The Thousand Nights and a Night

            I am very much enjoying my reading of the new Everyman’s edition of The Arabian Nights. Among collections of framed tales such as The Decameron, The Panchatantra, The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, the last has the most compelling frame story:  Scheherazade, the clever daughter of the vizier of King Shahryar, seeks to marry the king even though he executes each wife he marries the morning after the marriage night. By telling him stories she does not finish the night they are begun, she uses his curiosity to prolong her life, and eventually, after a thousand nights, he has fallen in love with her.

            Inevitably, a work whose edges are as amorphous as The Thousand Nights and which has been around more than a millennium is going to be a target for cultural appropriation. Wen-Chin Ouyang, who edits and introduces the 2014 Everyman edition, focuses on this aspect of The Arabian Nights and even uses the title Sir Richard Burton gave the work in his ten-volume appropriation of the tales for English speakers (1885-6).

The Hazar Afsan, a Persian collection mentioned in tenth-century accounts, seems to be the origin of what became The Thousand and One Nights, which is yet another version of the title. This collection, which has the frame story, was then translated into Arabic and transmitted in various Syrian and Egyptian manuscripts, accreting tales with each manifestation and continuing to do so when translations were made into European languages. Elements of Indian, Jewish, and Egyptian folk stories join those of Arab and Persian origin. The stories that many readers think of as the heart of The Arabian Nights—Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor—are almost certainly of European origin, added in the 1704 French translation of Antoine Galland and the editions of other European translators.

            Eight tales appear in all the manuscript versions. The first canonical tale is that of the merchant and the Ifrit or Demon who threatens to kill the merchant for inadvertently having killed the Ifrit’s son by throwing away a fruit pit. On the day appointed for his death (the merchant has wangled a stay to get his affairs in order), the merchant is joined by three men leading a gazelle, two dogs, and a mule, respectively (all the animals turn out to be people who have been enchanted into these forms). The three men tell stories that engross the Ifrit enough so that he lets the merchant go. During each of the tales Scheherazade pauses, always at a critical point, because morning is approaching, and King Shahryar agrees to keep her alive until the next night, when the story will be concluded. This first tale echoes and furthers the frame of the whole Nights in that it is itself framed, its tale within a tale structure is of itself  a delaying tactic, and finally it mirrors the larger frame story because its merchant protagonist, like Scheherazade, is kept alive by the telling of tales.

            “The Fisherman and the Jinni” is the second of the canonical tales. Here too are nested tales the fisherman tells the Jinni after luring him back into the copper jar where he was imprisoned during the time of Solomon, and from which he emerged with the intention of killing the person who freed him—the fisherman. The fisherman’s story of Rayyan’s cure of King Yunan is interrupted when the king tells his jealous vizier the story of Sindbad (not the one who has his own, non-canonical tale of seven voyages later) who regrets killing his falcon. The vizier comes right back with the story of a vizier killed by his king because he led the king’s son into danger from an ogress. King Yunan heeds the jealous vizier and prepares to kill Rayyan. But Rayyan fools him into fetching a book with supposed magic powers but which actually has poisoned pages that kill Yunan. Rayyan had implored mercy in vain from Yunan; the fisherman reminds the Ifrit how he had implored mercy to no avail. When the fisherman relents and released the Ifrit, the demon allows the fisherman to catch fish for which he is rewarded by his king, but they are magic fish that attract disturbing visitors when they are cooking. The king goes in search of answers about the magic fish and finds a young man half turned to marble, who tells a story of his bewitchment by his unfaithful wife. The king finds her and forces her to disenchant the young man, the fish, and the whole kingdom.

            The other canonical tales are “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” the stories associated with “The Hunchback’s Tale,” “The Story of the Three Apples,” which contains “The Story of Nur al-Din,” The Story of Ali ibn Baqqar,” and “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman.”

            The Sindbad stories—that is “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor” reminded me how different the real Arabian Nights is from any of its popularizations. The occasional grave-robbing doesn’t show up in Disney, though the giant, always malevolent creatures like the Roc do. But there are nightmarish figures like the old man who attaches himself to Sinbad’s shoulders and will not let go even when the two are sleeping. And, too, there are the echoes of European literature, for example in the Polyphemus-like giant who eats Sindbad’s companions until he devises a stratagem to make the ogre drunk and put out his eyes. The Sindbad tales have their own frame story, as each voyage is told by Sindbad the Sailor to another Sindbad, a landsman.

 Sindbad’s voyages have a reassuring pattern similar to that of many of the other tales. He grows restless at home in Baghdad, goes to El-Basrah to take ship, is separated from his companions by shipwreck or other disasters (such as being marooned on an island that turns outs to be a huge whale sleeping on the surface of the sea), undergoes thrilling adventures, and finally is reunited to his companions or finds new friends, returning home even richer than he left it.

            Ouyang makes the interesting decision to use different English translations for different tales: Edward William Lane’s somewhat prudish translations from his (1838-41) edition, those of Burton, who especially relished the erotic tales, John Payne’s translations, to which Burton was heavily indebted and which tend to be more poetic, and the Jean-Charles Mardrus French translation (1899-1904) that was turned into English by Edward Powys Mathers (1923), providing far from the first case where the texts we have available to us are translations of translations.