Eastern Dreams (15 page)

Galland does the same thing, merging the fantastic with the familiar and adding any inventions that he felt helped carry a story forward. The best example of this is also likely the most famous: no one has been able to adequately trace its origins or decipher its meaning, so for all its fame as a magical incantation, it is likely that the command “Open, Sesame!” is simply a convenient invention of Antoine Galland's to assist Ali Baba in getting in and out of the Forty Thieves' hideout.

The result is that Galland produced not so much a translation of
Alf Laila wa Laila
as a substantially modified paraphrase and expansion for French and other western readers. Understanding the prime difference between the complexities of academic study and the purposes of storytelling—entertainment, perhaps fused with instruction—Galland could never have known that his work would launch a three-hundred-year-long search for the
Nights
' true origins and structure. Aiming to do no more than enchant, inform and provide moral instruction, he felt justified in doing whatever he felt necessary to create a pleasing effect. Galland made no apologies; we should attach no blame.

By refashioning the
Nights
to ease its path into the West, Antoine Galland produced a classic. More than any other individual, he “created” the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
as the book is known today. Even as the
Arabian Nights
has always remained a reservoir of stories from the East, it became a beloved literary classic only because of Galland's efforts, sealing his place in the venerable tradition of storytelling. Apart from Scheherazade herself, Galland is, in fact, the first
Nights
storyteller whose life we know something about—the first actual
Arabian Nights conteur
known by name. Small wonder, then, when some feel that if
The Thousand and One Nights
has anyone in its long history who can be called its true author or synthesizer, it is Antoine Galland of France.

The immense popularity of
Les mille et une nuits
did little to turn Galland's head. His life proceeded much as always, a living testament to the Enlightenment ideal of acquiring knowledge as the best way to combat ignorance and superstition. In September 1706, still in Nicolas-Joseph Foucault's employ and with the first seven volumes of the
Nights
issued, Galland returned permanently to Paris, where from 1709 he lived in a house called
Au cerceau d'or
(“The Golden Hoop”) on the Rue de Sept-Voies, the appropriately exotic-sounding “Street of the Seven Ways.” (This and other dwellings were later demolished to make way for the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and the new Collège Sainte-Barbe.)

Even as
Les mille et une nuits
brought Galland his greatest fame, his letters and journals show that over time he came to resent the work in much the same way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of Sherlock Holmes, believing a somewhat flighty creation was taking him away from worthier endeavours. Complaining that he was wasting time working on further volumes of
Les mille et une nuits
that might be better spent on scholarly pursuits (to Gisbert Cuper, Galland remarked how “
that nonsense work brings me more honour … than the most beautiful work I can compose about coins…. Such is the world!”), Galland grew at first weary, then annoyed, by the public's continual demand for more stories. With atypical snobbishness, he wrote that this sort of nonsense was fit only for those court or society types who demanded easily digested literature, rather than those who gave proper weight to his learned papers and translations of serious texts.

Unlike Conan Doyle, however, who tried to kill off Holmes in 1893 (only to be forced into literary resurrection by an infuriated public), Galland was not so irked that he actually abandoned work on the
Nights
, even as it rankled that such “frivolous” stuff had
come to supersede a lifetime of dedicated scholarship. And like Doyle, Galland could not escape the notoriety of his most famous creation; in the public's mind, his name was inseparable from that of the
Nights
. Whatever else he may have done, Antoine Galland was known then as he is known today: as the man who brought
The Thousand and One Nights
to the West.

This fame sometimes had annoying consequences. In his earlier volumes, Galland employs Dinarzade's request to Scheherazade that if her sister is not sleepy, could she then recite one of her marvellous stories? This innocuous remark came back to haunt Galland when readers took him at his word and learned where he lived. At least once during his later years in Paris, Galland was awakened at night by people yelling at his window to tell them one of his “Arabian” stories. A variation of this anecdote has a gang of young men throwing stones at the aging scholar's window on a freezing evening, insisting that he recite one of his stories because now that he was up, he would be unable to sleep. One hopes Galland had a chamber pot handy.

Grumbles aside, Galland was not forgotten by the scholarly community. Nominated for the second chair in Arabic at the Collège Royal in 1708 for his many scholarly contributions, Galland had his nomination approved in June of the following year, and was herewith appointed Reader (Professor) in Arabic at the same institution where he had studied languages forty years before, joining his
Nights
“co-translator” Pétis de la Croix as one of two Arabic professors at the university. Perhaps aware that he may have received this position partly for his translation of the
Nights
as well as for his scholarly work, Galland used both
Sindbad
and the
Nights
in teaching Arabic to his students, confirming his belief that popular works are useful texts for the study of languages.

Galland prepared material for the final two volumes of
Les mille et une nuits
in 1712 and 1713, during his tenure at the Collège
Royal, although these were not published until after his death. For the next several years Galland discharged his duties at the university faithfully. By now, however, he was well into his seventh decade and his health was failing. Although he appears to have lived “
simple in life and manners,” along with the normal wear and tear of age, Galland was plagued increasingly by asthma and heart problems.

By early 1715, his condition had grown sufficiently serious that he sent to Picardy for his nephew, Julien Galland (later an interpreter in the Levant), to help prepare for the dispersal of his worldly goods. Since he had never really known his parents, Galland remarked that he believed he'd had three sires who had combined to make him the man that he was: the Collège Royal, where he studied and taught; the Bibliothèque du roi, where he worked; and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, which had now accepted him as a member.

To these institutions Galland bequeathed most of his possessions. Following his death, Galland's numismatic dictionary was given to the Académie, while his library of books and manuscripts, including the three volumes of
Alf Laila wa Laila
, was presented to the Bibliothèque du roi (now the Bibliothèque nationale). They reside there today as Nos. 3609, 3610 and 3611 of the library's Oriental Collection (the Arabic manuscript of
Sindbad
that started it all is listed separately as No. 3645) and are known collectively as the “Galland Manuscript.”

Aside from the ninth-century
Alf Laila
Fragment, the Galland Manuscript is the earliest surviving Arabic text of
The Thousand and One Nights
. The mysterious fourth volume Galland employed in his translation, and which is sometimes believed to have been a sequential part of his Syrian manuscript, has disappeared, so its contents may never be known, nor how much Galland relied on it.

Following the making of his will, Galland's health continued to go downhill, and by mid-February he was
in extremis
. At around
3
P.M
. on February 17, 1715, “
this excellent man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and litterateur” died of combined asthma and heart disease, two months shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. The next day, Antoine Galland—linguist, specialist in eastern history, Antiquary to the King of France, and Professor of Arabic—was buried close to the Church of St. Stephen of the Mount in Paris. His funeral convoy contained an odd assortment of mourners—respected scholars and university colleagues, but also a great number of poor French people whom Galland had helped financially, or whose children he had taught free of charge. Less than seven months later, Louis XIV himself died, ending a lengthy reign of seventy-two years. The lifespans of Galland and France's Sun King, whose agent and dealer Galland had sometimes been, had roughly paralleled one another.

More than two centuries after Galland's birth, the town of Rollot erected a monument to its famous son, which stands today. It bears the simple inscription “Translator of the Thousand and One Nights.” In this case the word “translator,” in the sense of someone presenting an accurate rendition of something from one language to another, is problematic, although Rollot's city fathers cannot be faulted for their misleading epitaph. Antoine Galland is as much the western messenger of the
Arabian Nights
as he is its adapter and sometimes-fabricator, reporting on a world lying culturally and geographically far beyond Enlightenment Europe.

Although not a translator in the modern sense, Galland's role as the first individual to publish a printed version of the
Nights
is in keeping with the fluid nature of the original work as it was developed by his medieval predecessors, making him not only the first European translator of the
Nights
but also the first western presenter of the tales in the tradition of those who came before him. By his efforts, Galland joins them in spirit around the desert campfires, in the marketplaces and in the coffee houses of the East,
where for centuries stories from
Alf Laila wa Laila
were recited or read aloud to enraptured listeners.

But with one notable difference. By making the
Nights
available to the West in a mass-produced printed form, over time Galland and his successors reached audiences their storytelling forebearers could not have imagined in their wildest flights of fancy. With first tens, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of readers, over the years Galland's audience grew ever wider until it came to encircle the earth itself. Today the picture Galland paints of a world where “
the glamour of imagination, the marvel of the miracles and the gorgeousness and magnificence of the scenery” has persisted for a hundred times the nearly three years it took for Queen Scheherazade to weave her lifesaving tales.

*
Galland's belief that a complete
Alf Laila wa Laila
contains thirty-six parts was based on the idea that the first volume of his Arabic manuscript, consisting of sixty-nine Nights (and which corresponds to the first two volumes of his
Nights
), would need an additional thirty-five volumes to make a full set of stories. But if all thirty-six Arabic volumes contained the same number of Nights as the first volume, Galland would have a total of 2484 Nights, not 1001, so the source of his belief in a thirty-six part Arabic
Nights
remains somewhat obscure.

*
A fifth Arabic volume Galland mentions in a 1702 letter is likely the
Sindbad
manuscript given to him in Paris, indicating that Galland did believe the Sindbad voyages somehow comprised part of
Alf Laila wa Laila
.

Chapter 4

“THESE IDLE DESERTS”

Never before have Eastern studies made such progress. In the time of Louis XIV everyone was a Hellenist; now they are all Orientalists
…

—
VICTOR HUGO,
LES ORIENTALES

If timing isn't actually everything, it is at least half the battle. With Enlightenment interest in the eastern world reaching full steam in the early eighteenth century,
Les mille et une nuits
arrived at exactly the right moment to become the
Harry Potter
of its day—a tremendously successful imaginative work enjoyed by all ages and classes. The
Nights
seemed to focus all the exotic promise of the East in a single book. Europeans taking holidays from their everyday reality by reading the work could detect a more glamorous, sensuous self in its tales, an oriental dopplegänger unburdened by cultural constraints. Through Antoine Galland's free adaption of
Alf Laila wa Laila, The Thousand and One Nights
came to the West through two worlds—the historical East, where the stories derived, and an Enlightenment Europe opening itself to the possibilities of other cultures.

So popular was
Les mille et une nuits
that it quickly attracted literary pirates. At a time when European copyright laws were in their infancy, even a halfway-successful book was guaranteed to be pirated, especially abroad, soon after its publication. Besides unlicensed extracts of Galland's work circulating widely in France, volumes of the
Nights
were bought and sped off to other parts of the Continent soon after their release in Paris, where they were translated with almost indecent haste by anonymous, bilingual hacks. These versions were then issued in cheap editions that were nonetheless the first translations of the work to appear outside France. Even as volumes of
Les mille et une nuits
continued to be published during the first two decades of the new century, unauthorized translations began appearing in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Poland and Russia.