In the caliph’s palace, a girl is frying multi-coloured fish when a woman with a wand bursts through the wall and demands to know of the fish if they are true to their covenant … A young man mounts a flying horse; the horse strikes out one of his eyes with a lash of its tail and lands him on a building where he will encounter ten more one-eyed men … A travelling merchant is entombed alive with his deceased wife … It was the strangeness of the plotting and imagery, as well as the freedom from classical constraints derived from such authors as Homer, Ovid and Virgil, that appealed to the earliest Western readers of The Thousand and One Nights (best known in English as The Arabian Nights). ‘Read Sinbad and you will be sick of Aeneas’, as the eighteenth-century gothic novelist Horace Walpole declared. Yet behind the apparent wildness of the stories, there are patterns and correspondences and the playing off of themes and images against one another by the tales’ anonymous authors.
‘One Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature’, according to the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in his essay ‘Love, Death and Storytelling’ (New Statesman, 26 December 2006). It was a book that was familiar to Pamuk since childhood, but he has recently described how he decided to reread it in order to understand what fascinated Western authors like Stendhal, Coleridge, De Quincey and Poe in these stories and made the book a classic: ‘I saw it now as a great sea of stories – a sea with no end – and what astounded me was its ambition, its secret internal geometry … I was able finally to appreciate One Thousand and One Nights as a work of art, to enjoy its timeless games of logic, of disguises, of hide-and-seek, and its many tales of imposture.’
It seems most probable that the core of the Arabic story collection, Alf Layla wa-Layla (‘The Thousand and One Nights’), originated in a fairly brief and simple form in ancient India. Then, some time before the ninth century AD, these Sanskrit tales were translated into Persian under the title Hazar Afsaneh (‘The Thousand Tales’) and doubtless some Persian stories were added to this collection. By the ninth century at the latest, an Arabic version known as Kitab Hadith Alf Layla (‘The Book of the Tale of One Thousand Nights’) was in circulation. But The Thousand and One Nights in the form we have it today, with its elaborate frame story about King Shahriyar and the storyteller Shahrazad, was compiled much later. The oldest substantially surviving manuscript of the Nights seems to date from the late fifteenth century. In the opening frame story, which is included in this edition, Shahrazad tells Shahriyar stories night after night in order to postpone her execution. The ‘nights’ function as story breaks; there are not actually a thousand and one stories. Some stories are very short, others very long, told over many nights. Some are about criminals, some about saints. Some feature magic and monsters, while others centre on commercial transactions or romantic assignations. It is the sheer variety of stories that gives the Nights its unique quality.
In bookshops and libraries it is common to find the Nights shelved with fairytales, even though fairies feature very rarely in the Arab stories. But a fairytale is not defined by the presence of fairies within it. Such Western stories as ‘Puss in Boots’ or ‘Bluebeard’ have no fairies in them, but they are still universally regarded as fairytales. A fairytale, rather, is a story that relies on the fantastic to induce wonder. In this sense, a very high proportion of the stories in the Nights can be regarded as fairytales. Even so, there are also plenty of stories in which the fantastic and the supernatural do not feature – stories about cunning adulterers, learned slave girls, pious hermits, master criminals, benevolent or despotic rulers and so on. Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that all great literature becomes children’s literature. (Doubtless he was thinking of such works as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.) In recent times, The Thousand and One Nights, together with other fairytale collections, has been carelessly classified as children’s literature. But in the seventeenth century, by contrast, Charles Perrault and the Comtesse d’Aulnoy aimed their famous collections of fairytales at sophisticated adult audiences and, as we shall see, Antoine Galland presented his translation to the same audience in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. There is certainly a great deal in the Nights that is not suitable for children.
Although some scholars have discussed the stories of the Nights as if they were in origin oral folktales that eventually happened to get collected and written down, this is only occasionally and partially true, for it is clear that some stories were originally told at the courts of the caliphs, others were artfully composed by skilled, if anonymous, authors, and even those which do seem to have had a folk origin have had their prose polished by later scribes and editors. Taken as whole, The Thousand and One Nights is close to pulp fiction, albeit pulp fiction with decidedly literary pretensions.
The insertion of passages of poetry in classical Arabic into the stories, including some verses by well-known poets, is one of the signs that the Nights is not just a collection of folktales. The poetry quoted in the stories does not serve to carry the narrative along, but, in general, it is used in order to express moments of high emotion. On occasions when the tales were narrated by professional storytellers, it is likely that the recitation of the poems was accompanied by music. Melancholy resignation seems to be one of the commonest themes of the poetry. The structure of Arabic vocabulary makes rhyming easy and, besides rhymed metrical poetry, passages of rhymed prose (saj‘) also feature. Rhymed prose, often used to evoke love, despair or violent conflict, also had the effect of slowing the narrative down. (The effect of rhymed prose has not been reproduced in this translation; read out aloud in Arabic, it sounds fine, but printed in an English translation it looks grotesque.)
Until quite recently, the stories of the Nights were not particularly esteemed in the Arab world. A French antiquarian and Orientalist, Antoine Galland (1646–1715), was chiefly responsible for their rediscovery and subsequent fame. In the years 1704–17, he translated the stories in the oldest substantially surviving manuscript and to this translation he added some stories from other sources. The earnest purpose of his translation was to instruct his readers in the manners and customs of the contemporary Orient and to use the tales to provide improving lessons in morality. Since ladies at the court of Versailles were his target readership and since the Arabic he was translating seemed to him somewhat crude, he took pains to remove what he saw as medieval barbarisms and improve the tales by rendering them into a polished and courtly French. In order for his translation to find favour, Galland had to take liberties with it. Translators translate not just into a language but also into a time and it is for this reason that Homer, Dostoevsky and Proust have had to be regularly retranslated. As it was, for over two centuries Galland’s translation would inspire countless other versions and imitations.
The stories of the Nights were an immediate success with French courtiers and intellectuals. The French literary historian Paul Hazard in La Crise de la conscience européene (published in 1935 and translated into English in 1953) has described how the craze for Shahrazad’s storytelling replaced the slightly earlier craze for the traditional French fairytales as rewritten by Charles Perrault: ‘Then did the fairies Carabosse and Aurora make way for the throng of Sultanas, Viziers, Dervishes, Greek doctors, Negro slaves. Light fairylike edifices, fountains, pools guarded by lions of massy gold, spacious chambers hung with silks and tapestries from Mecca – all these replaced the palace where the Beast had waited for Beauty to open her loving eyes.’
Galland had first published a translation of ‘Sindbad’, around 1698, and this had been well received. Someone then misled him into believing that ‘Sindbad’ was part of a larger collection known as The Thousand and One Nights. More by luck than judgement, Galland went on to translate the oldest substantially surviving Arabic version of the Nights. This probably dates from the late fifteenth century, but it is clear from literary references that there were earlier, less elaborate versions of the story collection in Arabic. There is also at least one Turkish manuscript that is older than the Arabic one which Galland translated. Though some of the stories in the Nights derive from much earlier Indian and Persian versions, the stories as we have them are thoroughly Arabized and Islamized. Galland’s French translation, Les Mille et une nuits, was swiftly translated into English and other languages. In the three centuries that followed there were also several English translations of the Nights directly from the Arabic.
In the course of the early nineteenth century, a series of printed editions in Arabic were published in Cairo, Breslau and Calcutta. Of these, the most compendious is known as Calcutta II, or the Macnaghten edition. Like the Cairo and Breslau editions, Calcutta II contains far more stories than are found in the Galland manuscript (and it is the Calcutta II text that is the basis of the Penguin translation by Malcolm Lyons). Because of the way some stories lead into other stories, and some frame others, which in turn contain yet more stories within them, it is difficult to say exactly how many stories are in Calcutta II, but certainly over 640. However, in the eighteenth century, English readers made do with what is known as the Grub Street translation of Galland’s French text. (According to Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary, Grub Street in London was ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet’.) It was the Grub Street version that inspired and delighted Addison, Walpole, Wordsworth, Coleridge and many others. Then, in the course of the nineteenth century, English translations were made from one or other of the printed Arabic editions. The history of those translations, however, is one of pedantry, pretension and plagiarism.
In 1838–41, Edward William Lane (1801–76) published a translation of some of the Cairo edition. Previously he had written a survey of everyday life in Egypt entitled Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). In the course of that book he had referred to Nights as ‘being a faithful picture of Arab life’. Apparently forgetting about the jinn, flying horses, cannibalistic ghuls, giant rukhs, Amazon warrior women, men turned into animals by magic, and improbably opulent palaces, he saw the stories as primarily having documentary value. But since he was both pious and prudish, when he came to translate an Egyptian printed text of the Nights known as the Bulaq edition, he cut out sexual scenes and omitted many stories as unfit for gentlefolk. In the opening frame story, for instance, Lane’s Shahriyar and Shah Zaman do not have sex with the lady carried in a chest. They merely engage in ‘conversation’ with her. As well as cutting out the sex, Lane was not so fond of fantasy and he omitted some stories for this reason. He was also under pressure from his publisher to bring the unprofitable publication to a speedy end. Lane was hostile to Galland’s polishing the text up and giving the dialogue a courtly feel. Piety also led him to try to model his prose on that of the King James Bible, but he succeeded only in reproducing the archaism of his model without matching its eloquence. There may also be another reason why he did this: because it was one of the very few books in English that he had read in his life. (He had become so accustomed to reading Arabic manuscripts that he used to complain that reading English print hurt his eyes.) Since he earnestly intended his translation to offer a guide to the manners and customs of the contemporary Egyptians, his text also served as a pretext for hundreds of pages of ethnographic notes.
In 1882–4, John Payne published a much more literary translation, of the Calcutta II text, in which the sexual episodes were kept in, but played down. Payne (1842–1917) was a self-taught polyglot and he published translations from Latin, French and Portuguese. He did his translation of the Nights riding around London on the top deck of a horse-drawn omnibus. Unfortunately, his translation, which deploys a wide range of archaic English, is abominably affected and almost unreadable. Although very few read Payne’s expensive translation, which was published in a limited subscribers’ edition, it was influential in two important respects. First, it enthused the fastidious poet and translator Stephan Mallarmé, who was a friend of Payne’s, and it was Mallarmé who urged Joseph Charles Mardrus (1868–1949) to produce a translation into French that was intended to rival what were seen as the literary qualities of Payne’s work. Secondly, that bold traveller and scoundrel Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), who was also a friend of Payne, having noted how the latter’s translation had rapidly sold out, calculated that if he also produced a translation, this might make him a lot of money. (Burton was usually strapped for cash.)
Burton’s version appeared in 1885–8 and it plagiarized both Lane and Payne (while relentlessly disparaging Lane’s work). Burton’s deployment of weird and archaic vocabulary makes him even more unreadable than Payne. Burton also exaggerated the eroticism and violence of the stories and he added a mass of unnecessary footnotes, many of them dealing with race or sex or both together. However, the Burton translation remained the most complete English version of the Nights until the translation for Penguin by Malcolm Lyons in 2008. Lane’s translation had not sold well. Burton’s and Payne’s editions were for private subscribers only. Therefore in the nineteenth century most English readers stuck with the Grub Street Nights.
In 1899–1904, Mardrus, egged on by his friend and patron Mallarmé, produced what purported to be a new French translation of an Arabic manuscript, but his translation was really a fraud. Where he was translating stories from the Nights, his renderings were deformed by obvious errors and eccentric translation strategies. In addition, he brought in stories from other collections and cultures and he seems to have made up some stories himself. Although his ‘translation’ has no scholarly merit, it has some literary value and his version inspired Yeats, Proust, Gide, Cocteau and James Elroy Flecker, as well as the Schéhérazade of the Ballets Russes.
This fresh translation of The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, made from Calcutta II by Malcolm Lyons (together with translations from Galland by Ursula Lyons), aims to reinstate the work as literature, to present it once again to an adult readership and to make it once more a pleasure to read its marvellous stories. The complete translation by Lyons has been published by Penguin in three volumes. This selected edition includes stories chosen from all three of these volumes.
Galland’s translation of the Nights and the various translations from Galland’s French into other European languages constituted a major event in Western literature. Imitations, pastiches, parodies and moralistic rewritings followed, as well as major works of literature that were influenced by the Nights in subtler ways. A full survey of the influence of the Nights on Western literature would have to discuss works by Addison, Johnson, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Tennyson, Thackeray, Stevenson, Rushdie, Diderot, Voltaire, Proust, Perec, Yeats, Joyce, Poe, Washington Irving, Roth, Twain, Barth, Cocteau, Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Hofmannstahl, Jünger and many others.
Here examples will be confined to three writers, each very different. First is William Beckford (1760–1844), whose Vathek (1782) was the finest of the numerous pastiches of the Nights produced in Britain and France during the eighteenth century. Beckford, an eccentric millionaire who knew some Arabic, made a particular study of the Nights. Vathek is the tale of a hedonistic caliph who is lured by an emissary of Eblis, the Devil, and his promises of knowledge of infernal secrets, into the depths of Hell. The narrative mingles Oriental lore, much of it concerning the supernatural, taken from the Nights and from Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s encyclopedia of Islamic culture, the Bibliothèque orientale (completed in 1697 by Galland), together with elements of lightly disguised autobiography. Although Beckford affected a tone of civilized irony, the book has since been acclaimed as a masterpiece of gothic horror.
Second is Dickens, about whom the nineteenth-century novelist and essayist George Gissing wrote in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898):
Oddly enough, Dickens seems to make more allusions to the Arabian Nights than to any other book or author … Where the ordinary man sees nothing but everyday habit, Dickens is filled with the perception of marvellous possibilities. Again and again he has put the spirit of the Arabian Nights into his pictures of life by the river Thames … He sought for wonders amid the dreary life of common streets; and perhaps in this direction was also encouraged when he made acquaintance with the dazzling Eastern fables, and took them alternately with that more solid nutriment of the eighteenthcentury novel.
Dickens, who had read the Nights as a boy, was delighted by the stories and, as his writing shows, strongly affected by them. At one point in the The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), for instance, Dick Swiveller wakes up in a strange bed: ‘If this is not a dream, I have woke up, by mistake, in a dream in an Arabian Night, instead of a London one.’ Then again David Copperfield, who as a schoolboy is compelled by the domineering Steerforth to tell stories late at night, compares his fate to that of Shahrazad. (And, of course, since Dickens both published many of his novels in serial sections and gave readings from them, it would be natural for him to think of himself as a latter-day male version of Shahrazad.) It would be very easy to go on listing overt and covert references to the Nights elsewhere in Dickens’s works. What is more important is the feel of the Nights stories and their impalpable but pervasive influence over Dickens’s fantastical plots with their moralizing outcomes. Enigmatic philanthropists cloaked in disguise walk the streets at night following in the footsteps of Harun al-Rashid. Baghdad is reconfigured as London, and the Dickensian city of mysteries and marvellous possibilities teems with grotesque characters who are distant descendants of the princes, sorceresses, porters and dervishes of the Nights.
Third is the French novelist Stendhal (1783–1842), who wrote of the Nights in his Souvenirs d’égotisme (1832): ‘I would wear a mask with pleasure. I would love to change my name. The Arabian Nights which I adore occupies more than a quarter of my head.’ It would probably be fruitless to search Le Rouge et le noir (1830) or La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) for plots or borrowed props. Nevertheless the Nights, and in particular its stress on magical powers, did help shape Stendhal’s image of himself as a novelist. Late in life he awarded himself magical powers, including becoming another person (as all good novelists should strive to do). He wanted to live like Harun in disguise. (He also wished for the ring of Angelica which conferred invisibility in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.) The power to become invisible, to assume another’s identity, to read another’s mind – all these staples of Islamic occultism and storytelling gave Stendhal metaphors for himself as an observer of humanity and a writer.
The influence of the Nights was not confined to Europe and America. Yukio Mishima is probably the best-known Japanese writer to have found inspiration in the stories and, though the Nights was for a long time despised in the Arab world for its poor style and what was deemed to be implausible plotting, from the twentieth century onwards leading Arab novelists, playwrights and poets have acclaimed the stories – among them such well-known writers as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Adonis, Salah ‘Abd al-Sabbur, Nawal al-Sadawi, Tayeb Salih, Gamal al-Ghitani and Edwar al-Kharrat.
The stories in this Penguin selection have been chosen to suggest the range of themes and treatments in the Nights. The opening frame story, the tale of King Shahriyar, his brother Shah Zaman and Shahrazad the storyteller, can be and has been read as a profound fable about storytelling and its relationship to sex and death. Shahriyar, who has been sexually betrayed by his wife, executes her and thereafter resolves to avoid ever being betrayed in such a way again by taking only virgins to his bed every night and having them executed on the following morning. The vizier’s elder daughter, Shahrazad, decides to offer herself as a hostage for the virgins of Shahriyar’s kingdom. Her father tries to dissuade her by telling her ‘The Story of the Donkey and the Bull’. This tale about a man who understands the language of animals is amusing, yet there is nothing in it that should dissuade Shahrazad from her decision to offer herself to Shahriyar. She does so, but after they have had sex she starts a story, then breaks off at dawn with the story still unfinished. So Shahriyar postpones her execution in order to hear the end of the story. But when Shahrazad finishes a story she starts another, and so from then on, night after night, she is talking for her life for one thousand and one nights.
The tales she tells for so many nights carry no single message, but instead demonstrate the immense richness and diversity of existence. However, life and death alternatives dominate the opening tales and several of them are about telling stories in order to save one’s life. This is the case in ‘The Fisherman and the ‘Ifrit’. (An ‘ifrit is a powerful kind of jinni.) In this story, the fisherman pleading with the murderous ‘ifrit is like Shahrazad and his story frames yet other stories. ‘Spare me and God will spare you’ is his theme. ‘The Story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage’, again about somebody seeking to avoid arbitrary execution, is one of the most remarkable in the Nights.
Later on in the Nights, the encounter of the porter with the three ladies of Baghdad inaugurates a new cycle of stories in which characters find themselves telling stories in order to save their lives. (It is noteworthy, by the way, that a porter features prominently in this adventure. Arabic high literature in the Middle Ages tended to be about princes, princesses and mighty warriors. The Nights has it share of these, but it also includes stories which have as their protagonists humbler folk such as shopkeepers, craftsmen or woodcutters.) The porter, who is well entertained by the three ladies, receives a warning: ‘ask no questions about what does not concern you’. Although the porter heeds the warning, three one-eyed dervishes who have sought hospitality in the same house and who have witnessed the mysterious whipping of the dogs, are less discreet. Under threat of death for their importunity, they find themselves telling tales as ransom for their lives. The stories they tell, of the workings of fate, subterranean and illicit sex, magical transformation, indiscreet curiosity and regret, are indeed remarkable. The tale of the third dervish, in particular, is in part a story about ill-fated curiosity. Left alone by the maidens in a palace with forty doors, he is told that he may open any door except the fortieth … It is the first of several ill-omened and forbidden doors in the stories of the Nights.
Just as life-or-death stories echo the opening frame of the Nights, so too do tales of sexual betrayal and revenge echo the story of Shahriyar, including ‘The Story of the Semi-petrified Prince’, as well as ‘The Story of the Lady of the House’ and ‘The Story of the Doorkeeper’ which cap the tales of the three dervishes. The prevailing tone of the latter two stories is tragic, for in one way or another love or trust has been abused and betrayed. ‘The Story of ‘Aziz and ‘Aziza’, another tragic tale, is particularly noteworthy for its exposition of the demanding etiquette of love. Also, as so often in Nights stories, the man is weedy and useless, while the woman is clever and resourceful. But love stories in which true love eventually wins through also feature prominently in the Nights. Among such stories included in this selection are ‘The Story of Nur Al-Din and Shams Al-Din’, ‘The Story of Taj Al-Muluk and Princess Dunya’ and ‘The Ebony Horse’.
In the Nights and in several other well-known story collections, most notably the medieval Arab version of Kalila wa-Dimna, the rhetoric of animals was deployed in the service of teaching wisdom, resignation to the will of God, warning against misplaced trustfulness and urging the need for useful friendships. Sometimes the animals, like Shahrazad, find themselves talking for their lives, as they tell stories to persuade their predatory listeners that they should not be killed. Such simple fables were probably among the stories to feature in the very earliest compilations of the Nights. Several such stories feature in this selection, beginning with ‘The Weasel and the Mouse’ and ‘The Crow and the Cat’. There is a pietistic feel to some of these animal fables and this is echoed in other similarly short tales of religious admonition, such as ‘The Angel of Death and the Rich King’ and ‘The Angel of Death and the King of the Israelites’, while ‘Alexander the Great and the Poor King’ is a story in praise of poverty. In medieval Arabic literature all sorts of improving stories were attached to Alexander the Great, who was thereby transformed from a historical figure into a legendary one. Harun al-Rashid features in the cycle of stories associated with the three ladies of Baghdad. As was the case with Alexander, the historical eighth-century caliph has been transformed into a figure who in quite a number of stories in the Nights has fantastic adventures or on occasion listens to applaud the adventures of others. Furthermore, all sorts of wisdom was retrospectively attached to historical figures, especially the pre-Islamic Persian kings, and the Nights story ‘King Anushirwan the Just’ exemplifies this.
Of course, not all the stories in the Nights were so improving. Quite a few start with idle and feckless protagonists who, more by luck and the good offices of the jinn than real effort and merit, blunder into fortune. This was a theme that must have been popular with the idle people who sat listening to these stories in market squares or cafés. ‘Abu Muhammad the Sluggard’ and ‘ ‘Ali, the Cairene Merchant’ are among such tales.
While some stories make heroes of idle youths who at the beginning of their adventures have squandered their inheritance, a number of other tales celebrate outright criminals and their cunning. ‘The Adventures of ‘Ali Al-Zaibaq’ is an example of this kind of tale. The stories in the Nights featuring thieves reflect a historical reality, as there is evidence in the medieval chronicles that some of the most successful crooks became cult figures among the common people, just as in Western culture the exploits of Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and the dandy criminal Pierre François Larcenaire were told and retold. More generally, there are a large number of stories in the Nights in praise of cunning, whether the cunning is that of a determined thief, a smooth-talking animal or an adulterous woman bent on deceiving her husband.
‘The Ebony Horse’ is a tale of magic. It almost certainly derives from an ancient Sanskrit original in which the hero travels not on a mechanical horse, but on an artificial image of the Hindu bird god Garuda. Like many stories in the Nights, the reach of this story was international, as in variant forms it features in various Oriental and medieval Western versions, including Chaucer’s unfinished ‘The Squire’s Tale’. (There is also a flying horse in ‘The Story of the Third Dervish’, although there the creature proves to be malign.)
‘Sindbad the Sailor’, the tale of his seven voyages on strange seas, is one of the most famous stories associated with the Nights, yet its status within that collection is anomalous. Galland found an independent manuscript of the Sindbad stories and published a translation of it which had some success with the reading public. Then, as has been noted above, someone told him that these stories were part of a greater story collection. Though untrue, this information led Galland on to seek out and translate a manuscript of the Nights and, when he published that translation, he added the Sindbad stories to it. Subsequent printed Arabic editions of the Nights also included these stories in the Nights corpus. Sindbad’s fictional adventures find some parallels in earlier non-fiction in Arabic written to guide sailors and merchants trading in the Indian Ocean and points further east; mistaking a whale for an island, for example, features both in the adventures of Sindbad and in the earlier literature of mariners and merchants. The marvels are certainly to the fore in the adventures of Sindbad. What is less obvious is the occasional inclusion of serious details about trading commodities. What is even more important is the intense piety of these stories. Invocation of God comes as naturally to Sindbad as breathing. The marvels he encounters are signs of the creative powers of the Almighty. Sindbad survives many perils because he puts his trust in God.
The status of ‘The Story of Aladdin, or the Magic Lamp’ and ‘The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Killed by a Slave Girl’ within the Nights is also anomalous. Though they are among the best-known stories, they really belong to the Nights apocrypha, as no Arabic original has been found for them (and consequently they have been translated from Galland’s French for this edition). Rather these ‘orphan stories’ seem to have been told to Galland by a Syrian Christian called Hanna Diyab who was visiting Paris. Galland wrote down the skeletons of these two stories and a handful of others and then fleshed them out into much fuller versions, more French in feeling and with more stress on psychological motivation and moral messages than are commonly found in the main corpus of Arabic stories. Though ‘The Story of Aladdin’, featuring yet another of those initially feckless youths, is set in China, it is clear that whoever first put this tale together had no idea what China was really like. His ‘China’ was merely a distant land where fantastic things could happen. As for ‘Ali Baba’, perhaps this should really be called ‘Marjana’, as it is the slave girl rather than her master who proves to be bold and resourceful. Although some people have suspected that Galland might have made up the ‘orphan stories’, this does not seem to be the case and variant versions of ‘Ali Baba’ seem to have circulated in the Middle East and the Balkans, while a version has been found in an early Turkish manuscript.
Finally, this selected translation includes the ending of the Nights as given in Calcutta II, in which Shahriyar forgives Shahrazad after she has shown him the children she has borne him. She has survived a perilous thousand and one nights through complete submission to her husband, both entertaining him and proving her fertility. Her sisters in the twenty-first century might not be so pleased with her. Yet the stories she has told are marvellous. As the well-known Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) has written in the introduction to a German translation of the Nights by Felix Paul Greve, published in 1907:
Here is a poem on which more than one person has worked, but it seems that it originated from one soul. It is a whole, it is a complete world. And what a world! Compared to this Homer appears pale and artificial. Here one finds bright colours and profundity, a stunning fantasy and a sharp practical wisdom. Here one finds endless adventures, dreams, aphorisms, jokes, indecencies, mysteries. Here the bawdiest spirituality and the most perfect sensuality are woven together. There is not one of our senses that is not aroused, from the outside and the inside. Everything in us is revitalised and encouraged to enjoy.
Or, as storytellers within the Nights put it more solemnly, it is ‘a story that, were it written with needles on the inner corners of the eye, would serve as a warning to those who take heed’.
Robert Irwin
London