The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments occupies the position in folklore studies that Richard Dorson attributed to the second largest continent when he wrote, “Folklorists are just beginning to look at Africa”: a huge, unmissable, ignored territory. It was a Persian work, translated into Arabic as Alf Laylah wa-Laylah , “the Thousand Nights and a Night” in the late eighth or early ninth century, then many times worked over in variant forms. Perhaps now would be a good time to return to it, as fears of a Muslim empire are heard everyday in the press.
Readers of English have had good reason to ignore this work. No great work of literature has been so inaccessible and so badly translated. After a sentence like, “‘It passed through my thought, O Commander of the Faithful,’ said the fisherman, ‘that since thou wishest to learn fishing so thou mayest have in hand an honest trade whereby to gain thy livelihood, this my gaberdine besitteth thee right well,’” can anyone be blamed for stopping reading? This is a sample of the prose of Richard Burton (no, not that Richard Burton), whose multivolume translation, which he gilded with the delusional adjectives “plain and literal,” has graced remainder tables in bookshops lo, these many years. Now that it’s three hundred years since the Nights was “brought to the West” by Antoine Galland and made into a work of the world’s patrimony, more and better attention has been given to a great, perhaps the great, monument of Arabic literature. Folklorists no longer can avoid looking at the Arabian Nights (we may as well call it that, though others will continue to use the longer title).
Materials are plentiful. The excellent edition of the oldest Syrian manuscript, by Muhsin Mahdi, has been forcefully and directly translated by Husain Haddawy. The distinguished Arabist Robert Irwin has written a very informative companion to the Nights , in addition to a charming novel spun out of his long and deep acquaintance with both book and region. Two European scholars have compiled a rich, full encyclopedia about the book. Proceedings of a Paris conference in 2004, edited by Aboubakr Chraïbi, bring together thirty-three articles to add to our knowledge. And as if those did not furnish information enough, the Egyptian-American folklorist Hasan El-Shamy has drawn the Arabian Nights into the center of classic folktale studies with an index of its motifs.
The book under review contains sixteen articles on the Arabian Nights . Jassim Ali Muhsin narrates the close relation between the reception of the Nights in Britain, ensuing critical productions, including work by Tzvetan Todorov, and their influence on the fictions of James Elroy Flecker, O. Henry, and John Barth. A stunning article, now a classic for specialists on this work, is by Nabia Abbott: “A ninth-century fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights .” It describes the “earliest known factual evidence of the collection’s material existence” (ix), and even presents a chronology of the steps in the evolution of the book (72). The turning point for European literature was Galland’s translation. After that, the collection attracted imitations galore. Solomon D. Goitein dates the oldest documentary evidence for the title Alf Laila wa-Laila to about 1150. The scrupulous textual scholar Heinz Grotzfeld contributes two articles. The first, “Neglected Conclusions of the Arabian Nights : Gleanings in Forgotten and Overlooked Recensions,” uncovers several versions of an ending for Shahraz?d’s longwinded performance, which for many years seemed to lack an ending. His second article, “The Age of the Galland Manuscript of the Nights : Numismatic Evidence for Dating a Manuscript?,” reports the discovery of the name of a coin minted only in 1427, which dates the earliest manuscript of the Nights to the second half of the fifteenth century. According to Heinz Grotzfeld, “What might be worthy of blame in this discovery [the Europeanization of the book] is that the Arabian Nights have contributed, especially by their widespread reception, more than any other work to the creation of that somewhat distorted image of the East that partly still persists in the West, and hampers a deeper understanding of the East and its very nature” (106). The editor Muhsin Mahdi, in “The Sources of Galland’s Nights ” (122-136), shows how many passages, and even whole stories, the translator Galland fabricated. Peter Heath, “Romance as Genre in the The Thousand and One Nights ” (170-225), presents a thematic criticism of genre, using the criticism of the next author, Tzvetan Todorov, who makes a strong theoretical point about embedded narratives and the equivalence, in the Nights , between storytelling and life itself (“Narrative-Men”).
There follow six case studies on single stories: the tale of the three apples (Roger Allen), the tale of Ali b. Bakkar and Shams el-Nah?r (Jamel Eddine Bencheikh), Aladdin (Michael Cooperson), the city of brass (Andras Hamori), the tale told by the king’s steward (Muhsin Mahdi), and Sinbad (Peter D. Molan). The book concludes with a feminist critique by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Shahraz?d Feminist.” Every article is valuable; all are interesting to read; together, they mark a major contribution to an understanding of a major work of world literature, which depends on folklore for both techniques and themes.
Works Cited
Chraïbi, Aboubakr, ed. Les Mille et une nuits en partage . Paris: Sindbad / Actes Sud, 2004.
El-Shamy, Hasan M. A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Haddawy, Husain, trans. The Arabian Nights . New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion . London: Allen Lane. 1994. Reprinted London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.
-----. The Arabian Nightmare . [London?]: Viking, 1987.
Mahdi, Muhsin, ed. Alf layla wa-layla . Leiden: Brill, 1984.
Marzolph, Ulrich, and Richard Van Leeuwen, comp. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia . Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
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[Review length: 961 words • Review posted on July 12, 2007]