A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

The current edition is a selection of the tales originally serialized in England between 1863 and 1865 as part of the Dalziel Brothers’ Illustrated Editions. A complete one-volume edition, Dalziel’s Illustrated Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, appeared in 1865. In partnership with the Dalziel brothers was H. W. Dulcken, a scholar and editor who revised and emended the text. Dulcken intended to reconcile the French translation of Antoine Galland (Les Mille et une nuits, 1704) with the English rendering of Edward William Lane (The Thousand and One Nights, 1838-1840). Like many nineteenth century texts, the Dalziel’s Illustrated text ended up being partly based on Galland’s version, which had earned the admiration—and occasionally the criticism—of the learned. As the most popular among the reading public, Galland’s version was serialized, adapted, abridged, and reprinted many times and remained consistently popular in Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dulcken obviously took a lead from Galland’s version, but he adopted Edward William Lane’s tendency to tame and domesticate what he deemed too wild for the rising bourgeoisie and the squeamish middle classes.

While Lane toned down such sections as the bath scene in “The History of Three Calenders, Sons of Kings, and of Five Ladies of Baghdad,” Dulcken softened it further. Many other places show the impact of Lane’s caution on the learned scholar. On the other hand, the Dalziel brothers were interested in a readable text in the first place, even if it was an amalgamation of the two major translations; to them it should derive its power from the illustrations. The project of an illustrated edition went far beyond what was available in the market; they enlisted the collaboration of a good number of artists at a time when art was beginning to play a greater role in the book industry. Illustrations would have complimented the overall effectiveness of the ease and narrative flow of Galland’s translation.

Galland’s version of The Thousand and One Nights, as the collection is properly called, can be described as faithful to the original narrative frame. The French translator was aware of Eastern storytellers’ knack for the kind of narrative that would engross audiences in medieval urban centers. He himself stressed the picturesque and the exotic, minimized needless detail, and Frenchified dialogues and scenes to reach his audiences. With his acute awareness of the literary market and popular taste, Sir Walter Scott wrote in the introduction to his Ivanhoe that Galland’s translation was “eminently better fitted for the European market, and obtained an unrivalled degree of public favor which they certainly would never have gained had not the manners and style been in some degree familiarized to the feelings and habits of the Western reader.” Indeed, the French translator was so responsive to the tastes of his audiences that “the Parisians, returning from their nocturnal revels, would often stop before his [Galland’s] door, and awake him from his soundest sleep, by calling loudly for him. Galland would open the window, to see what was the matter, and they would cry out: ‘O vous, qui savez de si jolis contes, et qui les racontez si bien[,] racontez nous en un!’ ” [“O you, who know of such pretty tales, and which tell them so well[, ] tell us one more!”].¹

It must be said, however, that Antoine Galland’s translation elicited and still elicits contradictory responses with respect to its accuracy. Robert Irvin collapses previous views by suggesting that Galland’s translation was done in the vein and temper of other French humanists who “argued that good taste took precedence over strict accuracy in translation.” Galland’s “aim in translating the Arabian Nights was not so much to transcribe accurately the real texture of medieval Arab prose as to rescue from it items that he judged would please the salons of eighteenth-century France.”² On the other hand, ahead of him and much in tune with translator Richard Burton’s “Terminal Essay,” in which Burton detailed the origin and history of the Nights and matters erotic, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote in the mid-1930s: “Word for word, Galland’s version is the most poorly written of them all, the least faithful, and the weakest, but it was the most widely read.” He adds: “Galland’s discre tions are urbane, inspired by decorum, not morality.”³

Despite lingering controversies, Galland was able to sustain a reputation as the most appreciated translator of the collection. “It was he that first opened to Europe this precious source of delight; it he was whose taste and enthusiasm led the way to the taste and enthusiasm of others,” wrote Romantic critic and essayist Leigh Hunt.⁴ Accepting the argument that the Victorian translator and renowned Orientalist Edward William Lane was able to provide a scholarly version of the tales, he further argued that without Galland, “perhaps Lane himself would not have been ultimately led to favor us with his more accurate version.”⁵ Over time the tales passed through so many reproductions, abridgements, adaptations, melodramatic and theatrical appropriations, serializations, renditions, and so-called new translations—of which Galland’s was a keystone—that the late American Orientalist Duncan Black Macdonald termed the whole phenomenon as one that “should make up a weighty chapter in the history of the great publishing humbug.”⁶

—Muhsin al-Musawi

Notes

1 According to J. F. Michaud (1767-1839), as quoted by Jos. Von Hammer in his preface to the New Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, translated by George Lamb, London: Henry Coburn, 1826, vol. 1, p. 5 and note.

2 Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, London: Allen Lane, 1994, p. 19.

3 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New York: Penguin, 1999, p. 93.

4 Leigh Hunt, “New Translations of the Arabian Nights,” Westminster Review 33 (October 1839), pp. 101-137.

5 Hunt, pp. 110-111.

6 In part one of Macdonald’s article “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” The Nation 71 (August 30, 1900), p. 167; cited in my Scheherazade in England, p. 11.