The Arabian Nights
A new translation by Husain Haddawy
W.W. Norton
The first, most striking feature of Husain Haddawy’s new translation of The Arabian Nights is its size: at a mere four-hundred-plus pages, Haddawy’s text looks like little more than a novella next to the seventeen-volume, several-thousand-page translation by Sir Richard Burton which has, since 1888, served as the standard English version.
Where did all those pages go? To explain that, a little background is needed. For this edition, Haddawy has translated an Arabic text, based on a 14th-century Syrian manuscript now in Paris, which was edited and published in an Arabic edition by Muhsin Mahdi in 1984. There are two main manuscript editions for The Nights, the Syrian and the Egyptian. This early Syrian manuscript in Paris is one of four extant texts representing the Syrian tradition. The Egyptian tradition, however, has many extant texts. These, according to Haddawy, date no earlier than the 17th century and are generally much later than that.
It was from just such a late, Egyptian manuscript that Burton made his translation. The Bulaq edition, as it is known, was printed in Cairo in 1835 and represents the work of hundreds of years of copyists’ and scholars’ additions and emendations. Taking the number “one thousand and one” literally, though it was certainly originally intended to denote endlessness or infinity, these writers added stories of their own, as well as stories from various other mythologies and oral traditions, to bring the collection up to the famed number.
One such addition, Haddawy says, is the story of Sinbad the Sailor. A very old story, it was nonetheless not part of the original Nights. To speak of an “original” may seem rather questionable (and so it is), taking into consideration the Nights’ origins in an oral tradition, but what Haddawy is referring to is a hypothetical prototype of the Nights, one re-constructed by comparison of the earliest works in both traditions.
Previous to this edition, the only other Western translation which relied on the early Syrian manuscript was written in French by Antonine Galland in the early 18th century. It is this translation that first introduced The Nights to a European audience. Galland, however, also drew on other oral and manuscript sources, and it may be that he wrote the famous story of Aladdin and the magic lamp himself. Thus, Haddawy’s new translation provides English readers with a chance to experience this ancient cycle of stories in a form much close to its original written, and perhaps oral, form than ever before.
What is immediately apparent from this new translation is how The Arabian Nights (or Thousand and One Nights) captivated generations of audiences in the East and those first European orientalists who “discovered” the Nights for the West.
The overlying narrative is the same; Shahrazad, the Vizier’s daughter, each night tells a take to King Shahrayer, her husband, and leaves him so interested in what will happen next that he cannot bring himself to have her killed (why he would desire this is another story). By dint of her clever storytelling, she manages to stay alive and ultimately cures her husband of his misogyny.
A measure of her success is that the stories are still hard to put down. The initial accounts are quite short, each bringing forth such clever and striking images that one can’t imagine how the next will top it—and yet they consistently do. Typically, someone is telling a story, and in turn a character within that story tells a story, in which another character has a story to tell and so on. As wild as these tales get, they almost never seem arbitrary or pointless. When there is not an obvious moral at work (e.g. the folly of curiosity, the merit of bravery) a bizarre logic seems to be behind these flights of fancy. The stories, and the levels of narration, gradually become more convoluted and rich as The Nights progresses.
There is, as Haddawy points out, a unique marriage between full-blown fantasy and concrete detail in The Nights. On the fifty-first night, for instance, in a tale which Haddawy designates “The Tale of the Envious and Envied,” the daughter of a king does battle with a demon. The Princess, skilled in sorcery, and the demon go through a number of metamorphoses, battling as different animals and substances, until she suffers a fatal wound. Before dying, she explains the battle to her father and a startled onlooker, making a brief reference to the laws that govern magical battles with demons. And that’s it. She dies, and we hear no more of these arcane laws, so briefly introduced. It is as if someone had turned on a light in a room crowded with treasure, quickly turned it off again, then took you away to a different room. This is the overwhelming experience of The Nights: its plenitude, the infinite treasure house of the imagination which is illuminates in brief, surprising flashes; the rent it makes in time through the endless interpolation of new stories, worlds, lives.
This is certainly what the British literary critic W.E. Henley had in mind when he said “He that has the book of the Thousand Nights and a Night has hashish-made words for life.” But this plenitude has often been, to some extent, attributed to the sheer size of the work’s European manifestations. “At home I have the seventeen volumes of Burton’s version,” wrote Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. “I know I’ll never read all of them, but I know that there the nights are waiting for me.” Well, Haddawy’s version needn’t take more than three or four nights’ reading, but it is no less “eternal” (to borrow an adjective from Borges) than its enormous Victorian namesake.
Haddawy’s English is also far more accessible than Burton’s. Burton’s convoluted Victorian prose can tend to make the stories dry or even confusing. It also seems likely that Haddawy’s uncluttered, modern style better approximates for us the experience of The Nights as it would have been for early readers and listeners. It is important to remember that this was a very popular and widely known cycle of stories about, primarily, magic, sex and death.
The Nights is also, as the overlying story suggests, pervasively misogynist and, as it happens, quite racist — aspects overlooked or perhaps indulged in by earlier audiences, but bound to be an impediment to many readers today. Haddawy makes no note of these elements in his introduction, unfortunately, and no attempt in his translation to hide them, thankfully.
In all, Haddawy’s translation is an important work and a fine place to begin one’s introduction to The Nights. But despite his belief that Burton’s translation is no more than a “Victorian relic” and Galland’s now lies “buried in the archives of literary history,” this most recent translation is not about to erase all that has come before it. Burton also believed he was writing a definitive translation that would preclude all others. However, Sinbad and Aladdin are not about to vanish in a puff of smoke simply because some scholar has declared them unauthentic.
The influence of The Arabian Nights, including its doubtful or apocryphal tales, can be traced throughout Western literature (John Barth’s latest book, in fact, is titled The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor). Whenever a writer makes use of an interpolated, multilayered narrative structure, The Nights is the archetype to which that work is compared. Haddawy’s new, more accessible translation will not only facilitate such comparisons but also introduce a whole new generation to this unjustly neglected Syrian text.
