The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (essential reading TXT) 📖

ordinance the text used by the first translator. But this would hardly have filled more than two-thirds of his volumes; for the other third he interpolated, or is supposed to have interpolated, the ten[FN#215] following tales.

 

1. Histoire du prince Zeyn Alasnam et du Roi des G�nies.[FN#216]

2. Histoire de Codadad et de ses fr�res.

3. Histoire de la Lampe merveilleuse (Aladdin).

4. Histoire de l’aveugle Baba Abdalla.

5. Histoire de Sidi Nouman.

6. Histoire de Cogia Hassan Alhabbal.

7. Histoire d’Ali Baba, et de Quarante Voleurs extermin�s par une Esclave.

8. Histoire d’Ali Cogia, marchand de Bagdad.

9. Histoire du prince Ahmed et de la f�e Peri-Banou.

10. Histoire de deux S�urs jalouses de leur Cadette.[FN#217]

 

Concerning these interpolations which contain two of the best and most widely known stories in the work, Aladdin and the Forty Thieves, conjectures have been manifold but they mostly run upon three lines. De Sacy held that they were found by Galland in the public libraries of Paris. Mr. Chenery, whose acquaintance with Arabic grammar was ample, suggested that the Professor had borrowed them from the recitations of the Rawis, rhapsodists or professional story-tellers in the bazars of Smyrna and other ports of the Levant. The late Mr. Henry Charles Coote (in the “Folk-Lore Record,” vol. iii. Part ii. p. 178 et seq.), “On the source of some of M. Galland’s Tales,” quotes from popular Italian, Sicilian and Romaic stories incidents identical with those in Prince Ahmad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Envious Sisters, suggesting that the Frenchman had heard these paramythia in Levantine coffee-houses and had inserted them into his unequalled corpus fabularum. Mr. Payne (ix. 268) conjectures the probability “of their having been composed at a comparatively recent period by an inhabitant of Baghdad, in imitation of the legends of Haroun er Rashid and other wellknown tales of the original work;” and adds, “It is possible that an exhaustive examination of the various MS. copies of the Thousand and One Nights known to exist in the public libraries of Europe might yet cast some light upon the question of the origin of the interpolated Tales.” I quite agree with him, taking “The Sleeper and the Waker” and “Zeyn Alasnam” as cases in point; but I should expect, for reasons before given, to find the stories in a Persic rather than an Arabic MS. And I feel convinced that all will be recovered: Galland was not the man to commit a literary forgery.

 

As regards Aladdin, the most popular tale of the whole work, I am convinced that it is genuine, although my unfortunate friend, the late Professor Palmer, doubted its being an Eastern story. It is laid down upon all the lines of Oriental fiction. The mise-en-sc�ne is China, “where they drink a certain warm liquor”

(tea); the hero’s father is a poor tailor; and, as in “Judar and his Brethren,” the Maghribi Magician presently makes his appearance, introducing the Wonderful Lamp and the Magical Ring.

Even the Sorcerer’s cry, “New lamps for old lamps !”—a prime point—is paralleled in the Tale of the Fisherman’s Son,[FN#218]

where the Jew asks in exchange only old rings and the Princess, recollecting that her husband kept a shabby, well-worn ring in his writing-stand, and he being asleep, took it out and sent it to the man. In either tale the palace is transported to a distance and both end with the death of the wicked magician and the hero and heroine living happily together ever after.

 

All Arabists have remarked the sins of omission and commission, of abridgment, amplification and substitution, and the audacious distortion of fact and phrase in which Galland freely indulged, whilst his knowledge of Eastern languages proves that he knew better. But literary license was the order of his day and at that time French, always the most begueule of European languages, was bound by a rigorisme of the narrowest and the straightest of lines from which the least ecart condemned a man as a barbarian and a tudesque. If we consider Galland fairly we shall find that he errs mostly for a purpose, that of popularising his work; and his success indeed justified his means. He has been derided (by scholars) for “H� Monsieur!” and “Ah Madame!”; but he could not write “O mon sieur” and “O ma dame;” although we can borrow from biblical and Shakespearean English, “O my lord!” and “O my lady!”

“Bon Dieu! ma s�ur” (which our translators English by “O

heavens,” Night xx.) is good French for Wa’ll�hi—by Allah; and “cinquante cavaliers bien faits” (“fifty handsome gentlemen on horseback”) is a more familiar picture than fifty knights.

“L’officieuse Dinarzade” (Night lxi.), and “Cette plaisante querelle des deux fr�res” (Night 1xxii.) become ridiculous only in translation—“the officious Dinarzade” and “this pleasant quarrel;” while “ce qu’il y de remarquable” (Night 1xxiii.) would relieve the Gallic mind from the mortification of “Destiny decreed.” “Plusieurs sortes de fruits et de bouteilles de vin”

(Night ccxxxi. etc.) Europeanises flasks and flaggons; and the violent convulsions in which the girl dies (Night cliv., her head having been cut off by her sister) is mere Gallic squeamishness: France laughs at “le shoking” in England but she has only to look at home especially during the reign of Galland’s contemporary—

Roi Soleil. The terrible “Old man” (Shaykh) “of the Sea” (-

board) is badly described by “l’incommode vieillard” (“the ill-natured old fellow”): “Brave Maimune” and “Agr�able Maimune” are hardly what a Jinni would say to a Jinniyah (ccxiii.); but they are good Gallic. The same may be noted of “Plier les voiles pour marque qu’il se rendait” (Night ccxxxv.), a European practice; and of the false note struck in two passages. “Je m’estimais heureuse d’avoir fait une si belle conqu�te” (Night 1xvii.) gives a Parisian turn; and, “Je ne puis voir sans horreur cet abominable barbier que voil�: quoiqu’il soit n� dans un pays o�

tout le monde est blanc, il ne laisse pas � resembler a un �thiopien; mais il a l’�me encore plus noire et horrible que le visage” (Night clvii.), is a mere affectation of Orientalism.

Lastly, “Une vieille dame de leur connaissance” (Night clviii.) puts French polish upon the matter of fact Arab’s “an old woman.”

 

The list of absolute mistakes, not including violent liberties, can hardly be held excessive. Professor Weil and Mr. Payne (ix.

271) justly charge Galland with making the Trader (Night i.) throw away the shells (�corces) of the date which has only a pellicle, as Galland certainly knew; but dates were not seen every day in France, while almonds and walnuts were of the quatre mendiants. He preserves the �corces, which later issues have changed to noyaux, probably in allusion to the jerking practice called Inw�. Again in the “First Shaykh’s Story” (vol. i. 27) the “maillet” is mentioned as the means of slaughtering cattle, because familiar to European readers: at the end of the tale it becomes “le couteaufuneste.” In Badral Din a “tarte � la cr�me,”

so well known to the West, displaces, naturally enough, the outlandish “mess of pomegranate-seeds.” Though the text especially tells us the hero removed his bag-trousers (not only “son habit”) and placed them under the pillow, a crucial fact in the history, our Professor sends him to bed fully dressed, apparently for the purpose of informing his readers in a footnote that Easterns “se couchent en cale�on” (Night lxxx.). It was mere ignorance to confound the arbal�te or cross-bow with the stone-bow (Night xxxviii.), but this has universally been done, even by Lane who ought to have known better; and it was an unpardonable carelessness or something worse to turn N�r (fire) and D�n (in lieu of) into “le faux dieu Nardoun” (Night lxv.): as this has been untouched by De Sacy, I cannot but conclude that he never read the text with the translation. Nearly as bad also to make the Jewish physician remark, when the youth gave him the left wrist (Night cl.), “voil� une grande ignorance de ne savoir pas que l’on presente la main droite � un m�decin et non pas la gauche”—whose exclusive use all travellers in the East must know. I have noticed the incuriousness which translates “along the Nile-shore” by “up towards Ethiopia” (Night cli.), and the “Islands of the Children of Khaledan” (Night ccxi.) instead of the Kh�lidat�ni or Kh�lid�t, the Fortunate Islands. It was by no means “des petite soufflets” (“some taps from time to time with her fingers”) which the sprightly dame administered to the Barber’s second brother (Night clxxi.), but sound and heavy “cuffs” on the nape; and the sixth brother (Night clxxx.) was not “aux l�vres fendues” (“he of the hair-lips”), for they had been cut off by the Badawi jealous of his fair wife. Abu al-Hasan would not greet his beloved by saluting “le tapis � ses pieds:”

he would kiss her hands and feet. Ha�atalnefous (Hayat al-Nuf�s, Night ccxxvi.) would not “throw cold water in the Princess’s face:” she would sprinkle it with eau-de-rose. “Camaralzaman” I.

addresses his two abominable wives in language purely European (ccxxx.), “et de la vie il ne s’approcha d’elles,” missing one of the fine touches of the tale which shows its hero a weak and violent man, hasty and lacking the pundonor. “La belle Persienne,” in the Tale of Nur al-Din, was no Persian; nor would her master address her, “Venez ��, impertinente!” (“come hither, impertinence”). In the story of Badr, one of the Comoro Islands becomes “L’�le de la Lune.” “Dog” and “dog-son” are not “injures atroces et indignes d’un grand roi:” the greatest Eastern kings allow themselves far more energetic and significant language.

 

Fitnah[FN#219] is by no means “Force de c�urs.” Lastly the d�no�ement of The Nights is widely different in French and in Arabic; but that is probably not Galland’s fault, as he never saw the original, and indeed he deserves high praise for having invented so pleasant and sympathetic a close, inferior only to the Oriental device.[FN#220]

 

Galland’s fragment has a strange effect upon the Orientalist and those who take the scholastic view, be it wide or narrow. De Sacy does not hesitate to say that the work owes much to his fellow-countryman’s hand; but I judge otherwise: it is necessary to dissociate the two works and to regard Galland’s paraphrase, which contains only a quarter of The Thousand Nights and a Night, as a wholly different book. Its attempts to amplify beauties and to correct or conceal the defects and the grotesqueness of the original, absolutely suppress much of the local colour, clothing the bare body in the best of Parisian suits. It ignores the rhymed prose and excludes the verse, rarely and very rarely rendering a few lines in a balanced style. It generally rejects the proverbs, epigrams and moral reflections which form the pith and marrow of the book; and, worse still, it disdains those finer touches of character which are often Shakespearean in their depth and delicacy, and which, applied to a race of familiar ways and thoughts, manners and customs, would have been the wonder and delight of Europe. It shows only a single side of the gem that has so many facets. By deference to public taste it was compelled to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original, contrasting with the gorgeous tints, the elevated morality and the religious tone of passages which crowd upon them. We miss the odeur du sang which taints the parfums du harem; also the humouristic tale and the Rabelaisian outbreak which relieve and throw out into strong relief the splendour of Empire and the havoc of Time. Considered in this light it is a caput mortuum, a magnificent texture seen on the wrong side; and it speaks volumes for the genius of the man who could recommend it in such blurred and caricatured condition to readers throughout the civilised world. But those who look only at