties with the text; on the contrary, I have been as faithful as possible, except for very few interpolations (placed in brackets) without which the gaps would have rendered the narrative illogical, and except when literal fidelity would have meant deviating from the limits of idiomatic English and consequently violating the spirit or the intended effect of the original. Thus, for instance, “O my liver,” becomes, “O my heart” or “O my life”; “Allah” becomes “God”; and “God the Most High,” the most familiar epithet for God in Arabic, becomes “The Almighty God.” I have, unlike the other translators, who use the same style regardless of level, adopted a plain narrative as well as a conversational style that modulates with the original between the colloquial and the literary, according to speaker or situation, yet I have used colloquialisms and slang terms sparingly because the English equivalents are certain to disappear sooner or later, thus rendering the translation obsolete before its time. Likewise, I have used literary ornament judiciously because what appealed to Arabic thirteenth- or fourteenth-century literary taste does not always appeal to the taste of the modern English reader. For instance, I have avoided the rhymed prose of the original because it is too artificial and too jarring to the English ear.
Furthermore, I have varied the level of the style to suit the level of a given story, a lower level for some of the comic tales of “The Story of the Hunchback,” and a higher level for “The Story of Nur al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar,” a story written in thirteenth-century Baghdad, with literary echoes from the highly euphuistic and popular Maqamat of Hariri. Finally, I have avoided the temptation to add a distinctive color or stamp a personal manner or mannerism on the original in order to appeal to the reader. Burton’s case is sobering enough; besides, the intention of the style of the Nights is to provide the storyteller or the reader with the opportunity to tell or read the story in his own voice and to dramatize the action and dialogue in his own way, very much as the actors do when they bring their written parts to life. Neutrality is crucial here.
The Verse
ONE OF THE distinctive features of the Nights is that the prose narrative is interspersed with verse passages, some of which were interpolated by the original editor, some by subsequent copyists. They are inserted to suit the occasion, and whether adding color to the description of a place or a person, expressing joy or grief, complimenting a lady, or underscoring a moral, they are intended to heighten the action, raise the literary level, and intensify the emotional effect. Yet a great number of these passages fail to achieve such effects because they are too mediocre, for less than one-half are anthologized from the classical poets of the period down to the fourteenth century, while the rest are composed by lesser versifiers, including hacks and even the copyists themselves.
In general, the verse is characterized by poetic diction, comparisons, metaphors, conceits, and all kinds of parallelisms, especially balanced antitheses. For this reason, I have adopted a style similar to that of neoclassic poetry, particularly because, like its Arabic counterpart, it was ultimately derived from the same source, namely the Greco-Roman tradition; besides, a traditional Arabic poem consists of lines, each of which comprises two equal halves and follows the same rhyme throughout, thus producing an effect akin to that of the heroic couplet. I have, however, used an abcb rhyme scheme for greater freedom and flexibility in reproducing both the sense and the stylistic ornaments of the original. In the case of the love lyrics, I have drawn on the tradition of courtly compliment, imitating one type or another depending on the freedom or emotional intensity of the Arabic lyric in question.
My main problem was how to render the turgid or vapid verse passages of the lesser versifiers, which are marked by artificial word order, forced rhymes, inexact parallelisms, and hackneyed metaphors. The choice was either to purify them through the filter of translation and avoid the charge of inept English renderings, or to be consistent with my aim of adhering both to the letter and to the spirit of the original. I have decided in favor of the latter and have rendered each passage as it is, making it appear neither better nor worse. Thus the original discrepancy between the good and the bad is maintained. For instance, a classic passage reads:
If you suffer injustice, save yourself,
And leave the house behind to mourn its builder.
Your country you’ll replace by another,
But for yourself you’ll find no other self.
Nor with a mission trust another man,
For none is as loyal as you yourself.
And did the lion not struggle by himself,
He would not prowl with such a mighty mane.
while that of a hack versifier reads:
If I bemoan your absence, what will you say?
If I pine with longing, what is the way?
If I dispatch someone to tell my tale,
The lover’s complaint no one can convey.
If I with patience try to bear my pain,
After the loss of love, I can’t endure the blow.
Nothing remains but longing and regret
And tears that over the cheeks profusely flow.
You, who have long been absent from my eyes,
Will in my loving heart forever stay.
Was it you who have taught me how to love,
And from the pledge of love never to stray?
And thus the English reader, like his discerning Arab counterpart,
can see for himself both the faults and the felicities of the work.
Conclusion
FOR ALL A given translator’s knowledge and skill, a translation is essentially a matter of sensitivity and taste, applied in one thousand and one instances. As such, for the translator, who stands astride two cultures, possesses two different sensibilities, and assumes a double identity, a translation is a journey of self-discovery. And the road to truth is, like the road to fairyland, fraught with perils and requires an innocent suspension of disbelief in the self and what it creates. By translating the work, one translates oneself; the little Arab boy who listened to the Thousand and One Nights has become the English storyteller. He may have produced a strange creature, a man with an ass’s head, or may even, like Bottom, sport an ass’s head of his own. What does it matter, so long as he has dreamed, in one Baghdad or another, a dream in the lap of a fairy queen.
HUSAIN HADDAWY
Reno 1988
A Note on the Transliteration
For the transliteration of Arabic words, the Library of Congress system is used, without diacritical marks except for the “’”, as in “’Ajib,” which is an “a” pronounced from the back of the throat.
The World of the Nights: Places Mentioned in the Stories