The Arabian Nights II (2 page)

“ 'Ali Baba” has a similar history. Galland heard the story from
Diab and wrote it down in French. Subsequently, an Arabic manuscript written by one Yuhanna ibn-Yusuf Warisi was acquired by the Bodleian in 1860. Although it is written in a pseudo-grammatical Arabic, with some mistakes and colloquial words, as well as purple patches, verses, and rhyming phrases alien to Galland's version, a close examination reveals that it is a modified translation of Galland. It is no more of Arabic origin than its author Jean Varsi, a Frenchman attached to the French mission in Egypt. (For further details concerning “ 'Ala al-Din” and “ 'Ali Baba,” see Muhsin Mahdi's Arabic introduction to
Alf Layla was Layla
, Leiden, 1984, and the discussion in his forthcoming third English volume.)

All four stories in this volume have been translated from Arabic into English before. Having dealt at length with the history and quality of the other translations in the introduction to my first volume, I will limit myself here to some relevant aspects of the versions which are still more or less current. These are Edward Lane's (1839-41), Richard Burton's (1885-86), and N. J. Dawood's (Penguin, Revised Edition 1973). Lane and Burton include both “Qamar al-Zaman” and “Sindbad,” while Dawood, whose selections contain less than three of the nucleus stories, includes only “Sindbad.” Lane includes neither “'Ala al-Din” nor “ 'Ali Baba,” while Burton includes both stories, and Dawood includes only “'Ala al-Din.” Both Burton and Dawood unknowingly based their translations on the fake Arabic versions.

Typically, Lane, Burton, and Dawood follow the practice of their predecessors, the Arab literati and editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by taking liberties with the text. Dawood omits all the verse passages. Lane translates his sentences closely, but, ever sensitive to Victorian sensibilities, he omits many words and passages he considers inappropriate or offensive, passages or words that not only lend the Arabic original color and piquancy, but also reveal the spirit in which it was written. Burton, on the other hand, revels in and preserves the peculiarities of the style of the Arabic original, declaring in his introduction that he has “carefully Englished the picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness.” But for Burton, preserving these peculiarities meant exaggerating them, by creating an ornate pseudo-archaic style that is alien both to the style of the Arabic original and to any recognizable style in English literature.

Consider the fate of the following passage from “Qamar al-Zaman”:

And when she saw that he was without pants, she placed her hand under his shirt and felt his legs, and as his skin was very
smooth, her hand slipped and touched his penis, and her heart ached and pounded with desire, for the lust of women is greater than the lust of men, and she felt embarrassed.

Lane omits it altogether, while Burton translates it as follows:

Then she thrust her hand into his breast and, because of the smoothness of his body, it slipped down to his waist and thence to his navel and thence to his yard, whereupon her heart ached and her vitals quivered and lust was sore upon her, for that the desire of women is fiercer than the desire of men, and she was ashamed of her own shamelessness.

This example of Burton is mild by comparison with his other flights. For instance, a passage from his literal translation of Galland's “'Ala al-Din,” which he gives in an appendix, reads,

In this action of joining his hands, he rubbed the ring which the magician put on his finger, and of which he knew not yet the virtue, and immediately a genie of an enormous size and frightful look rose out of the earth, his head reaching the vault, and said to him, “What wouldst thou have with me? I am ready to obey thee as thy slave, and the slave of all who have the ring on thy finger; I, and the other slaves of that ring.”

Yet in his translation of Sabbagh's manuscript, which is basically a plain translation of Galland, no more ornate than Burton's own cited rendering, the passage reads,

And whilst he implored the Lord and was chafing his hands in the soreness of his sorrow for that had befallen him of calamity, his fingers chanced rub the Ring when, lo and behold! forthright its Familiar rose upright before him and cried, “Adsum; thy slave between thy hands is come! Ask whatso thou wantest, for that I am the thrall of him on whose hand is the Ring, the Signet of my lord and master.” Hereat the lad looked at him and saw standing before him a Marid like unto an Ifrit of our lord Solomon's Jinns. He trembled at the sight; but, hearing the Slave of the Ring say, “Ask whatso thou wantest, verily, I am thy thrall, seeing that the signet of my lord be upon thy finger, he. . . . ”

It is useful to compare this passage with Dawood's translation of Sabbagh:

Whilst he was wringing his hands together, he chanced to rub the ring which the Moor had given him as protection. At once a great black ifrit, as tall as one of Solomon's jinn, appeared before him.

“I am here, master, I am here!” the jinnee cried. “Your slave is at your service. Ask what you will, for I am the slave of him who wears my master's ring.”

The sight of this apparition struck terror to Aladdin's heart.

Burton and Dawood stand poles apart; Burton is flamboyant, while Dawood is serviceable and plain.

Compared with the following faithful translation of Galland, Dawood, as is typical of his translation throughout, seems to be somewhat lacking in vividness and immediacy.

In clasping his hands, he rubbed, unaware, the ring which the magician had placed on his finger and of which he knew not the power. As soon as he did so, a demon of enormous size and dreadful look rose before him, as if out of the earth, with his head reaching the vault, and said to him, “What do you wish? Here I am, ready to obey you, as your slave and the slave of all who wear the ring, I and the other slaves of the ring.”

A similar difference may be seen in Lane's and Burton's respective treatments of the verse passages, which are a peculiarity of the
Nights
and which are interspersed with the prose narrative. They are inserted by a given editor or copyist to suit the occasion, and whether adding color to the description of a place or 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. Lane omits them for the most part, and when he includes them, he gives them in an abbreviated form and translates them in a flat, literal style. Dawood omits them altogether because, according to him, they “obstruct the natural flow of the narrative” and because they are “devoid of literary merit.” He forgets that at least half of these passages come from some of the most prominent classical Arab poets. Burton, on the other hand, again translates them in an inflated style that is often awkward and forced. For example, the passage which reads,

Resisting women is obeying God,

For they will not thrive who lend them their ears.

They will hinder them on perfection's way,

Though they may study for a thousand years,

Lane translates as follows,

Oppose women; for so wilt thou obey [God] becomingly since the youth will not prosper who give them his rein.

They will hinder him from attaining perfection in his excellencies though he pass a thousand years in the study of science.

And Burton translates this section as follows:

Rebel against women and so shalt thou serve Allah the more.

The youth who gives women the rein must forfeit all hope to soar.

They'll balk him when seeking the strange device, Excelsior,

Tho' waste he a thousand of years in the study of science and lore.

If Lane and Burton fail in their translations, it is not simply due to their tampering with the text; it is due to the kind of tampering and the nature of the text itself. The genius of the
Nights
and the secret of their appeal lie in their reconciliation of opposites. Whether they are fables, fairy tales, romances, or comic as well as historical anecdotes, they interweave the unusual, the extraordinary, the marvelous, and the supernatural into the fabric of everyday life, in which both the usual incidents and the extraordinary coincidences are but the warp and weft of divine Providence, a fabric in which the sacred and profane meet. Their meeting place is in the details—the unabashed, straightforward, matter-of-fact details that secure the reader's willing suspension of disbelief and open the way to a mysterious yet immediate world of wonder and wish fulfillment. Both Lane and Burton violate this place of equilibrium and thus spoil the effect, Lane by censoring the details, Burton by exaggerating them.

Nowhere is the essential quality of the
Nights
more apparent than in the four stories of this volume, which is why I have scrupulously tried to adhere to both the spirit and the letter of the original text. This means that, on the one hand, I have endeavored to be as literal as possible within the limits of idiomatic English and, on the other, that I have used a style designed to produce on the English reader as much as possible the aesthetic effect produced on the Arabic reader by the original. There are two notable differences between my first volume of translations and the present one. First, the reader will not find, except in some sections of “Qamar al-Zaman,” that the style modulates between colloquial and literary. This is because both the editor of the Bulaq edition and Galland have cultivated the terrain and smoothed out the differences. Second, the reader will not find the frame dialogue between Shahrayar and Shahrazad and consequently the divisions into nights, for the Bulaq edition uses a different sequence
from that of the Syrian manuscript I used for my first volume, and Galland does not divide the stories into nights. To impose an arbitrary order, therefore, would have been an inconsistent consistency or an unseemly mannerism. It should be noted, moreover, that in “ 'Ala al-Din,” Galland permits himself to forget that Shahrazad is the storyteller. He often deviates from the omniscient third-person narrator and editorializes in the first person. Throughout, the reader will miss Shahrazad, but then I miss her too.

Finally, I am presenting these four stories without any special claim to authenticity or uniqueness. My sole aim in offering this volume is to fill a literary gap and, like my more generous great-uncle who told me more than four tales in Baghdad, to entertain the reader in the hope that, in time, others will do the same, with versions of their own, more suited to their time, “that thereby beauty's rose might never die.”

H
USAIN
H
ADDAWY

Reno 1994

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 “'Ali,” which is an “a” pronounced from the back of the throat.

T
HE
S
TORY OF
S
INDBAD THE
S
AILOR

There lived in Baghdad, in the time of the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, a man called Sindbad the Porter, who was poor and who carried loads on his head for hire. One day, he was carrying a heavy load, and as it was very hot, he became weary and began to perspire under the burden and the intense heat. Soon he came to the door of a merchant's house, before which the ground was swept and watered, and the air was cool, and as there was a wide bench beside the door, he set his load on the bench to rest and take a breath. As he did so, there came out of the door a pleasant breeze and a lovely fragrance; so he remained sitting on the edge of the bench to enjoy this and heard from within the melodious sounds of lutes and other string instruments accompanying delightful voices singing all kinds of eloquent verses. He also heard the sounds of birds warbling and glorifying the Almighty God, in various voices and tongues, turtledoves, nightingales, thrushes, doves, and curlews. At that he marveled to himself and felt a great delight. He went to the door and saw inside the house a great garden and saw pages, servants, slaves, and attendants, the likes of whom are found only with kings and sultans. And through the door came the aromas of all kinds of fine delicious foods and delicious wine.