The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition) (3 page)

What makes a coherent reading or translation of such a text possible is an eye familiar with Arabic prose and an ear attuned to the rhythm of the spoken language, ideally the eye and ear of someone who reads, writes, and speaks Arabic like a native. It is a wonder, therefore, that foreign translators, like Lane, Payne, and Burton, made so few mistakes, yet no wonder that they made them. In diction, for instance, when they met words they could not understand, they often dropped them from their text. In grammar, a misreading, for instance, of the conjugation of the verb “to overtake,” which also means “to realize,” leads Burton to translate the refrain “But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence,” as “And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.” This example would seem innocuous enough were it not that it is repeated one thousand times and were it not that it spoils the dramatic poignancy of the situation, when the morning, the hour of her execution, finally catches up with Shahrazad. In syntax, reordering the clauses for a coherent reading often requires knowledge of Arab life and culture. For example, the following passage, translated literally, reads:

After a while, our mother also died, and left us three thousand dinars, which we divided equally among ourselves. I was the youngest. My two sisters prepared their dowries and got married.

Burton translates it as follows:

After a while my mother also deceased, leaving me and my sisters-german three thousand dinars; so each daughter received her portion of a thousand dinars and I the same, albe' the youngest. In due course of time, my sisters married with the usual festivities.

But it should read:

After a while, our mother also died, leaving us three thousand dinars, which we divided equally among ourselves. Since I was the youngest of the three, my two sisters prepared their dowries and got married before me.

For what is at issue here is not the Islamic law of inheritance but marriage customs in Arab society.

Moreover, the problem for the translators was compounded in that, as often as not, a given passage had already been altered by the editor of a manuscript or a printed edition or by both. For the tales, for all their popularity among the people, were regarded with condescension and contempt by the Arab literati of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These included the editors themselves, self-appointed men of taste and judgment, who, trained during the period of the decline of Arabic literature, had little judgment and no taste. They regarded these folk tales as entertaining in substance but vulgar in style, and they undertook to improve them according to their own light.

Their method was to condense, amplify, or alter. They took a given passage, summarized it, and recast it in correct, polite, or literary Arabic, often sacrificing vivid details vital to the art of the story-teller for empty academic phrases or poetic diction. For instance, “The Story of the Hunchback” opens with this passage:

It is related, O King, that there lived once in China a tailor who had a pretty, compatible, and loyal wife. It happened one day that they went out for a stroll to enjoy the sights at a place of entertainment, where they spent the whole day in diversions and fun, and when they returned home at the end of the day, they met on the way a jolly hunchback. He was smartly dressed in a folded inner robe and an open outer robe, with gathered sleeves and an embroidered collarband, in the Egyptian style, and sporting a scarf and a tall green hat, with knots of yellow silk stuffed with ambergris. The hunchback was short, like him of whom the poet 'Antar said:

Lovely the hunchback who can hide his hump,

Like a pearl hidden in an oyster shell,

A man who looks like a castor oil branch,

From which dangles a rotten citric lump.

He was busy playing on the tambourine, singing, and improvising all kinds of funny gestures. When they drew near and looked at him, they saw that he was drunk, reeking of wine. Then he placed the tambourine under his arm and began to beat time by clapping his hands, as he sang the following verses:

Go early to the darling in yon jug;

Bring her to me,

And fete her as you fete a pretty girl,

With joy and glee,

And make her as pure as a virgin bride,

Unveiled to please,

That I may honor my friend with a cup

Of wine from Greece.

If you, my friend, care for the best in life,

Life can repay,

Then at this moment fill my empty cup,

Without delay.

Don't you, my tantalizer, on the plain

The gardens see?

. . . [W]hen the tailor and his wife saw the hunchback in this condition, drunk and reeking of wine, now singing, now beating the tambourine, they were delighted with him and invited him home to sup and drink with them that night. He accepted gladly and walked with them to their home.

I have deliberately chosen this lengthy passage in order to show how drastically the Egyptian editor reduces and excises (in this case two entire poems) and to show the extent of the substance and flavor the reader misses as a result. Payne's translation is accurate, but he uses the edited version, and so he reads:

There lived once in the city of Bassora a tailor, who was open-handed and loved pleasure and merrymaking: and he was wont, he and his wife, to go out by times, a-pleasuring, to the public places of recreation. One day they went out as usual and were returning home in the evening, when they fell in with a hunchback, the sight of whom would make the disappointed laugh and dispel chagrin from the sorrowful. So they went up to look at him and invited him to go home and make merry with them that night. He consented and accompanied them to their house.

Or else the editors altered some details and thereby showed insensitivity to psychological subtlety or dramatic nuance. In “The Story of the Slave-Girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din ibn-Khaqan,” the passage in which the caliph throws off his disguise reads:

I heard, O happy King, that the old man went into a storeroom to fetch a stick with which to beat the fisherman, who was the caliph, while the caliph cried out from the window, “Help, help!” and was at once joined by Ja'far and the officers, who dressed him in his royal suit, seated him on a chair, and stood in attendance. When the old man came out of the storeroom with the stick, rushing toward the fisherman, he was stunned to see instead the caliph seated on a chair and Ja'far standing in attendance. He began to bite his nails in bewilderment and to exclaim, “Am I asleep or awake?” The caliph turned to him and said, “O Shaikh Ibrahim, what state do I see you in?” The old man became sober at once and, rolling on the ground, recited the following verses.

The Egyptian editor alters the passage to read, again in Payne's translation:

When the Khalif heard this, he cried out at him and made a sign to Mesrour, who discovered himself and rushed upon him. Now Jaafer had sent one of the gardeners to the doorkeeper of the palace for a suit of the royal raiment for the Commander of the Faithful; so he went and returning with the suit, kissed the earth before the Khalif and gave it to him. Then he threw off the clothes he had on and dressed himself in those which the gardener had brought, to the great amazement of Gaffer Ibrahim, who bit his nails in bewilderment and exclaimed, ‘Am I asleep or awake?' ‘O Gaffer Ibrahim,' said the Khalif, ‘what state is this in which I see thee?' With this, he recovered from his. drunkenness and throwing himself on the ground, repeated the following verses:

Or they inserted some details, often exaggerating action, description, or emotion and thereby weakening the literary effect. Again in a passage in “Anis al-Jalis,” for instance, the added details change the delicate humor of high comedy to the coarse humor of low comedy. After the caliph exchanges his clothes with the fisherman, he takes the salmon and returns to the garden in disguise to surprise Ja'far, who has been waiting for him there. But the Egyptian editor inserts the following passage, which reads, this time in Burton's translation:

Hardly had the fisherman ended his verse, when the lice began to crawl over the Caliph's skin, and he fell to catching them on his neck with his right and left throwing them from him, while he cried, ‘O fisherman, woe to thee! What be this abundance of lice on thy gaberdine? ‘O my lord,' replied he, ‘They may annoy thee just at first, but before a week is past thou wilt not feel them nor think of them'. The Caliph laughed and said to him, ‘Out on thee! Shall I leave this gaberdine of thine so long on my body?' Quoth the fisherman, ‘I would say a word to thee but I am ashamed in presence of the Caliph!' and quoth he. ‘Say what thou hast to say'. ‘It passed through my thought, O Commander of the Faithful', said the fisherman, ‘that since thou wishest to learn fishing so thou mayest have in hand an honest trade whereby to gain thy livelihood, this my gaberdine besitteth thee right well.' The Commander of the Faithful laughed at this speech, and the fisherman went his way.

Thus the translators, by adhering to such sources, deviate not only from the letter but also from the spirit of the original, particularly since the letter and the spirit are often inextricable. But such adherence is not the only cause of their violation of the spirit; another and more fundamental cause lay in their respective views of the work itself, their objectives in translating it, and their strategies and styles, all of which may be explained by the fact that they simply failed to see that fidelity to the precise detail was crucial to achieve the essential quality of the
Nights
, by bridging the gap between the natural and the supernatural.

From Galland to Burton, translators, scholars, and readers shared the belief that the
Nights
depicted a true picture of Arab life and culture at the time of the tales and, for some strange reason, at their own time. Time and again, Galland, Lane, or Burton claimed that these tales were much more accurate than any travel account and took pains to translate them as such. For this purpose, each of them adopts a specific strategy, depending on his other intentions. Lane translates the work as a travel guide to Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. In order to substantiate this claim, he adds compendious notes intended to explain a given passage and to introduce the reader to various aspects of Arab culture, such as social customs, mythology, religion, and ethics, without asking himself whether such substantiation would be necessary if the claims were true. Consequently, he proceeds to depict this life in an accessibly plain style, much more faithful to the conversational style of the original than, say, the style of Burton. But instead of being faithful to the life depicted in the tales, Lane omits sometimes a few details, sometimes whole passages, curiously because he finds them inconsistent with his own observations of life in Cairo. For instance, he omits the details of the drinking scene in “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” because he has never seen Cairene ladies drink, but, to make sure that the reader is properly informed, he appends a twenty-page footnote dealing with drinking habits among the Arabs. Then he goes on to explain that such passages, like the one he has omitted, “seem as if they were introduced for the gratification of the lowest class of auditors of a public reciter of a coffee-shop. These passages exhibit to us persons of high rank, both men and women, as characterized by a grossness which is certainly not uncommon among Arabs of the inferior classes” (ch. 10, n. 87). He also omits the verse passages, except for a token line here and there, because he finds them to be for the most part either worthless or obscure, and because in truth they do not suit his sociological purpose. He is an orientalist or a sociologist, rather than a storyteller.

If Lane attempts to guide the prudish Victorian reader through Cairo by introducing him to a higher class of Egyptian society, Burton attempts to bring Cairo, in all its color, to England. But unlike Lane, who is interested in what he considers to be typical manifestations of Arab culture, Burton is interested in the exotic, the quaint, and the colorful. He too appends copious notes, but these are meant to appeal to Victorian prurience or to shock prudish sensibility. Typical is the note on the passage in the “Prologue,” in which Shahrayar's wife lies on her back and invites the black slave Mas'ud to make love to her while ten other black slaves are busy making love to ten of her female attendants; Burton explains the white woman's predilection for black men by expatiating on the efficacy of the enormous male organs in Zanzibar, promising the reader to regale him on the retention of the semen, in due course.

Burton declares in the introduction that his purpose is to produce a “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original.” That original, as I have mentioned earlier, uses a style that modulates between the colloquial and the literary. The literary is marked by metaphors and similes, formulaic epithets, parallelisms, and rhymed prose, and Burton literally preserves all this, including the jingling rhymes, merrily telling the reader that he has “carefully Englished the picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness.” And outlandish, indeed grotesque, they appear, both to English and to Arabic eyes. Having gone so far, Burton is unable to retrench in his rendering of the colloquial passages; therefore, he renders them in a pseudo-archaic style dear to the heart of many a Victorian translator, a style that is totally alien both to the style of the Arabic original and to any recognizable style in English literature. One may suppose that Burton follows a general Victorian tendency to archaize and make more colorful the “rude” works of primitive times and places; and subsequently one may trace the same tendency in the style of Payne's translation of the
Nights
, in which Burton detects and admires a “sub-flavor of the Mabinogianic archaism.” But even a cursory comparison easily shows that the style of Payne's translation, which was unfortunately published in a limited edition of five hundred copies and was therefore unavailable to the general reader, is by far more successful than Burton's in reproducing both the letter and the spirit of the original. But what is more to the point here is that a careful and thorough comparison between Burton and Payne explains another reason for Burton's choice of style. He himself admits in the introduction that Payne “uses the exact vernacular equivalent of the foreign word so happily and so picturesquely that all future translations must perforce use the same expression.” Burton consistently follows Payne's translation, copying it almost verbatim but adding his own sauce and spices.