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Volume 3
Nights 719 to 1001

Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS,
with URSULA LYONS
Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN

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PENGUIN BOOKS

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Editorial Note

Introduction

The Arabian Nights: Nights 719 to 1001

The Story of Aladdin, or The Magic Lamp

Glossary

Maps

The ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century

Baghdad in the Ninth Century

Cairo in the Fourteenth Century

Index of Nights and Stories

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THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS
VOLUME 3

MALCOLM C. LYONS, sometime Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and a life Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, is a specialist in the field of classical Arabic Literature. His published works include the biography Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry and many articles on Arabic literature.

URSULA LYONS, formerly an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University and, since 1976, an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature.

ROBERT IRWIN is the author of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, The Arabian Nights: A Companion and numerous other specialized studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism. His novels include The Limits of Vision, The Arabian Nightmare, The Mysteries of Algiers and Satan Wants Me.

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This new English version of The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand and One Nights) is 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. A great achievement in its time, Burton’s translation nonetheless contained many errors, and even in the 1880s his English read strangely.

In this new edition, in addition to Malcolm Lyons’s translation of all the stories found in the Arabic text of Calcutta II, Ursula Lyons has translated the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, as well as an alternative ending to ‘The seventh journey of Sindbad’, from Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French. (For the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories no original Arabic text has survived and consequently these are classed as ‘orphan stories’.)

The text appears in three volumes, each with an introduction, which, in Volume 1, discusses the strange nature of the Nights; in Volume 2, their history and provenance; and, in Volume 3, the influence the tales have exerted on writers through the centuries. Volume 1 also includes an explanatory note on the translation, a note on the text and an introduction to the ‘orphan stories’ (‘Editing Galland’), in addition to a chronology and suggestions for further reading. Footnotes, a glossary and maps appear in all three volumes.

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.

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The Christians of medieval Europe believed Asia to be a region of fabulous riches, strange marvels and wise sages. Cannibals and dog-headed men dwelt there and lambs grew from the soil as plants. The Travels of Sir John de Mandeville, written sometime between 1357 and 1371, gave an account of the marvels of Asia that was supposedly based on the author’s journeyings. However, Mandeville’s Travels was no kind of Rough Guide to Asia, providing reliable information for prospective travellers. It was, rather, a work of entertainment in which interesting facts were mixed in with even more interesting fictions. Some of the wonders conjured up by Mandeville are common to The Arabian Nights and to The Seven Voyages of Sindbad. These include the giant bird known as the rukh, the Amazon warrior women, the Magnetic Mountain, the Fountain of Youth and the earthly paradise.

In later centuries, Galland, Lane and Burton were to use their translations of The Arabian Nights as vehicles for instructive glosses and footnotes about Islamic and Arab manners and customs. But medieval Christian storytellers were not so interested in such things, and they had little sense of the otherness of the Arab world. They did not compose or adapt stories featuring veiled women, harems, eunuchs and camels. There seems to have been no attempt to produce a translation of the Nights that might have served any educational purpose. Instead, individual storytelling items were absorbed piecemeal by medieval European romancers and added to their fictional repertoire. Detached from Shahrazad’s frame, such plot motifs, images or accessories – for example, the flying carpet – even reached as far as Iceland.

The unfinished ‘Squire’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387– 1400) provides one example of how all sorts of bits and pieces were taken from the Nights and other Oriental sources, yet the story as a whole is unmistakably European and reveals no interest at all in the real Orient. In Tartarye (the Mongol lands) there was a great king called Cambyuskan. An envoy from Arabia brought him gifts, including a horse of brass, a mirror, a gold ring and a sword. The mirror and the ring were for the king’s daughter Canacee. The mirror allows the viewer to see danger and to detect falsehood in a woman. The sword can cut through armour and deliver wounds that cannot be cured save by the application of the flat of the same sword. The ring permits its wearer to understand the language of birds; hence Canacee is able to hear a female falcon lament about how she has been deserted by a tercel (male hawk). Canacee nurses the bird, which has swooned from grief, and, shortly after this episode, ‘The Squire’s Tale’ breaks off.

It is impossible to know how the story as a whole would have developed further and what part the horse, mirror and sword would have played in it. However, the deserted female falcon features in the Nights stories of Ardashir and Hayat al-Nufus and of Taj al-Muluk and Princess Dunya. From the Nights tales we can deduce that Canacee, having heard the female falcon’s story, will come to distrust all men and rebuff their approaches, until some prince completes the story by showing how the male hawk did not deliberately abandon the female, but was seized by a bigger raptor, such as a kite. Once Canacee understands the full story, she will accept the prince’s suit.

The mechanical horse and the magic mirror that feature in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ also have their precursors in Nights stories. But this is not the place to track down and examine each and every example of Arab stories and images that appeared in the romances of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Orlando Furioso, the mock-heroic epic composed by Ludovico Ariosto and published in 1532, provides a striking example of the adaptation of a Nights story, almost certainly via an Italian intermediary source. One of the great classics of European literature, it is set in the time of Charlemagne and recounts the struggles of Orlando (Roland) and others of Charlemagne’s paladins against the Saracens and pagans. Their destinies cross with those of distressed damsels, sorcerers and monsters. In Canto 28, an innkeeper recounts to Rodomont the story of two kings, Astolfo and Iocondo, who were betrayed by their wives with a knave and a dwarf respectively. Eventually the kings accept the propensity of women to be unfaithful. Rodomont, having listened to the innkeeper, is forced to accept that there is no limit to women’s wiles. Evidently the innkeeper’s story is an adaptation of the story with which the Nights opens, the tale of how Shahriyar and Shah Zaman were betrayed by their adulterous wives and how, after a sexual encounter with a woman, supposedly kept under guard by a jinni, they come to recognize that there is no such thing as a faithful woman.

Arab, Persian and Turkish stories percolated into Europe, carried there perhaps by sailors, merchants and prisoners of war. Spain and Sicily were important as channels of transmission for Arab and Islamic culture, while another region where Muslim and Christian alternately fought one another or lived together in uneasy coexistence was the Balkans. The degree to which Arabian Nights stories were known by Balkan and Greek Christians and transmitted by them prior to the publication of Galland’s French translation has yet to be properly investigated. But a version of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ circulated in the Balkans (though ‘Ali Baba’ was one of Galland’s ‘orphan stories’ for which no Arabic original has been found). Nights tales also circulated in Romania, and there was a Vlach version of the story of Hasan of Basra. In 1835, Alexander Kinglake, author of the high-spirited travel masterpiece Eothen, set out for the Holy Land and Egypt and, at one stage of his journey, took a Greek boat from Smyrna to Cyprus. One of the things that struck him was the Greek crew’s fondness for long stories. These were ‘mostly founded upon oriental topics, and in one of them I recognized with some alteration, an old friend of The Arabian Nights. I inquired as to the source from which the story had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed down unwritten from Greek to Greek.’ (Kinglake went on to speculate, provocatively and foolishly, that the Nights as a whole might have a Greek rather than an Oriental origin.) It is clear that some of the Nights stories circulated in oral form in Ottoman-occupied Greece and came via Turkish versions.

Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks and others could have become familiar with Nights stories via translations made from Arabic or Syriac. But it is perhaps more likely that they came to the stories in Turkish versions produced during the Ottoman period. Although the main corpus of The Arabian Nights was not translated into any European language until the eighteenth century, a substantial section had been translated into Turkish at a remarkably early date by Abdi in 1429 under the title Binbir Gece (‘Thousand and One Nights’). Several other translations were later made into Turkish and these survive in various manuscripts. One in the British Library, apparently dating from the seventeenth century, has the ‘night stories’ told by Shahrazad, or rather ‘Shehzad’ as she features in Turkish. These stories include the hunchback cycle, but the ‘night stories’ are interleaved with ‘day stories’ related by another narrator about the great Sufi saint Junayd. There is also the ten-volume Beyani manuscript of 1636, a translation of the Nights into Turkish made on the orders of Murad IV. This manuscript was purchased by Galland and brought by him to Paris; it is currently in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is possible that Galland consulted this Turkish manuscript in order to supplement the material in the fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript he was translating from.

Galland’s translation was rather free and stories were edited in order to conform to eighteenth-century French standards of decorum and refinement. He also conceived of the publication of these stories as having a twofold purpose: they would not only give readers instruction about the manners and customs of Oriental peoples, but those readers would ‘benefit from the examples of virtues and vices’ contained in the stories. His French translation appeared in 1704–17 as Les Mille et une nuits and it was in turn swiftly translated into English, German, Italian and most of Europe’s leading languages. Adaptations, parodies, pastiches and other works inspired in one way or another by the Nights followed its publication. These included Jacques Cazotte’s Les Mille et une fadaises (1742), Crébillon fils’s Le Sopha (1742), Denis Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), Voltaire’s Zadig (1748), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), John Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet (1761), James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii (1764) and Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772). The majority of these publications echoed Galland’s earnest purpose in that their narratives offered improving examples of the ‘virtues and vices’.

France and, more precisely, Paris in the early eighteenth century had a central role as the arbiter of taste and civilization. In his introduction to Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy of Western Culture (1991), Jack Zipes, a leading authority on the history of the fairy tale, having noted this, goes on to remark of Galland’s translation that ‘the literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment’. In the centuries that followed the French publication of the Nights, the stories were imitated, parodied and emulated. Some writers imitated the manner; others merely borrowed a few Oriental props or phrases. Words such as ‘carbuncle’, ‘talisman’ and ‘hieroglyphic’ and phrases such as ‘Barmecide feast’ and ‘Aladdin’s cave’ were part of the common stock of literary bric-à-brac from a cultural attic. In more modern times, writers have played intertextual games with the original stories. Often overt or covert reference to the Nights has been used as a kind of literary echo chamber in order to give depth to a more modern story.

For some eighteenth-century authors, the stories of the Nights were not moralistic enough and they laboriously ‘improved’ them; for others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stories were not erotic enough. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the existence of The Arabian Nights was also to serve as a kind of licensing authority, permitting literary fantasy, eroticism and violence. Later, from the mid twentieth century onwards, there have been many attempts by women writers to redress the injustice of Shahriyar’s treatment of women and his threat to execute Shahrazad as well as to reply to the fairly pervasive misogyny of the medieval Arab stories.

Translated versions of the Nights influenced in different ways such well-known writers as Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, William Beckford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth (and I have discussed the nature of the various influences in my Arabian Nights: A Companion, 2004). The account of the influence of the Nights that follows will concentrate on a small handful of selected examples from British and French literature, but, of course, the influence of the Nights spread more widely and any truly comprehensive account of its influence would also need to discuss such figures as the Germans, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Ernst Junger, the Danes Adam Oehlenschläger and Hans Christian Andersen, the Italian Italo Calvino and the Japanese Yukio Mishima. It would also cover the impact of the Nights on modern Arabic literature. In the Arabic-speaking world, the Nights, because of its colloquial style, frequently incorrect Arabic and occasional bawdiness, used not to enjoy a high reputation. However, from the twentieth century onwards and following the acclamation of Western writers and intellectuals, many of the Arab world’s most famous writers have championed the Nights, praised the liberating qualities of imaginative fiction and pastiched its themes. They include Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Naguib Mahfouz and Edwar Kharrat. ‘We are a doomed people, so regale us with amusing stories’ is the bitter reflection of the narrator in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (originally published in Arabic in 1966). This remarkable novel – one of the finest, perhaps the finest ever to have been written in Arabic, about traditional values, colonialism, cross-cultural sexual encounters and much else – draws complex parallels with the Nights, its protagonist a modern avatar of Shahriyar, driven to kill the women with whom he sleeps.

In eighteenth-century Britain, the influence the Nights exercised on young people, some of whom were destined to go on to become novelists, was redoubled by the many imitations and pastiches that were published. These included John Hawkesworth’s aforementioned Almoran and Hamet (1761), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Thomas Gueulette’s early eighteenth-century, mock-Oriental Tartar, Moghul and Chinese tales (written in French, but translated into English). But one English mock-Oriental story collection was of particular importance. This was Tales of the Genii: or The Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar (1764) by the Reverend James Ridley. In this book, Ridley, who had served as an army chaplain in India, sought to promote ‘the true doctrines of morality under the delightful allegories of romantic enchantment’. Those ‘true doctrines’ were of course Christian and Protestant. Ridley’s tales contain a lot of sorcery, magical transformations, genii, richly decorated palaces and all the conventional settings and trappings of the Orient. His heroes and heroines pass through many ordeals and unmask all sorts of enchantments in order to discover virtues that are veiled by appearances. The book, with its heavy freight of Christian doctrine and moralizing, does not read well today, but it was enormously popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, as we shall see, it helped form the youthful imaginations of better writers.

Responses to the Nights over the centuries were shaped by changes in society and taste. The Romantics were less interested than their predecessors in the moral lessons to be drawn from the Arabian stories, but enthusiastic about the wonders of magic, the exotic, and the sublime qualities of the vast and wild. Moreover, the Nights came to be associated with childhood reading and the opening up of the imagination that came from it. ‘Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii?’ Coleridge asked (in a letter to Thomas Poole in 1797), before answering: ‘I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know of no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.’ (The first selection of tales from the Nights made specifically for children was published by Elizabeth Newberry in 1791.)

William Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850) is an autobiographical poem in blank verse, in which the poet searches for past sources of joy and recalls his childhood, including his youthful reading. In the course of this, he praises the authors of pulp fiction: ‘Ye dreamers, then, / Forgers of lawless tales! we bless you then’. He believed that Arabian and similar tales were ‘eminently useful in calling forth intellectual power’ (as expressed in a letter of 1845). In the fifth book of The Prelude, he writes:

A precious treasure had I long possessed,

A little yellow, canvas-covered book,

A slender abstract of the Arabian tales…

The Brontës – Emily, Charlotte, Anne and Bramwell – all read the Nights when young. Ridley’s Tales of the Genii also exercised a powerful influence on their youthful imaginations and the four children called themselves the ‘Genii’. Charlotte and Bramwell constructed an imaginary kingdom called Angria and wrote stories about it, while Emily and Anne composed poems about another imaginary kingdom, Gondal. Both the stories and the poems drew upon Oriental and pseudo-Oriental tales.

‘I took a book – some Arabian tales.’ This description of what Jane did after a conversation with Mr Brocklehurst at Gateshead is one of several explicit references to the Nights in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). To take another example, Rochester’s horse is called Mesrour – derived from ‘Masrur’, the name of the eunuch who accompanies Harun al-Rashid on his nocturnal explorations of Baghdad in the Nights. More profoundly, such incidental and trivial references are surely intended to suggest that, in its broadest outline, Jane Eyre is patterned on the frame story of the Nights. Jane is a kind of reincarnation of Shahrazad, talking and teaching for her future. Correspondingly, Rochester is Shahriyar, an embittered despot who distrusts women (though he is, of course, also a kind of Bluebeard, presiding over a great house with a locked chamber). In fact, Jane refers to him as ‘sultan’. The novel is, in short, the story of how the autocratic sultan is tamed by a good woman (subsequently the theme of so many women’s romances).

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) also contains many explicit references to the Nights, as Nelly Dean assumes the role of a latter-day Shahrazad, while Lockwood is a kind of avatar of Shahriyar. Early on in the novel, Catherine pretends to herself that she is like a merchant with his caravan – such as the merchant in the Nights story of the merchant and the jinni – but whereas the merchant’s expedition leads him to a dangerous encounter with the jinni, who wants to kill him, Catherine’s leads her to meet the demonic Heathcliff. Heathcliff is several times compared to a ghoul. On the other hand, Nelly Dean fancies that Heathcliff might be an Oriental prince in disguise. More important, perhaps, than specific references to the Nights, was the licence that the Arabic stories conferred for the wildness and passion that characterizes the storytelling of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

In Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), the nineteenth-century novelist and essayist George Gissing wrote about Dickens’s novels in the following terms:

Oddly enough, Dickens seems to make more allusions to the Arabian Nights than to any other book or author… Where the ordinary man sees nothing but everyday habit, Dickens is filled with the perception of marvellous possibilities. Again and again he has put the spirit of the Arabian Nights into his pictures of life by the river Thames… He sought for wonders amid the dreary life of common streets; and perhaps in this direction was also encouraged when he made acquaintance with the dazzling Eastern fables, and took them alternately with that more solid nutriment of the eighteenth-century novel.

Dickens, who read the Nights as a boy, was delighted by the stories, but his pleasure in Oriental storytelling was also fuelled by his passion for Ridley’s tales. As a child, Dickens composed a tragic drama, Misnar, The Sultan of India, based one of the stories in Tales of the Genii, essentially the story of an Indian prince’s struggle to retain his throne against challenges presented by his ambitious brother assisted by seven genii and the illusions conjured up by them.

The power of Ridley’s story stayed with Dickens throughout his life. Towards the end of Great Expectations (1861), Pip reflects on how, without his foreknowledge, everything is slowly but inexorably moving in such a way to bring catastrophe suddenly upon his head: ‘In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through leagues of rock…’ The reference is to the story of Misnar and his wise counsellor who design a pavilion with a great stone slab set above it to trap and kill two evil enchanters. At one point in the The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dick Swiveller wakes up in a strange bed: ‘If this is not a dream, I have woke up, by mistake, in a dream in an Arabian Night, instead of a London one.’ Likewise, David Copperfield, who as a schoolboy is compelled by the domineering Steerforth to tell stories late at night, compares his fate to that of Shahrazad. (And, of course, since Dickens both published many of his novels in serial form and gave readings from them, it would be natural for him to think of himself as a latter-day male version of Shahrazad.) It would be very easy to go on listing overt and covert references to the Nights and to Ridley’s ersatz version elsewhere in Dickens’s works. What is more important is the feel of the Nights stories and their impalpable but pervasive influence over Dickens’s fantastical plots with their moralizing outcomes. Enigmatic philanthropists cloaked in disguise walk the streets at night following in the footsteps of Harun al-Rashid. Baghdad is reconfigured as London, and the Dickensian city of mysteries and marvellous possibilities teems with grotesque characters who may be distant descendants of the hunchback or of the barber’s seven disabled brothers.

In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), in large part a novel about the Jewish people and their future prospects, she nevertheless makes frequent use of references to The Arabian Nights in order to heighten the Oriental feel of the novel. In particular, the protagonist, Daniel Deronda, is repeatedly compared to Qamar al-Zaman, the prince who, because of his education, is suspicious of women (and in Lane’s translation is so handsome that he is ‘a temptation unto lovers, a paradise to the desirous’). Correspondingly, the Jewess Mira is compared to Princess Budur, who is fated to marry Qamar al-Zaman. Throughout the novel, allusions to the Nights are used not only to suggest the Oriental, but also the sensual passion that is the theme of so many of its stories.

For a long time, European and Japanese knowledge of The Arabian Nights was mediated by Galland’s courtly French and there is a sense in which the Nights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be regarded as largely a work of French literature. Its influence on French literary culture was, if anything, more overpowering than its legacy in Britain. In his Souvenirs d’égotisme (1832), Stendhal wrote of the Nights: ‘I would wear a mask with pleasure. I would love to change my name. The Arabian Nights which I adore occupy more than a quarter of my head.’ It would probably be fruitless to search Le Rouge et le noir (1830) or La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) for plots or borrowed props. Nevertheless the Nights, and in particular its stress on magical powers, did help shape Stendhal’s image of himself as a novelist. Late in life he awarded himself magical powers as a writer, including becoming another person (as all good novelists should strive to do). He wanted to live like Harun in disguise. (He also wished for the ring of Angelica which conferred invisibility in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.) The power to become invisible, to assume another’s identity, to read another’s mind – all these staples of Islamic occultism and storytelling gave Stendhal metaphors for himself as an observer of humanity and a writer.

The Nights influenced the storytelling of Alexandre Dumas père at a more obvious and superficial level. His Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1845–6) is a wonderful melodrama of imprisonment, escape, enrichment and revenge, which was first published as a magazine serial. Dumas worked with a vocabulary of Oriental fantasy images that was shared with his readers. In the novel, Edmond Dantès, wrongfully imprisoned as a Bonapartist conspirator, escapes and, having discovered treasure on the island of Monte-Cristo, returns to Paris to take revenge on those who put him in prison.

There are many overt references to the Nights in the novel, but the most sustained evocation of its Oriental matter comes in chapter thirty-one, in which a Baron Franz d’Epinay lands on Monte-Cristo on a venture to encounter smugglers or bandits. Having landed, he encounters a group of smugglers who are going to roast a goat. They invite Franz to dine with them, but he can only join them if he is first blindfolded. The place he is led to is compared by his guide to the caves of Ali Baba. On being told that it is rumoured that the cave has a door that only opens to a magic password, Franz exclaims that he has ‘definitely stepped off into a tale from the Thousand and One Nights’. When the blindfold is removed, he finds himself in a cave furnished sumptuously in an Oriental style.

He is greeted by a mysterious and strikingly pale man who introduces himself as Sindbad the Sailor (but he is, of course, the Count of Monte-Cristo, alias Dantès, a Byronic figure who revels in mystery). Whereupon Franz decides to take the name Aladdin for the evening. The splendid dinner is served by Ali, a Nubian mute. In an evening of Eastern opulence, dinner is followed by hashish paste and, as the hashish takes effect, Franz drifts off into erotic dreams. He wakes on a bed of heather in a cave – transported back from Oriental enchantment to mundane reality.

In the course of the nineteenth century, abridged, bowdlerized and illustrated versions of The Arabian Nights proliferated and the Nights was in danger of being classified as merely children’s literature. The fresh translation from the Arabic into French by Joseph Charles Mardrus was to reverse that trend – at least for some readers. His highly literary version had been produced at the urging of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and it was published from 1898 to 1904 by La Revue blanche, a periodical devoted to Symbolism and modernism. Although Mardrus’s translation was inaccurate, unscholarly and somewhat fraudulent, it read well and it was a huge hit. André Gide was one of its leading enthusiasts. In Britain, the poets W. B. Yeats and James Elroy Flecker were among those who found fresh inspiration in Mardrus.

Jean Cocteau, dandy, enfant terrible, poet, novelist, artist and filmmaker, was, from his youth onwards, obsessed with the Mardrus Nights. He founded a literary and artistic magazine, Shéhérazade, which ran from 1909 to 1911. He was particularly fascinated by the figure of Shahrazad, the woman who talks for her life, whom he compared to a snake charmer who plays a flute in front of a cobra in the knowledge that, if the flute’s melody should cease, the cobra would strike. But, in some strange way, the young Cocteau, who had passionate fixations for a succession of beautiful women, but who was coming to terms with his homosexuality, seems to have regarded Shahrazad as representing the feminization of the world and therefore a figure to be resisted. His first volume of verse was entitled La Lampe d’Aladdin (1909). In the preface, Cocteau wrote: ‘I have wandered amid the gloom of life, with the marvellous lamp. Young like Aladdin, walking with fearful step, I have seen fruits, jewels, gleams and shadows. And my heart filled with illusions, I have wept at the difficulty of giving them to an unbelieving world.’ Cocteau also furnished a preface to an edition of the Nights. Sensuality, drugs, mirages, the Alexandrian Cabala, all such things were meat and drink, or rather opium and alcohol, to Cocteau.

But it was not just writers who were inspired by the Mardrus’s representation of the Nights. When the Ballets Russes presented their version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade in Paris in 1909, they discarded the four-part scenario that Rimsky-Korsakov had provided for his opus. Instead, quite a different story was substituted that was loosely modelled on the opening Nights story of Shahriyar’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity and his bloody vengeance. The story of illicit lust and violent requital in an opulent, lushly coloured setting echoed the general tenor of the Mardrus version of the Nights.

In the second half of the twentieth century there was a revival of interest in the Nights, particularly among writers who were interested in the opportunities offered for modernist and postmodernist literary experiments. Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino and Angela Carter are among those who can be mentioned here. Indeed, Angela Carter was one among many women writers who have been preoccupied with the role of the female storyteller. A. S. Byatt shares this preoccupation. In one of her short story collections, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), the title story is an account of the encounter of an ageing narratologist (an academic expert on storytelling) with a djinn in an hotel room in modern Ankara. The djinn offers her three wishes. She wishes to be as she was when she last felt good about her body. Secondly she wishes that the djinn should love her. Finally, she wishes that the djinn should have his freedom. ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ is a story about how stories will outlive us and it plays with conventions of the fairy-tale genre, using the fairy-tale form as a vehicle for the exploration of how fairy tales work.

There is no limit to the messages that can be drawn from various readings and retellings of the stories of The Arabian Nights. When one reads these stories, one has the impression that one has entered the engine-room of all stories, where all the possible plots have been stripped down to their essential elements. One senses also that, just as Sindbad or the one-eyed princes are the stories they tell about themselves, so we readers are the sum of our own stories. As the heroine of ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ reflects: ‘These tales are not psychological novels, are not concerned with states of mind or development of character, but bluntly with Fate, with Destiny, with what is prepared for human beings.’ Not only literature, The Arabian Nights is and continues to be one of the most inspiring sourcebooks of literature ever created.

Robert Irwin
London

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SHAHRAZAD CONTINUED:

A story is also told, O fortunate king, that in the city of Shiraz there was a great king whose name was al-Saif al-A‘zam Shah. He was a childless old man and so he gathered together wise men and doctors and told them: ‘I am old and you know my position, the state of my kingdom and how it is governed. I am afraid of what will happen to my subjects when I am dead, as I have no son yet.’ ‘We shall prepare some drugs to help you, if Almighty God wills it,’ they told him, and when he took what they produced and lay with his wife, she conceived with the permission of Almighty God, Who says to something: ‘Be’ and it is. When the months of her pregnancy had been completed, she gave birth to a boy as beautiful as the moon who was given the name Ardashir. He grew up studying science and literature until he reached the age of fifteen.

In Iraq there was a king called ‘Abd al-Qadir who had a daughter as beautiful as the full moon when it rises, named Hayat al-Nufus. This girl had such a hatred of men that no one could mention them in her presence and, although sovereign kings had asked her father for her hand in marriage, when one of them approached her, she would always say: ‘I shall never marry and if you force me to do that, I shall kill myself.’ Prince Ardashir heard about her and told his father that he would like to marry her. The king was sympathetic when he saw that his son was in love, and every day he would promise to get Hayat al-Nufus for him as a wife. He sent his vizier off to ask her father for her hand, but the request was refused. When the vizier got back and told his master of his failure, the latter was furiously angry and exclaimed: ‘Does someone in my position send a request to a king to have it refused?’ He ordered a herald to proclaim that his troops were to bring out their tents and equip themselves as best they could, even if they had to borrow the money for their expenses. ‘I shall not draw back,’ he said, ‘until I have ravaged the lands of King ‘Abd al-Qadir, killed his men, removed all traces of him and plundered his wealth.’

When Ardashir came to hear of this, he rose from his bed and went to his father. After kissing the ground before him, he said: ‘Great king, do not put yourself to any trouble over this…’

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the seven hundred and twentieth night, SHE CONTINUED:

I have heard, O fortunate king, that when Ardashir came to hear of this, he went to his father, kissed the ground before him and said: ‘Great king, do not put yourself to any trouble over this by sending out these champions and this army and spending your money. You are stronger than ‘Abd al-Qadir and, if you send this army of yours against him, you will certainly be able to ravage his lands, kill his fighters and seize his wealth. He himself will be killed and when his daughter hears that she is responsible for his death and the deaths of his men, she will kill herself and because of her I shall die, as I could not live on after her.’ ‘What do you advise, then, my son?’ his father asked, and Ardashir told him: ‘I shall set out myself on my own errand. I shall dress as a merchant and find some way of reaching the princess, after which I shall look to see how I can get what I want.’ ‘Is this what you choose?’ asked the king, and when Ardashir said that it was, the king summoned his vizier and said: ‘Go with my son, the fruit of my heart; help him in his quest; protect him and use your sound judgement to guide him.’ He then gave Ardashir three hundred thousand gold dinars, gems, ring stones and jewellery, as well as other goods, treasures and the like.

Ardashir went to his mother, kissed her hands and asked for her blessing, which she gave him. She then got up quickly and opened her treasure chests, from which she produced for him valuables such as necklaces, jewellery, robes and rarities, together with all kinds of other things, including relics of former kings that had been stored away and were past all price. The prince then took with him such mamluks, servants and beasts as would be needed on the journey and elsewhere, and he and the vizier, together with their companions, dressed as merchants.

When he had taken leave of his parents, his family and his relations, he and his party set out across the desert wastes, travelling night and day. Finding the way long, he recited the following lines:

My passionate longing and lovesickness increase;

There is none to help me against the injuries of Time.

I watch the Pleiades and Arcturus when they rise,

As though in the fervour of my love I worshipped them.

I look for the morning star, and when it comes

I am stirred by passion and my ardour grows.

I swear that I have never changed your love for hate,

And that I am a lover who is left without sleep.

Matching the greatness of my hopes is my increasing weakness;

You have gone, and I have small endurance and few helpers.

But still I shall endure until God reunites us,

To the chagrin of all my envious foes.

When he finished his recitation he swooned away for a time and the vizier sprinkled him with rosewater. ‘Be patient, prince,’ he told him on his recovery, ‘for with patience comes relief, and here you are on your way to what you desire.’ The vizier continued to soothe and console him until he regained his composure, and he and his companions pressed on with their journey. Again, however, disheartened by its length, he thought of his beloved and recited:

She has long been absent; my cares and my distress increase;

My heart’s blood is aflame with fires of love.

The passion that afflicts me has made my hair turn white,

And tears pour from my eyes.

You are my desire, the goal of all my hopes;

I swear by the Creator, Who fashioned branch and leaf,

I have endured for you, who are my hope,

Such passion as no other lover could endure.

Ask the night to let you know of me,

Whether through all its length my eyelids ever closed.

When he finished his recitation he wept bitterly and complained of the violence of his passion, and again the vizier soothed and consoled him, promising him that he would win through to his goal.

After a few more days of travelling, they came after sunrise within sight of the White City and the vizier told the prince: ‘Good news, prince. Look, for this is the city that you have been making for.’ In his delight the prince recited:

My two companions, I am a lover sick with passion;

The ardour of my love is always with me.

I moan like a parent who has lost a child, sleepless through grief.

In the dark of night there is none who may pity my love.

The winds that blow here from your land

Bring coolness to my heart.

The tears shed by my eyes are like rain clouds,

And, in their sea, my heart is left to float.

The prince and the vizier then entered the city and asked where wealthy merchants stayed. They were directed to a khan where they took lodgings and in which they hired three storerooms. When they had been given the keys, they opened these up and stored their goods and possessions in them, after which they rested. The vizier, who had begun to consider how the prince might set about his quest…

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Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the seven hundred and twenty-first night, SHE CONTINUED:

I have heard, O fortunate king, that the prince and the vizier stopped at the khan, put their goods in the storerooms and lodged their servants there. They stayed until they were rested, after which the vizier, who had begun to consider how the prince might set about his quest, then said to him: ‘Something has occurred to me which, I think, may serve your purpose, if Almighty God wills it.’ ‘Your counsel is always good,’ the prince told him, ‘so do whatever comes to your mind, may God guide you.’ The vizier explained: ‘I propose to hire a shop for you in the drapers’ market, in which you can sit. Everyone, high and low alike, finds the need to go to the market and I think that, if people see you sitting in your shop, they will be drawn towards you and this will help you to get what you want. For you are a handsome young man and your good looks will serve as an attraction.’ ‘Do whatever you want,’ the prince told him.

The vizier got up immediately and put on his most splendid clothes, as did the prince, and he put a purse containing a thousand dinars in his pocket. The two of them went out, and the people who looked at them as they walked around the city were astonished by the good looks of the prince, exclaiming: ‘Praise be to God, Who created this young man from “a despicable drop”.* Blessed be God, the best of creators’.† There was a great deal of talk about him, some quoting from the Quran: ‘This is no mortal man but a noble angel,’‡ while others were asking: ‘Has Ridwan, the guardian of Paradise, let him out of its gate by mistake?’ People followed the two to the drapers’ market, which they entered and then stopped. A venerable and dignified shaikh came up and, after they had exchanged greetings, he asked if there was anything they wanted so that he might have the honour of satisfying their needs. The vizier asked him who he was, to which he replied that he was the market superintendent. The vizier then said: ‘Shaikh, you must know that this young man is my son and I want to take a shop for him in this market so that he may sit here and learn the techniques of trading and how to behave as a merchant.’ ‘To hear is to obey,’ the superintendent said, and there and then he produced the key of a shop and ordered the salesmen to sweep it out, which they did.

When it had been cleaned, the vizier sent for a high cushioned seat stuffed with ostrich feathers on which was placed a small prayer mat and whose borders were embroidered with red gold. He also had a cushion fetched, before bringing in as much of the materials that they had taken with them as would fill the shop.

The next day, the young prince came to open the shop. He sat down on the seat with two splendidly dressed mamluks standing before him, while two handsome Abyssinian slaves stood at the lower end. The vizier advised him that, to help him achieve his goal, he should keep his secret from the townspeople, and after telling him to let him know day by day everything that happened to him in the shop, the vizier went off and left him sitting there like the moon when it is full. News of the prince’s beauty spread, and people would come to him in the market without wanting to buy anything but merely to admire his grace and his symmetrical form, praising Almighty God for the excellence of His creation. Such were the crowds that it became impossible for anyone to pass through the market, while the prince himself was taken aback by his admirers and kept looking from right to left, hoping to make the acquaintance of someone with a connection to the court who might be able to tell him about the princess.

He became depressed by his failure to do this, although every day the vizier encouraged him to hope for success. When this had been going on for a long time, one day as he was sitting there, a respectable, dignified and sedate old woman arrived, dressed as a person of piety and followed by two slave girls, beautiful as moons. She stopped by the shop and, after having looked at the prince for some time, she exclaimed: ‘Praise be to God, Who has perfected the creation of that face!’ She then greeted him, and when he had returned her greeting, he gave her a seat beside him. ‘From what land do you come, you handsome man?’ she asked, and he replied: ‘From Indian parts, mother, and I am here to look around the city.’ ‘You are an honoured visitor,’ she told him, before going on to ask what goods and materials he had and asking him to show her something beautiful that would be suitable for royalty. ‘If it is something beautiful that you want to be shown,’ the prince said, ‘I have things to suit all customers.’ ‘My son,’ she told him, ‘I want something expensive and elegant, the finest that you have.’ He said: ‘You will have to tell me for whom you want the goods so that I can show you something to match the client.’ ‘That is true,’ she agreed, and she went on to tell him that she wanted something for her mistress, the princess Hayat al-Nufus, daughter of ‘Abd al-Qadir, the ruler of the country. On hearing this, the prince was wild with joy and his heart fluttered. He gave no instructions to his mamluks or his slaves, but reaching behind his back he brought out a purse containing a hundred dinars, which he passed to the old woman, saying: ‘This is to pay for your laundry.’ Then from a bundle he drew out a dress worth ten thousand dinars or more and said: ‘This is one of the things that I have brought to your country.’ The old woman looked admiringly at it and asked: ‘How much is this, you master of perfection?’ ‘I make no charge for it,’ he said, and she thanked him before repeating the question. He insisted: ‘By God, I shall take nothing for it. If the princess will not accept it, you can have it as a gift from me. I thank God, Who has brought us together, and if some day I happen to need something, I may find in you someone to help me get it.’

The old woman admired his eloquence, generosity and good manners. She asked him his name, and when he told her that it was Ardashir, she exclaimed: ‘By God, this is a remarkable name, and one that is given to princes, although you yourself are dressed as a merchant’s son!’ He said: ‘It was because of my father’s love for me that he gave me this name,