10 - 16 January 2002
Issue No.568
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 10 - 16 January 2002 Issue No.568 |
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Plain talk
The ability of A Thousand and One Nights to endure the test of time, displaying unequalled longevity in its countless guises and ever- changing transformations, is astounding. On Christmas Eve, I recently found out from the London papers, Channel 4 broadcast "The Golden Voyage of Sindbad." A day later, on Boxing Day, BBC 1 showed "Aladdin and the King of Thieves."
Of the many English versions of the book, two translations now gracing the bookshops deserve special mention: Hussain Haddawi's Everyman Library edition, and N J Dawood's Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, a Penguin classic. Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights, a Penguin companion, is similarly worth a lot more than the price on its cover.
In an article published in the Books section of the Independent Review, Irwin marvels at the wonders of this eternal collection of stories, which has inspired pantomime and cinema as well as the famous Sheherezade by Rimsky Korsakov. Like Goha and his anecdotes, the origin of the Nights is an honour claimed by many countries. That they are set in various cities and islands spanning India, China, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt makes it difficult to locate the source of the tales. This is why modern scholars have come to the conclusion that the compendium is a composite work that developed over many centuries, in different parts of the world. They were probably initially transmitted orally, with material added at different times and places.
The book comprises fairy tales, romances, legends, fables, parables and exotic as well as realistic adventure stories. The one story that extends from beginning to end, "containing" all the other stories, concerns King Shahryar who, having discovered that his first wife was unfaithful to him, proceeded to marry a new maiden every day, deflowering and killing her in the morning. When Sheherazade arrives, however, she has an effective trick up her sleeve: every evening she starts telling him a story, stopping before it winds down to a close and promising to finish it the next evening. Thus her life is spared.
Every Ramadan in Egypt, the Nights figure prominently in the media; and the audience never fail to be as enthralled by them as King Shahryar. Whatever the origin of the book, it must be said, it was the Cairo version that was used for English translations. In the period from1838 to 1841, Edward Lane produced an expurgated version translated directly from the Arabic, omitting those episodes and stories that he found improper. Prior to Lane, parts of the book had been translated; but it was not until the first decade of the 19th century that the book started exercising "a strong influence on such diverse writers as Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," as Irwin testifies. In the period from 1885 to 1888, finally, Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer and Arabist, produced an unexpurgated translation from the Arabic "that not only included the bawdy bits omitted by Lane but exaggerated the obscenity of some tales."
When I had a chance to see a Christmas pantomime for the first time, in the company of my little son, in London, I wondered how many of the children present, laughing wildly as they were, realised that the Aladdin now before them came from far-off lands. The pantomimes were a new, burlesque version of the stories, with allusions to contemporary events added. Not so the films, at least not necessarily so: for it is well to realise that the history of the Arabian Nights on film is "nearly as old as the history of film itself," as Irwin adequately indicates. "In 1902 the first silent Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was shown," and from then on film followed upon film. After Disney's 1992 animated Aladdin, a Egyptian television serial in which the same characters acted out new scenarios of Sindbad was shown.
If anything, the astounding longevity of the Arabian Nights goes to show that, no matter where or when one happens to be, there is nothing more captivating than a good yarn.
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