Arabian Nights

Unfaithful Originals and True Translations: The Thousand Nights and a Night

Dr. Paulo Lemos Horta

Jorge Luis Borges admired the inventive memory of the translators of the 1001 Nights who often recalled scenes absent in the originals with which they worked, such as the image of Aladdin's false uncle putting his ear to the ground to hear his enemy's footsteps on the other side of the earth. For the Argentine modernist Borges, originals could prove unfaithful to their translations, and this is indeed the case of the Arabian Nights.

Scheherazade herself anticipated the translators in this respect. While she had "read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine," she also reinvented these sources to parcel out stories to astonish her husband King Shahryar and earn a reprieve from execution each night for a thousand nights and a night.

Since the manuscript available to the tales' first French translator, Antoine Galland, spanned only 271 nights, he improvised a further 730 - including the tales of "Aladdin", "Ali Baba" and "Sinbad" - from other manuscripts and his mysterious informant, Hanna. Each Nights translator promises to offer the Arabian Nights as it 'really is', yet each remembers the work as his own. Edward Lane offered in his notes the religious teachings of his Cairo sheikh, and Richard Burton added insights illustrative of his own exploits as an anthropologist and adventurer. In fashioning sequels to the Nights, writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Joseph Roth continue the practice of Scheherazade and the translators of supplementing their source material. Jorge Luis Borges himself would recount an apocryphal night in which Scheherazade begins to relate her own tale thus extending her cycle of tales into infinity. This collection of Nights editions chronicles the evolution of a singulary universal work and demonstrates how translators and illustrators in effect co-author the tales. Highlights at the Special Collections include first editions by Lane (1839-1841) and Payne (1884) and early twentieth-century illustrated editions including Edmund Dulac's Art Nouveau masterpiece Princess Badoura.

Dr. Paulo Lemos Horta (Ph.D., Toronto, S.C.T., Cornell) has presented his research at Michigan, Wisconsin, Toronto, British Columbia, the American Comparative Literature Association and at Cornell University. His research on the Nights was supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Clark Institute at UCLA. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

The seven voyages of Sindbad the sailor: From the Arabian nights entertainments Woodcuts by Philip Reed New York City: Holiday House, 1939 J398.20956 A65sr

Princess Badoura: A tale from the Arabian Nights Retold by Laurence Housman, illustrated by Edmund Dulac [London]: Hodder and Stoughton, [1913?] J398.20956 A65pr

'The love of an extraordinary woman for a flawed man': An exchange with Salman Rushdie on the 1001 Nights

Dr. Paulo Lemos Horta

Paulo Lemos Horta:

Not being able to count on "having even a thousand nights and a night," the narrator of Midnight's Children declares that he must work "fast, faster than Scheherazade." And at the outset of Shalimar the Clown a young woman wonders if she speaks in her sleep in "Night-Arabian," the "dreamtongue of Scheherazade." Between these two novels, published 25 years apart, there are by my count 999 further references to the Nights in your work. How did you first come across these stories, and why do you keep coming back to them? Cities, continents, agents, and publishers change, and only Scheherazade remains!

Salman Rushdie:

To be more precise, I have made 1001 references to the Arabian Nights, or to be even more precise, a thousand references and a reference!

My father had one of those multi-volume translations. It was the Richard Burton version, full of exotic notes which tell us a lot about Richard Burton and little about the Nights.

Supplemental nights to The book of the thousand nights and a night; with notes anthropological and explanatory... By Richard F. Burton [London]: Printed by the Burton Club for private subscribers only, [19--] 398 A65b4

I come back to the Arabian Nights over and over again because I find the frame tale of Scheherazade fascinating, because while there’s Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba, you know, I’m most interested in Scheherazade and her frame narrative.

It is the story of someone who tells stories to save her life. But I’m really interested in it because at its heart it is a love story. King Shahriyar marries virgins and kills them in the morning; he’s beastly. Here is this woman who sacrifices herself to save all the other women in her city from being murdered by the cruel Shahriyar. Scheherazade is the learned, wise, and brave daughter of Shahriyar’s most esteemed grand Vizier, who acts as a Prime Minister of sorts. Though she is exempt because of her father’s high position, she volunteers to marry the king.

The Arabian nights' entertainments: Arranged for the perusal of youthful readers By Mrs. Sugden London: George Routledge and Sons, [19--?] J398.20956 A65su1 The Arabian nights: Their best-known tales Edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1929, c1909 J398.20956 A65w2

On their wedding night, her little sister Dunyazad joins Scheherazade and King Shahriyar and sits at the foot of the bed, perhaps knitting, while they make love, and during their post-coital embrace she asks for a story, the pretext for Scheherazade to begin her tales. The purpose of the storytelling - to put off the threat of execution each night.

After the first few nights this threat becomes theoretical. Shahriyar is not really going to kill her, after all, she is the mother to his children. At the end of the story she presents Shahriyar with three children that she has borne him somehow in secret through unbroken narrative. This brings up the question of what one would have known about the other, which suggests that they have moved on to a different plane and know more than they care to admit. It is a story about how Scheherazade and Shahriyar fall in love.

The interesting question is: why does she fall in love with him? It is easy to understand why he falls in love with her. She’s … she’s extraordinary. But why would she fall in love with him? He’s a mass murderer, he’s beastly. She’s civilized and she civilizes him. But that is the luck men sometimes have, that extraordinary women fall in love with them, although they are not extraordinary. And these things happen. How wonderful that extraordinary women fall in love with flawed men.

This is my fascination with the Arabian Nights.

Copyright © Paulo Lemos Horta, 2005. From an exchange that followed a reading of Shalimar the Clown at the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver, September 24th 2005.

Stories from the Arabian nights Based on a translation from the Arabic by Edward William Lane; selected, edited and arranged for young people by Frances Jenkins Olcott; illustrations by Monro S. Orr London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1913 (1923 printing) J398.20956 A65o The Arabian nights entertainments Selected and edited by Andrew Lang; illustrated by H.J. Ford London; Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929, c1898 J398.20956 A65La

The Arabian nights' entertainments [Adapted] by Geo. Flyer Townsend Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske & Co., c1898 J398.20956 A65to The Arabian nights' entertainments New York: G.H. McKibbin, [19--?] J398.20956 A65ma