Eastern Dreams (14 page)

Even more than Charles Perrault's
Mother Goose Stories
, the popularity of Galland's
Les mille et une nuits
was immediate, immense and ultimately far-reaching. Rather than the familiar settings of western fairy tales, the
Nights
presented readers with a world that had been all but unimaginable a short time before. Published in their initial European incarnation over a period of thirteen years, the
Nights
' cultural influence has now spanned centuries, becoming an identifiable source for a significant amount of western thought, perception and popular fiction concerning the Muslim East.

But in a curious echo of the Arab literati's earlier apathy toward
Alf Laila wa Laila
, the French establishment practically ignored this first publication of the tales. With few exceptions, the small number of literary presses that actually bothered to review
Les mille et une nuits
alternated between regarding the book as either too learned for general readers or too frivolous for serious students of literature. Those few periodicals that reviewed the work positively, like the august
Journal des savants
, were reflexively considerate to a respected fellow
littéraire
, remarking that in addition to their pleasing aspects, Galland's stories were also useful to students of eastern folklore and customs.

Hardly ringing endorsements, but the public didn't care. They took to the
Nights
like manna in the wilderness, reading, discussing, dreaming and otherwise embracing the tales until
The Thousand and One Nights
became part of Europe's storytelling fabric. These were biblical wonder tales without the religious baggage, as well as welcome successors and additions to the West's own body of folklore. On the book's appearance the first volumes sold out, were reprinted and sold out again, soon running to a higher-than-usual number of editions. With individual volumes reprinted as soon as they sold out, booksellers were often forced to offer entire sets of individual books for sale whenever they had them in stock, making it nearly impossible to determine what comprises a true “first edition” of
Les mille et une nuits
.

Unassuming as he was, Antoine Galland did not lack for some basic marketing skills. His carefully chosen subtitle,
Arabian Tales Translated into French
, was designed to capitalize on the longstanding fascination with “the East,” particularly the fabled land of Arabia. Since ancient times the western world had been bewitched by images of “Araby the Blest”—home to unicorns, phoenixes and fragrant gums, as well as the precious spices preserving and flavouring often-gamy European food. From time immemorial the
West had viewed Arabia as a land apart; a place, Europeans told one another in hushed tones, where the very
air
breathes perfume and spice-smells.

Galland knew full well what he was doing by invoking the magical name “Arabia” in his title. After a lifetime spent searching the Levant's shops and bazaars for the oriental collectibles coveted by France's elite, no one understood better that using terms like “Arabian” or “Arabic” to describe a book was a near-guaranteed selling point, even if he of all people knew that in reality, his
Nights
was a compilation of stories from various times and places. But nothing was better designed to appeal to the exotic tastes of the eighteenth-century public than a package of “Arabian” stories of whatever origin. Within a few decades, the collection began to be known by alternative titles: the
Arabian Tales
, the
1001 Arabian Nights
or simply the
Arabian Nights
.

After 1706, the appearance of new volumes of
Les mille et une nuits
slowed as Galland's other obligations took precedence and, perhaps, his enthusiasm began to wane. By then he had published seven volumes and long since exhausted the contents of his Arabic manuscripts, as well as making no headway in his search for a non-existent complete Arabic text. In the three years following the publication of Volume 7, Galland was able to provide his publisher with only one new story (“The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub,” translated from an unidentified source), which by itself would not be enough to make another volume.

But such was the continuing demand for more
Nights
that in 1709, Claude Barbin committed fraud. Without Galland's knowledge or permission, and to his subsequent very great annoyance, the firm unscrupulously used two Turkish stories translated by Galland's
fellow orientalist François Pétis de la Croix to release an eighth volume of
Les mille et une nuits
.

This was not done with Pétis de la Croix's knowledge, either. He had translated the tales for a book of his own, and yet the publisher used them as
Nights
fodder and inserted—or rather, forged—the Scheherazade links Galland outlined in his tales to make these ones appear like additional stories from
Les mille et une nuits
. Thus Pétis de la Croix's translations of “Zayn al-Asnam” and “Khudadad and his Brothers” were placed in the text alongside “The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub” to create Volume 8 of the
Nights
.

When he discovered the deception from Pétis de la Croix, Galland was livid. What words he had with his publisher are not recorded, but so enraged was Galland that for a time he seriously considered suspending further publication of the
Nights
to deprive Claude Barbin of future earnings. In the end he swallowed his anger and stayed with the work, but not with the firm. Volumes 9 and 10 were published by another Parisian publisher, Florentin Delaune, in 1712, with the final two, posthumous volumes released five years later in Lyon by Antoine Briasson.

At the start of Volume 9, Galland informs the reader heatedly that the final two stories in the previous book are “
not part of the
Nights
,” stating that he was unaware of “
the infidelity done to him” until after the volume was on the streets. Besides the problem of not having a complete Arabic edition as a sourcebook, this was the reason for the long hiatus between the appearance of Volume 8 in 1709 and the publication of the remainder of the work.

All the same, the unwarranted insertions so publicly repudiated by Galland remain a standard part of
Les mille et une nuits
and its translations to this day, and are now considered as integral to the work as those other stories of doubtful provenance that have become recognized parts of the
Nights
, “Sindbad,” “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba.”
Irony again: so much wrangling over a work with no author or set stories, by an individual who was partially unaware of the nature of the text, but who nevertheless fashioned a book that has come to be accepted as a complete work by fifteen generations of readers.

Then there is the nature of Galland's translation. For an academic, Antoine Galland was a born storyteller, possessing to “
a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more captivating than culture or scholarship.” But as a scholar, Galland was also acutely aware that he was presenting material of some complexity to a non-specialist audience, one that could not be expected to either understand or appreciate those complexities. Words can fly further than any bird. In the same way as travellers venture physically from one geographical realm to another and move between cultures as they do so, so too are translated works ferried by vessels of language from one geographical or cultural locale to another.

Depending on the date of their first appearance, this transportation can also function as an act of time travel, with texts originating in the near or distant past being revived in another period through the translator's efforts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, European translation was in a state of debate regarding its function and purpose. Humanists did not consider accurate transcription from one language to another to be the ultimate end of the translation process; rather, they argued that if he is capable, the translator has the added responsibility of improving the original text by polishing or revising it to a state suitable for contemporary readers. This idea applied particularly to the translation of classical literature, from Homer's epics to the Bible, where it was felt a restrained European decorum was preferable to a warts-and-all approach of rendering precisely each
word and nuance. In some cases, such as Alexander Pope's version of
The Iliad
, the translated work stands by itself as a recognized classic, but many books rendered with “improvement” rather than linguistic fidelity in mind are less than useful today for conveying anything of the original, and can be viewed more as adaptions than actual translations as the term is currently understood.

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.”