The Arabian Nights Tales of 1001 Nights

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

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Translation of Nights 1 to 294, Note on the Translation and Note on the Text
copyright © Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008
Translation of ‘The story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves killed by a slave girl’ and ‘Translating Galland’
copyright © Ursula Lyons, 2008
Introduction, Glossary, Further Reading and Chronology copyright © Robert Irwin, 2008

Text illustrations design by Coralie Bickford-Smith; images: Gianni Dagli Orti/Museo Correr,
Venice/The Art Archive

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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.

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.

The story collection of The Arabian Nights has drawn on many cultures and sources – Indian, Persian, Greek. One of its parallel sources, which drew on the same ancient Indian materials, is a Sanskrit text known as the Kathasaritsagara, or ‘The Ocean of the Streams of Story’, compiled by the eleventh-century author Somadeva. The Arabian Nights is, like the Kathasaritsagara, a vast storytelling ocean in which the readers can lose themselves. One story, like a wave, is absorbed into the one that follows. The drift of the narrative tides carries us, like Sindbad, to strange places, and the further from home, the stranger those places are. Within the stories themselves, the sea operates as the agent of destiny which carries ships, men and magically sealed bottles and casts them upon unexpected shores: the Island of Waq-Waq where the women grow from trees, the island of the Magnetic Mountain presided over by its talismanic statue, the Black Islands of the Ensorcelled Prince and the islands of China. The tides are unpredictable, and men’s fortunes founder and are wrecked upon the sea of destiny.

The vastness and complexity of the Nights is mesmerizing. In her story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994), A. S. Byatt has written:

What delights above all in the Arabian Nights is its form. Story is embedded in story, story sprouts out of the midst of story, like the Surinam toads out of the back of their mother toad, which Coleridge used as a metaphor for his unruly imagination. The collection resembles both a group of Russian dolls, formally similar, faces and colours different, and a maze or spider-web with threads and passages leading in all directions, both formless and orderly at once.

Plot motifs within the Nights combine and recombine: the ageing and childless couple who, having prayed for a son, find that their wish is granted; the merchant who sits minding his business when a veiled woman enters his shop and summons him to follow her; the man who is told that he may explore every room in the palace save only one room, which is locked; the squandering of his deceased father’s fortune by a feckless youth; the fisherman who casts his net upon the waters but at first has no luck; the young man who is smuggled into the caliph’s harem; the curiously assembled queue of people each of whom swears that he or she can tell a tale yet more remarkable than the one they have just heard. The stories are full of echoes and half echoes of one another, like recurrent dreams in which the landscape is thoroughly familiar, though what is to come is utterly unpredictable. The stories’ devices are recombined, inverted or truncated in what comes to seem like a complete spectrum of storytelling possibilities.

Those Surinam toads… one story frames another, which in turn contains yet another within it, and so on and so on. The French refer to this sort of framing procedure as the mise en abîme, the thrust into the abyss. Shahrazad, talking in an attempt to save her life, tells the tale of the hunchback, and that includes the tale of the tailor, and the tailor tells the tale of the barber, and the barber tells his own tale, and within that are the tales of his various unlucky brothers. Such a Chinese-box structure as an organizing device in fiction has its counterpart in real life, wherein we are all of us the stories we carry within us, but that master story contains also the stories of our family and friends, and perhaps the newsagent and the postman, and perhaps what the postman told you about his brother and the story the brother was told by a tourist he met in Italy, and so on. To look at it from the opposite direction, each of us embodies a life story and our stories get inserted into the overarching master stories of other people we know – just as, without having any choice in the matter, we may appear in the dreams of people we know.

Shahrazad tells stories in order to postpone her death. But death, ‘the destroyer of delights’, is implicitly or explicitly the terminator of all the stories she tells and, in this sense, whether a prince marries a princess or a poor fisherman wins his just reward from the caliph, all stories will end unhappily if carried through to their inevitable conclusion. The Angel of Death, a protagonist in several stories, is unfailingly intransigent. The calender dervishes, whom Shahrazad has relating the stories of their adventures, are nothing other than the stories that they tell about themselves. The same is true of Sindbad, and of the sequence of people that manhandled the corpse of the hunchback from place to place and then, in order to save themselves from being executed for the hunchback’s murder, tell the stories of their strange adventures. As in medieval fiction, so, in real life, we are the stories we tell about ourselves. And our tales are told in order to postpone the coming of ‘the destroyer of all delights’.

The stories that Shahrazad relates in order to delay her execution are told at night, and they cease abruptly when dawn breaks. Stories are best told at night. Since listening to stories in Arab society was regarded as less sinful after the day’s work was done, stories were known as asmar, ‘things of the evening’ or ‘tales related in the night for amusement’. Stories told at night often feature adventures that take place at night: the caliph Harun al-Rashid disguises himself and wanders the streets of Baghdad at night; the singing girls entertain the caliph’s courtiers at night; lovers’ assignations happen at night; so does housebreaking, and the thief was known as the Sahib al-Layl, or ‘Master of the Night’. In the darkness it is easy to get lost in the warren of streets in Baghdad or Cairo and so find oneself in an alleyway one has never set foot in before, and in that alleyway there is a house where the lights are still on and something strange is about to happen. The jinn are on the move when darkness falls.

The night cloaks many mysteries. The Arabic for ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ is sirr, but sirr is one those numerous Arabic words which also comprehends its opposite meaning, so that sirr also means ‘a thing that is revealed, appears or made manifest’. Many stories open strangely and they will only close when that strangeness is resolved and the truth ‘appears or is made manifest’. One night the caliph Harun ventures out in disguise and hires a boat on the Tigris. Only a little time passes before a torch-lit barge approaches and on it Harun sees a man enthroned and robed as the caliph and waited upon by servants and courtiers in the robes of the caliph’s court… Or consider the tale in which, once again, Harun ventures out in disguise and makes his way to the Tigris, where he encounters a fisherman who is pulling a large box out of the water. The box contains the body of a mutilated woman. Harun tells his vizier Ja‘far that the crime must be solved in three days or his life will be forfeit… Much stranger yet is the adventure of Judar who used to fish on Lake Qarun. One day he is approached by a Maghribi – that is, a North African – who asks Judar to tie his hands behind his back and throw him into the lake. If the Maghribi drowns, Judar is to go to a certain Jew and give him the Maghribi’s mule and saddlebag, for which he will receive one hundred dinars… ‘These are mysteries that are worthy to be graven on the corner of an eye with a needle.’ For some readers the atmosphere of deep mystery in such Nights stories may summon memories of the similarly atmospheric and mystifying openings of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle or G. K. Chesterton.

Then consider the case of the multi-coloured fish caught in the net of a poor fisherman which he then presents to the king and for which he is well rewarded. These fish are sent down to the royal kitchens, where they are scaled and put in a frying pan with oil. They are fried on one side and then turned over. Whereupon a beautiful maiden, her eyes darkened with kohl, bursts through the wall of the kitchen and, having stuck her wand in the frying pan, addresses the fish: ‘Fish, are you faithful to the covenant?’ The cook faints, but the frying fish raise their heads and reply: ‘Yes, yes. If you return, we return; if you keep faith, then so do we…’ What is the meaning of this? There is no answer. Some of the mysteries of The Arabian Nights are destined never to be solved.

The mystery of the locked room is particularly important. Within the Nights there are many locked rooms that should not be entered. Just one will serve as an example here. After the third dervish has departed from the palace of the ten one-eyed men, he follows their guidance and comes to a palace inhabited by forty moon-faced, amorous young women. After a year at the palace sleeping with different girls, he is woken by the wailing of the women. They tell him they must be away on business for forty days. He has very nearly the free run of the palace and he can go into every room except the fortieth, which on no account must he enter. And then the women ride off. What now? As the reader, one does not want the dervish to enter that last room, because there is obviously something evil or dangerous in it; one wants him to carry on dallying with the moon-faced women for ever. But at the same time the reader wants the dervish to enter the forbidden chamber, because the reader is, like the dervish, curious and wishes to know what is within it. Besides, unless the dervish crosses the forbidden threshold, there will be no more story. The third dervish’s dilemma is the same as that of Peter Rabbit, whose mother tells him: ‘Whatever you do, do not go into Mr McGregor’s garden.’ The reader both wants and does not want to see the rabbit venture into the garden. A horrible tension has been set up.

In the event, on the fortieth day, the dervish, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, enters the fortieth chamber, where he finds a horse waiting, saddled and bridled. He mounts the horse and whips it into action. The magic horse flies him to the roof of another palace and, as the dervish dismounts, the horse lashes out with its tail, striking out his right eye. The dervish finds that he has been brought back to the palace of the ten one-eyed men. His story has been a warning to the curious. It is as if the storyteller is teasing the audience, saying to them: ‘Beware. You should not be listening to my stories.’ Also, perhaps, the interdiction ‘Whatever you do, do not do this’ acts as a kind of dam, slowing the narrative stream of the plot. It holds the story back for a while, but, when the narrative flow breaks through, it does so with redoubled force.

The stories of the Nights are suffused by sex. Their protagonists languish and faint from excess of desire. They waste away from love, and they improvise verses to celebrate their melancholy passions. All the emotions are heightened. Those who listen to poems or to music on the lute are liable to tear their robes in ecstasy; a good joke may cause the caliph to fall over with laughter. The stories are full of competing eloquences, as men and women debate before caliphs or jinn and engage in a rhetoric of persuasion that draws on stories, maxims and pious examples. Envy is one of the powerful passions to fuel the plotting of the stories, and the eye of envy seeks out the beautiful child or the magic key to wealth. The storytellers have a ruthlessly mocking attitude towards mutilation and misfortune. The streets of Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus teem with one-eyed, one-handed men and hunchbacks, and each mutilation or deformity has its own story. People hunger for justice, even if that justice may be summary and arbitrary. When they bring their story and complaint before the caliph, they cannot know whether the end of it will be a purse of gold or being thrust down on to the executioner’s leather mat to be beheaded. Though religious belief and practice are rarely the subject of the stories, invocations to God – ‘In the Name of God’, ‘Praise be to God’, ‘I take refuge in God’, ‘From God we come and to Him do we return’ – come as easily to the Muslims in the street as breathing. However, it is fate, not God, which governs their destinies.

There are many stories about richly apparelled and libidinous princes and princesses and their hunting, feasting and music making, designed, in part, to stir up envy. But one should not ignore the fact there are other stories in the Nights which suggest that there is a mystical meaning to the way the world works and which call their audience to repentance. There are tales in praise of hermits and renunciation of the pleasures of the world. There are also stories of virtuous deeds done by stealth and tales of divine favour. In one lengthy story, a small encyclopedia in its own right, the slave girl Tawaddud lectures her audience on the Quran, traditions concerning the Prophet, Islamic law and other edifying matters. In the story of Buluqiya, we are introduced to the fantastic structures of Islamic cosmology: the cosmic mountain, Qaf, at the end of the world; the archangels that preside over the procession of night and day, earthquakes, famine and prosperity; the angel who carries the seven worlds and who stands on a bull who stands on a fish who swims in the sea of infinity.

Although it is missing at the beginning of the Arabic text from which this translation has been made, the manuscript from which Antoine Galland made his translation opens with an address to the reader. The first part runs:

Praise be to God, the Beneficent King, the creator of the world and man, who raised the heavens without pillars and spread out the earth as a place of rest and erected the mountains as props and made the water flow from the hard rock and destroyed the race of Thamud, ‘Ad and Pharaoh of the vast domain…

Thamud was the name of a pagan people who dwelt in north-western Arabia and rejected the call of Allah’s prophet Salih to repent and turn to monotheism, and who were consequently destroyed in an earthquake. The ‘Ad were an ancient and arrogant tribe that dwelt among the sand dunes. Their fate is recounted in the Nights in the tale of Iram, ‘City of the Columns’. Their ruler, Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, ordered the building of a city in imitation of Paradise. Its building took three hundred years, but no sooner was it completed than God destroyed it with a rushing single wind, the ‘Cry of Wrath’. Centuries later, a certain ‘Abd Allah ibn Abi Qilaba stumbled across its ruins. Pharaoh appears in the Bible and in the Quran as the ruler who, having rejected Moses’ mission, was punished together with his people. The reader was expected to take warning from such stories: power and wealth are transitory and all things perish before the face of God.

The storytellers of the Nights and their audiences lived in the vicinity of ruins. Tales were told in the shadows of Tadmur, Petra, Ikhmim, Luxor and Giza. In the story of al-Ma’mun and the Pyramids of Egypt, the ‘Abbasid caliph orders his workmen to break into a Pyramid, but after an awful lot of digging he discovers a cache of money that is exactly equivalent to the amount that he has expended in digging towards it. In the story of the City of Brass, the Umaiyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik commissions an expedition to North Africa to seek out one of the stoppered vases that were reputed to contain the jinn imprisoned by Solomon centuries earlier. The expedition led by the emir Musa sets off into the desert, but loses its way for a year before entering the ancient lands of Alexander and, after several strange encounters, they arrive at the City of Brass. After reciting verses from the Quran, Musa’s party enters the city only to find that it is populated by the dead, while at the heart of the labyrinth that is the royal palace they find the mummified corpse of the queen to whom the deceptive semblance of life has been given by quicksilver in her eyeballs. This was once the city of Qush, son of Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, and all its wealth could not save it when God declared its doom. So take warning from that. Inside the City of Brass the expedition finds a gold tablet with the following inscription: ‘Where are the kings of China, the masters of might and power? Where is ‘Ad, son of Shaddad,^* and the buildings he raised up? Where is Nimrod, the mighty tyrant?’ The dead and their ruined habitations are present in the world of the living to guide men to repentance.

At a more mundane level, the stories of Nights carry warnings against dissemblers, charlatans, tricksters and adulterers. They give lessons on how to detect cheats, deal with gate-crashers and how to avoid the wiles of women. The cunning of women is not the least of the many marvels of the Nights, and many of the stories that are superficially about sex are more profoundly about cunning and the celebration of cunning. As the opening address of the Galland manuscript has it: ‘This book, which I have called The Thousand and One Nights, abounds also with splendid biographies that teach the reader to detect deception and to protect himself from it…’ The importance of not being cheated loomed large in the minds of the shopkeepers of Cairo and Damascus and the frequenters of the coffee houses who were the primary audience of the Nights.

Let us return to the merchant who sits minding his business when a veiled woman enters his shop and summons him to follow her. He is a man who has been waiting for a story to happen to him. The Arabian Nights should be understood as the collective dreaming of commercial folk in the great cities of the medieval Arab world. It seems clear from the marginal jottings made on manuscripts of the Nights that have survived that most of their borrowers and readers were shopkeepers and other people engaged in trade in the big cities – Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Cairo and Damascus. It is not surprising that there are as many merchants and sons of merchants in these stories as there are princes and princesses. Money, debts and loans play a much larger part here than they do in European fairy stories. A number of tales celebrate the entrepreneurial and innovative qualities of the Muslims. And, despite the impression given by Hollywood films, Sindbad was not a sailor but a merchant.

At times, the stories go into some detail about commercial transactions. There is, for example, the Christian broker’s tale, in which the Christian trading in Cairo is offered by a young man the brokerage on a large quantity of sesame at the rate of one ardabb for a hundred dirhams, but before going round to collect it from the Khan al-Jawali (a warehouse and hostel for visiting merchants), he checks the going rate for sesame with other buyers and finds it to be a hundred and twenty dirhams for a single ardabb. He is then offered a brokerage commission of ten dirhams on every ardabb, from a total of fifty ardabbs of sesame that he will be handling for the young man. The details of this mundane transaction serve as the frame for the young man’s tale of sexual ensnarement, financial ruin and mutilation.

Some stories pander to the tradesmen’s fascination with commodities. Consider the porter of Baghdad who is hired by a dark-eyed young woman to load his basket with the things that she is going to purchase: first ‘an olive-coloured jar of strained wine’; then in a fruiterer’s shop ‘where she bought Syrian apples, Uthmani quinces, Omani peaches, jasmine and water lilies from Syria, autumn cucumbers, lemons, sultani oranges, scented myrtle, privet flowers, camomile blossoms, red anemones, violets, pomegranate blooms and eglantine’. The lovingly catalogued shopping spree continues at the butcher’s, the grocer’s, with the sweetmeat seller and the perfume seller. Or consider the shop that ‘Ala’ al-Din Abu’l-Shamat buys and which was ‘furnished with rugs and cushions, and stored there he discovered sails, spars, ropes and chests, together with bags filled with beads, shells, stirrups, axes, maces, knives, scissors and other such things, as the previous owner had been a secondhand dealer’. Among later storytellers perhaps only H. G. Wells, himself the son of a shopkeeper, has given so much prominence to the small shopkeeper in fiction. Wells, and before him the anonymous storytellers of the Nights, celebrated the culture of tradesmen who wish for something better than minding the store and dream of making something of themselves in a world from which routine has been banished.

The stories of the Nights were composed and collected for the entertainment of city dwellers, and the city is the usual setting for those stories. The streets are narrow and the upper storeys often have corbelled and enclosed projecting balconies. High mashrabiyya windows allow the inhabitants to observe the street without being seen. Narrow, densely packed alleyways often end in cul-de-sacs. Parts of the city consisted of harat, or secure quarters, whose gates were closed at night. In the daytime, the streets are crowded. The shopkeepers usually sit on mastabas (stone platforms) at the front of their stores. The mosque is more than a place for prayer; it is where public business is conducted and where travellers, unable to find lodgings elsewhere, sleep (as did the man who became rich again because of a dream). The hammam, or public bath, is usually close to the mosque. Visiting merchants lodge in caravanserais, hotels-cum-warehouses, in which their goods are usually stored on the ground floor while they sleep in the upper galleries. Prosperous domestic houses usually present austere outer façades that belie the wealth and ornamentation to be found within. The more prosperous dwellings are often built around a central courtyard with the reception room on the first floor. The poor sleep in tenement buildings, shanties or holes in the ground.

Less frequently, the adventures of the Nights take place outside the city. The storytellers had only a slight interest in the lives of the fellahin or peasants (though there are a few stories about them). Beyond the walls of the city of the storytellers lay mostly wasteland and desert, populated by huntsmen, woodcutters, bandits and ghuls. The storytellers and their listeners rarely ventured beyond the city and into the desert. It was rarely that they entered a palace, and never its harem; certainly they never visited the Valley of Diamonds or the Island of Waq-Waq with its trees bearing human fruit. The wastelands, as much as the palaces and remote islands, were sites of improbable adventures – places urban shopkeepers and artisans could only dream about.

In ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, the heroine (who is a narratologist)

was accustomed to say in lectures that it was possible that the human need to tell tales about things that were unreal originated in dreams and that memory had certain things in common with dreams; it rearranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling.

Ultimately it is the dream-like quality of The Arabian Nights which appeals. The dream, like Shahrazad, can only continue in existence as long as it tells a story. Once things stop happening in a dream, that dream, perforce, is ended.

The life of the fictional Shahrazad depended on her ability to produce stories night after night, leaving them carefully unfinished at appropriate points so as to be asked to complete them later. In real terms throughout the Arab world, the reciters of such tales were concerned not with life but livelihood, for their audiences had to be encouraged to return, night after night, to attend the performances and reward the performers. As can be seen in the search for a text of the tale of Saif al-Muluk in Volume 3, the stories had manuscript backing, although sadly many of these manuscripts have been destroyed, lost or left unstudied and unedited. Edward Lane noted in his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) how the reciters would allow themselves to take liberties with whatever texts they had to suit the taste of their audience. Successful accretions could be added to the conflated versions, so adding to the repetitions, non sequiturs and confusions that mark the present text. Except where textual justification can be found, no attempt has been made to superimpose on the translation changes that would be needed to ‘rectify’ these. This leaves a representation of what is primarily oral literature, appealing to the ear rather than the eye.

Success for the reciters did not depend merely on creativity, important as this is, but on the introduction of ingredients that their audiences would recognize and find attractive. Tautology, standard phrases and repetition help this process, while colours add to and at times replace imagery – ‘brown’ is applied to a spear, for instance, and ‘white’ to a sword. Such details can be multiplied at will but behind them lie universal questions of narrative technique. Specifically, in The Arabian Nights the structure of the language itself did much to point the way. Arabic, with its infusion of words from surrounding cultures, has a vast vocabulary, providing a range of virtual synonyms and almost unlimited access to rhyme words. Its clauses are characteristically attached rather than subordinated to one another, and sentences resemble an accumulation of wavelets rather than the sound of single breakers. Assonance and rhyme duplicate sounds, and the strength of the linguistic effect these produce derives characteristically from repetition rather than innovation.

In Arabic popular literature, this effect is designed to mesmerize the audience by the use of rhythm and sound, adapted to a pace that is deliberately slow. The hypnotized listeners are not encouraged to look forward or back, but to immerse themselves in the reciter’s present. By contrast, a reader not only can assimilate more words in a given space of time, but he is in control of his own pages and can look wherever he wants. For example, more often than not, characters of the Nights are introduced with their full names and descriptions whenever they occur – A son of B, the king of C, and so on. For identification the reader will find this unnecessary, as, even if he has forgotten to whom a name refers, he can look back and find out. Similarly, one of the main effects of rhymed prose, as well as the introduction of poetry, is not only its direct appeal to the ear but its ability to slow down the pace of the narrative, the opposite of what is attempted here.

The translators Richard Burton and Enno Littmann have shown in their versions of the Nights that it is by no means impossible to reproduce the element of rhyme, but whether this helps to duplicate the mesmeric force of the original is more doubtful, and in the present translation no such attempt has been made. Here the object has been to speed up the pace of the narrative to what is hoped to be more nearly adapted to the eye rather than the ear of the modern reader. In no case has the sense been deliberately falsified, but, where possible, its presentation has been simplified and accelerated. This does not apply to the poetry, which some translators have curtailed, thinking it inessential. It does, however, form so important a part of the reciters’ presentation that it has been included in full, although no attempt has been made to risk further distortion by imposing on the English version rhyme schemes omnipresent in Arabic.

What has been sacrificed is the decorative elaboration of the original, as well as the extra dimension of allusiveness that it provides. In the latter case, it is not merely that one incident will recall another, either within the Nights themselves or, more widely, in the huge corpus of Arabic popular literature, but a single phrase, one description or one line of poetry must have served to call other contexts to the mind of the original audience. To explore these intricacies, however, is the task of a commentary rather than of a translation.

Beneath the elaboration of the text are fundamental patterns of the genre of storytelling. Not only are these responsible for the basic structure of the Nights, but it is they that serve to underline the importance of the work, firstly as an immediate source of popular literature and, more generally, in the universal history of storytelling. It is these patterns that, it is hoped, this translation will help to make more accessible.

In any English version, the transliteration of Arabic names and words presents familiar problems. Here it has been decided not to enter in most cases the diacritical markings that distinguish matching consonants as well as long and short vowels. For Arabists these are unnecessary and for the general reader they may be thought to add confusion rather than clarity. Similarly, on a more restricted point, academic rectitude suggests that in many cases y should be used in place of i, as in the case of Zayd for Zaid, but here i has been preferred throughout as appearing simpler and less exotic.

The purely academic problems connected with the compilation of The Arabian Nights lie outside the scope of this work. It represents accretive literature, changing from place to place and from age to age, and so there can be no ‘perfect’ text. Although it would be possible to produce a conflated version, adding and subtracting from manuscripts and printed texts, here a choice has been made of the Macnaghten text (Calcutta 1839–42 or Calcutta II). This has been translated in full, and to it have been added stories from Galland’s French version. For those interested in individual points, the notes of the translators Edward Lane and Richard Burton, with their wide-ranging experience in this field, are of prime importance. In this translation, notes have been reduced to a minimum and have only been added to help with the reading or, in the case of the Quran, to provide references. In most cases these cover individual points. More generally, entries in the Glossary supply information on characters and terms found throughout the text.

No translator can fail to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to his predecessors, and, in the present case, to contemporary translators of the Nights such as Husain Haddawy. Unfortunately, the recent Pléiade edition of Les Mille et une nuits by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel (2005) came to my attention in time to be admired but too late to be used. Particular use has been made of the excellent German version, Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten, by Enno Littmann (1921–8). Finally, all scholars in this field owe an especial debt to R. Dozy, who used the Nights as one of the sources of his magisterial Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (1877–81), in which almost all its obscure words are explained. In general, the sense of the Arabic is clear, but there are occasions when even Dozy admits that he does not know what a word means, and others in which it is impossible to be certain of what was the original meaning of an idiomatic phrase or term.

My own most grateful thanks are owed to Robert Irwin, the protagonist of this project, who has not only helped with checking the translation, but has added introductions, a glossary and notes of his own. A similar debt of gratitude must happily be acknowledged to Hilary Laurie of Penguin Books, whose friendly skills and editorial encouragement have helped to smooth difficulties at every stage in the work’s production. Unstinted gratitude is also owed to Kate Parker and Caroline Pretty, who have been confronted with the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stable of the text. Finally, my wife Ursula is responsible not only for the translation of Galland’s French but has used her Arabic expertise to add invaluable help to what would otherwise have been an infinitely slower and more tedious task. Quae mihi praestiteris memini.

The translation from the French of two of the best-known tales in the Nights (‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ali Baba’), called ‘orphan stories’ because they were not included among the three manuscripts used by Antoine Galland and because they lacked a surviving text, presents problems of another kind. Both are essentially retold by Galland to suit the audience and society of his time, and consequently the contrast is stark between the Arabic of the Calcutta text and the sophisticated and elegant French of Galland. ‘Aladdin’ was first read by Galland in 1709/10 in an Arabic version written for him by Hanna Diab, and he himself admitted his version was ‘toute différente de ce que lui avait été raconté jusqu’alors’. Galland makes Shahrazad conclude her story by pointing out the moral it contained, and he also added an ending where the king asks Shahrazad if she has finished her story. In his version, Galland’s sultan and courtiers act as though they are at the court of the Sun King, with its etiquette, language and customs. The language of deference is even used by Aladdin’s mother, who, despite her description as a poor woman of humble origins, Galland makes speak in language quite out of character, giving her long monologues containing a complex sentence structure of subordinate clauses when she tries to dissuade her son from daring to seek the hand of the sultan’s daughter in marriage. Moreover, she asks him, anachronistically, what he has done for his sultan (whom she describes as ‘un si grand monarque’) and for his country (‘patrie’) – concepts alien to Nights society – to deserve this. Here the translation remains as faithful as possible to the eighteenth-century French, but it has been necessary to simplify the sentence structure and shorten the sentences. Some of the idioms have had to be altered, together with some of the modes of address (such as mon bonhomme, ma bonne femme), and such concepts as honnêteté, the honnête homme and the beau monde, which all need reinterpreting.

Galland’s version of ‘Ali Baba’ was developed from a summary he entered in his journal and, again, was originally written down in French after he had heard it from Diab. Galland’s treatment here is more straightforward. The story is much shorter and is told in a more direct manner. The action is faster; the dialogue is in keeping with the characters, though he cannot resist making the wily Marjana more representative of a cultivated Frenchwoman, allowing her space in which to describe her actions. Here, interestingly, we find the origin of the phrase ‘Open, Sesame!’ or ‘Sesame, open!’ (or ‘close’), which Galland has translated from the Arabic in which he was told the story as ‘Sésame, ouvre-toi!’ and ‘Sésame, referme-toi!’

As for the proper names in the French versions of ‘Ali Baba’ and ‘Aladdin’, these have been changed to follow the conventions for transliterating Arabic names that are used in the rest of the translation, but without any diacritical marks. (Hence ‘Husain’ is used instead of ‘Houssain’; ‘Qasim’ instead of ‘Cassim’; ‘Badr al-Budur’ instead of ‘Badroulboudour’; and so on.)

To these two tales has been added an alternative ending for ‘The seventh journey of Sindbad’ as it is given in Galland, but which is also found in the translations by Enno Littmann and Edward Lane.