Tales From 1001 Nights Read online

  Tales from 1,001 Nights

  Aladdin, Ali Baba and Other Favourite Tales

  Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS,

  with URSULA LYONS

  Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in three volumes by Penguin Classics 2008

  This abridged edition published 2010

  All stories translation copyright © Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008 except the translation of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Killed by a Slave Girl’ and ‘The Story of Aladdin’ copyright © Ursula Lyons, 2008

  Introduction, Glossary and Further Reading copyright © Robert Irwin, 2010

  The moral right of the translators and introducer has been asserted

  Cover images © The Art Archive

  Cover design Coralie Bickford-Smith

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96587-1

  Contents

  Editorial Note

  Introduction

  King Shahriyar, Shah Zaman and Shahrazad

  The Story of the Donkey and the Bull

  The Fisherman and the ‘Ifrit

  The Story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage

  The Story of King Sindbad and the Falcon

  The Story of the Treacherous Vizier

  The Story of the Semi-petrifed Prince

  The Porter and the Three Ladies

  The Story of the First Dervish

  The Story of the Second Dervish

  The Story of the Envious and the Envied

  The Story of the Third Dervish

  The Story of the Lady of the House

  The Story of the Doorkeeper

  The Story of Nur Al-Din and Shams Al-Din

  The Story of Taj Al-Muluk and Princess Dunya

  The Story of ‘Aziz and ‘Aziza

  Animal Stories

  The Weasel and the Mouse

  The Crow and the Cat

  The Fox and the Crow

  The Flea and the Mouse

  The Falcon and the Birds of Prey

  The Sparrow and the Eagle

  The Hedgehog and the Doves

  The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Killed by a Slave Girl

  Abu Muhammad the Sluggard

  The Ebony Horse

  ‘Ali, the Cairene Merchant

  Five Stories of Kings

  The Angel of Death, the Rich King and the Pious Man

  The Angel of Death and the Rich King

  The Angel of Death and the King of the Israelites

  Alexander the Great and the Poor King

  King Anushirwan the Just

  Sindbad the Sailor

  The First Journey of Sindbad

  The Second Journey of Sindbad

  The Third Journey of Sindbad

  The Fourth Journey of Sindbad

  The Fifth Journey of Sindbad

  The Sixth Journey of Sindbad

  The Seventh Journey of Sindbad

  The Adventures of ‘Ali Al-Zaibaq

  The Story of Aladdin, or the Magic Lamp

  Conclusion

  Glossary

  Further Reading

  Maps

  The ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century

  Baghdad in the Ninth Century

  Cairo in the Fourteenth Century

  Editorial Note

  This selection of stories from The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand and One Nights) is taken from the three-volume Penguin Classics edition (2008), the first complete translation of the Arabic text known as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II since Richard Burton’s famous translation of it in 1885–8.

  In addition to Malcolm Lyons’s translations from the Arabic text of Calcutta II, this selection includes Ursula Lyons’s translations of the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba from Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French. (For these stories no original Arabic text has survived and consequently they are classed as ‘orphan stories’.)

  For this selected edition, the ‘nights’ format has been removed, but the ‘nights’ covered by each story cycle are indicated in a note at the end of each chapter. As the two ‘orphan stories’ are not included within the ‘nights’ structure (and neither are the opening and concluding chapters, which ‘frame’ the stories told by Shahrazad), no notes are given for these.

  As often happens in popular narrative, inconsistencies and contradictions abound in the text of the Nights. It would be easy to emend these, and where names have been misplaced this has been done, to avoid confusion. Elsewhere, however, emendations for which there is no textual authority would run counter to the fluid and uncritical spirit of the Arabic narrative. In such circumstances no changes have been made.

  Introduction

  In the caliph’s palace, a girl is frying multi-coloured fish when a woman with a wand bursts through the wall and demands to know of the fish if they are true to their covenant … A young man mounts a flying horse; the horse strikes out one of his eyes with a lash of its tail and lands him on a building where he will encounter ten more one-eyed men … A travelling merchant is entombed alive with his deceased wife … It was the strangeness of the plotting and imagery, as well as the freedom from classical constraints derived from such authors as Homer, Ovid and Virgil, that appealed to the earliest Western readers of The Thousand and One Nights (best known in English as The Arabian Nights). ‘Read Sinbad and you will be sick of Aeneas’, as the eighteenth-century gothic novelist Horace Walpole declared. Yet behind the apparent wildness of the stories, there are patterns and correspondences and the playing off of themes and images against one another by the tales’ anonymous authors.

  ‘One Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature’, according to the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in his essay ‘Love, Death and Storytelling’ (New Statesman, 26 December 2006). It was a book that was familiar to Pamuk since childhood, but he has recently described how he decided to reread it in order to understand what fascinated Western authors like Stendhal, Coleridge, De Quincey and Poe in these stories and made the book a classic: ‘I saw it now as a great sea of stories – a sea with no end – and what astounded me was its ambition, its secret internal geomet
ry … I was able finally to appreciate One Thousand and One Nights as a work of art, to enjoy its timeless games of logic, of disguises, of hide-and-seek, and its many tales of imposture.’

  It seems most probable that the core of the Arabic story collection, Alf Layla wa-Layla (‘The Thousand and One Nights’), originated in a fairly brief and simple form in ancient India. Then, some time before the ninth century AD, these Sanskrit tales were translated into Persian under the title Hazar Afsaneh (‘The Thousand Tales’) and doubtless some Persian stories were added to this collection. By the ninth century at the latest, an Arabic version known as Kitab Hadith Alf Layla (‘The Book of the Tale of One Thousand Nights’) was in circulation. But The Thousand and One Nights in the form we have it today, with its elaborate frame story about King Shahriyar and the storyteller Shahrazad, was compiled much later. The oldest substantially surviving manuscript of the Nights seems to date from the late fifteenth century. In the opening frame story, which is included in this edition, Shahrazad tells Shahriyar stories night after night in order to postpone her execution. The ‘nights’ function as story breaks; there are not actually a thousand and one stories. Some stories are very short, others very long, told over many nights. Some are about criminals, some about saints. Some feature magic and monsters, while others centre on commercial transactions or romantic assignations. It is the sheer variety of stories that gives the Nights its unique quality.

  In bookshops and libraries it is common to find the Nights shelved with fairytales, even though fairies feature very rarely in the Arab stories. But a fairytale is not defined by the presence of fairies within it. Such Western stories as ‘Puss in Boots’ or ‘Bluebeard’ have no fairies in them, but they are still universally regarded as fairytales. A fairytale, rather, is a story that relies on the fantastic to induce wonder. In this sense, a very high proportion of the stories in the Nights can be regarded as fairytales. Even so, there are also plenty of stories in which the fantastic and the supernatural do not feature – stories about cunning adulterers, learned slave girls, pious hermits, master criminals, benevolent or despotic rulers and so on. Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that all great literature becomes children’s literature. (Doubtless he was thinking of such works as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.) In recent times, The Thousand and One Nights, together with other fairytale collections, has been carelessly classified as children’s literature. But in the seventeenth century, by contrast, Charles Perrault and the Comtesse d’Aulnoy aimed their famous collections of fairytales at sophisticated adult audiences and, as we shall see, Antoine Galland presented his translation to the same audience in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. There is certainly a great deal in the Nights that is not suitable for children.

  Although some scholars have discussed the stories of the Nights as if they were in origin oral folktales that eventually happened to get collected and written down, this is only occasionally and partially true, for it is clear that some stories were originally told at the courts of the caliphs, others were artfully composed by skilled, if anonymous, authors, and even those which do seem to have had a folk origin have had their prose polished by later scribes and editors. Taken as whole, The Thousand and One Nights is close to pulp fiction, albeit pulp fiction with decidedly literary pretensions.

  The insertion of passages of poetry in classical Arabic into the stories, including some verses by well-known poets, is one of the signs that the Nights is not just a collection of folktales. The poetry quoted in the stories does not serve to carry the narrative along, but, in general, it is used in order to express moments of high emotion. On occasions when the tales were narrated by professional storytellers, it is likely that the recitation of the poems was accompanied by music. Melancholy resignation seems to be one of the commonest themes of the poetry. The structure of Arabic vocabulary makes rhyming easy and, besides rhymed metrical poetry, passages of rhymed prose (saj‘) also feature. Rhymed prose, often used to evoke love, despair or violent conflict, also had the effect of slowing the narrative down. (The effect of rhymed prose has not been reproduced in this translation; read out aloud in Arabic, it sounds fine, but printed in an English translation it looks grotesque.)

  Until quite recently, the stories of the Nights were not particularly esteemed in the Arab world. A French antiquarian and Orientalist, Antoine Galland (1646–1715), was chiefly responsible for their rediscovery and subsequent fame. In the years 1704–17, he translated the stories in the oldest substantially surviving manuscript and to this translation he added some stories from other sources. The earnest purpose of his translation was to instruct his readers in the manners and customs of the contemporary Orient and to use the tales to provide improving lessons in morality. Since ladies at the court of Versailles were his target readership and since the Arabic he was translating seemed to him somewhat crude, he took pains to remove what he saw as medieval barbarisms and improve the tales by rendering them into a polished and courtly French. In order for his translation to find favour, Galland had to take liberties with it. Translators translate not just into a language but also into a time and it is for this reason that Homer, Dostoevsky and Proust have had to be regularly retranslated. As it was, for over two centuries Galland’s translation would inspire countless other versions and imitations.

  The stories of the Nights were an immediate success with French courtiers and intellectuals. The French literary historian Paul Hazard in La Crise de la conscience européene (published in 1935 and translated into English in 1953) has described how the craze for Shahrazad’s storytelling replaced the slightly earlier craze for the traditional French fairytales as rewritten by Charles Perrault: ‘Then did the fairies Carabosse and Aurora make way for the throng of Sultanas, Viziers, Dervishes, Greek doctors, Negro slaves. Light fairylike edifices, fountains, pools guarded by lions of massy gold, spacious chambers hung with silks and tapestries from Mecca – all these replaced the palace where the Beast had waited for Beauty to open her loving eyes.’

  Galland had first published a translation of ‘Sindbad’, around 1698, and this had been well received. Someone then misled him into believing that ‘Sindbad’ was part of a larger collection known as The Thousand and One Nights. More by luck than judgement, Galland went on to translate the oldest substantially surviving Arabic version of the Nights. This probably dates from the late fifteenth century, but it is clear from literary references that there were earlier, less elaborate versions of the story collection in Arabic. There is also at least one Turkish manuscript that is older than the Arabic one which Galland translated. Though some of the stories in the Nights derive from much earlier Indian and Persian versions, the stories as we have them are thoroughly Arabized and Islamized. Galland’s French translation, Les Mille et une nuits, was swiftly translated into English and other languages. In the three centuries that followed there were also several English translations of the Nights directly from the Arabic.

  In the course of the early nineteenth century, a series of printed editions in Arabic were published in Cairo, Breslau and Calcutta. Of these, the most compendious is known as Calcutta II, or the Macnaghten edition. Like the Cairo and Breslau editions, Calcutta II contains far more stories than are found in the Galland manuscript (and it is the Calcutta II text that is the basis of the Penguin translation by Malcolm Lyons). Because of the way some stories lead into other stories, and some frame others, which in turn contain yet more stories within them, it is difficult to say exactly how many stories are in Calcutta II, but certainly over 640. However, in the eighteenth century, English readers made do with what is known as the Grub Street translation of Galland’s French text. (According to Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary, Grub Street in London was ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet’.) It was the Grub Street version that inspired and delighted Addison, Walpole, Wordsworth, Coleridge and many others. Then, in the course of the nineteenth century, English t
ranslations were made from one or other of the printed Arabic editions. The history of those translations, however, is one of pedantry, pretension and plagiarism.

  In 1838–41, Edward William Lane (1801–76) published a translation of some of the Cairo edition. Previously he had written a survey of everyday life in Egypt entitled Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). In the course of that book he had referred to Nights as ‘being a faithful picture of Arab life’. Apparently forgetting about the jinn, flying horses, cannibalistic ghuls, giant rukhs, Amazon warrior women, men turned into animals by magic, and improbably opulent palaces, he saw the stories as primarily having documentary value. But since he was both pious and prudish, when he came to translate an Egyptian printed text of the Nights known as the Bulaq edition, he cut out sexual scenes and omitted many stories as unfit for gentlefolk. In the opening frame story, for instance, Lane’s Shahriyar and Shah Zaman do not have sex with the lady carried in a chest. They merely engage in ‘conversation’ with her. As well as cutting out the sex, Lane was not so fond of fantasy and he omitted some stories for this reason. He was also under pressure from his publisher to bring the unprofitable publication to a speedy end. Lane was hostile to Galland’s polishing the text up and giving the dialogue a courtly feel. Piety also led him to try to model his prose on that of the King James Bible, but he succeeded only in reproducing the archaism of his model without matching its eloquence. There may also be another reason why he did this: because it was one of the very few books in English that he had read in his life. (He had become so accustomed to reading Arabic manuscripts that he used to complain that reading English print hurt his eyes.) Since he earnestly intended his translation to offer a guide to the manners and customs of the contemporary Egyptians, his text also served as a pretext for hundreds of pages of ethnographic notes.