Eastern Dreams (32 page)

When Dinarzade asks Scheherazade in the
Alf Laila
Fragment to relate tales of “
the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice … the courage and cowardice” of men, she is voicing the ability of the
Nights
to convey an encompassing humanity in narrative. So encompassing, in fact, that the
Arabian Nights
is one of the few books in whose pages readers can be guaranteed to find whatever they seek. Children see it as an attractive fairyland; adults reading or rereading the work are surprised by the frank sophistication of
some versions; literary scholars view it as a seminal text containing informative treasures; professional historians acknowledge it as an important source of social conditions during early Islam.

And postwar academics criticizing orientalist perceptions are not the only intellectuals making use of the
Nights
. Since the 1920s, feminists have advanced the notion that Scheherazade is an icon of gender triumph over destructive male forces. That she prevails over the sultan is viewed as a prototypical feminist victory over male aggression; her wit and storytelling skills are capable of shaping the world as a civilizing force. Modernist writers, meanwhile, tend to view the work in a broader perspective, drawing on the
Nights
' picture of a “
neutral territory … between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet” to blur the boundaries between real and unreal.

The Thousand and One Nights
appears, like a shadow, throughout modern literature—a prototype of twentieth-century fiction that rejects literary absolutes to create worlds of deliberate uncertainty. Authors from Marcel Proust (who may have unconsciously written
À la recherche du temps perdu
as a personal version of the
Nights
) through James Joyce (with
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
) to Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino and many others have featured it in their work, either through simple reference or via such literary devices as magic realism, metafiction and deconstructive playfulness.

If these and other contemporary writers using the
Nights
have anything in common, it is their reconstructing of the older book's universe, where dreams and waking reality mingle in a peculiarly literary landscape. By employing the dense familiarity of the
Nights
' characters and elements to explore themes relevant to their own concerns, modern writers continue the tradition of maintaining and expanding the
Arabian Nights
' imaginative domain. They are now—albeit in often very different ways—as much custodians of
the work as were the storytellers of old, transmitting to new generations the essential attributes of a gleaming world where magic, dreams, reality and human interaction coexist in a sometimes-harmonious, sometimes-uneasy alliance of opposites.

As for the work itself, it continues to attract translators and researchers, as well as breed controversy. Between 1899 and 1904, Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus issued a new, sixteen-volume French translation of the
Nights
that was hailed as a fine replacement for the Galland version, updating the literary style from the time of Louis XIV to
fin de siècle
Europe. It was so well received that T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) thought about producing an English translation. “
Much the best version … in any language,” Lawrence wrote to his publisher. “
The correctness of Mardrus can't be bettered. The rivalry in English isn't high. Payne crabbed: Burton unreadable: Lane pompous.”
*

Which makes one wonder about the extent of Lawrence's Arabic, since Mardrus did as much distortion as any of his predecessors, omitting some tales, reworking others and otherwise juicing things up by inserting personal bons mots and a number of nasty Gallic diatribes against Jews. He may have grown up in a household where both French and Arabic were spoken, but Mardrus's Arabic scholarship has been called “
beneath criticism” by Arabists who note that his translation swarms with errors and unnecessary vulgarisms.

At first, Mardrus claimed that he worked from the Egyptian Bulaq Text of the
Nights
, but backtracked when discrepancies between his version and the Bulaq edition were uncovered. He then maintained that what he
actually
used was a seventeenth-century North African manuscript (shades of Maximilian Habicht), but this appears to be another case of
Nights
fraud, since whatever text or texts Dr. Mardrus did use, he made as personal and loose an adaption as anyone before him.

That said, Mardrus's edition is by no means worthless; its heavy eroticism evokes the
outré
Guy de Maupassant decadence of the period in which he wrote (and perhaps befits a man married to the lesbian novelist-poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus), but his statement that “
For the first time in Europe, a complete and accurate translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
is made available” is stunningly pretentious; his contention that the Arabic words have only been replaced with French ones laughable.

Luckily, for every charlatan and falsifier in the history of the
Nights
, there is a sincere and learned researcher. Before the First World War, the Scottish-American orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald did much work on the
Nights
as a sideline to his research on Islamic theology, believing
Arabian Nights
stories are indigenous examples of Muslim spiritual concerns. Aware that the history of the work was full of confusing artifice and invention, MacDonald examined the various
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscripts in Europe and thought about using the Galland Manuscript to fashion a critical reconstruction of how the early
Nights
might have looked, shorn of the extraneous material added over the centuries. MacDonald does not appear to have gotten very far with the project before his death in 1943, but the idea of producing a critical edition of the Galland Manuscript was revived in the postwar era, when Muhsin Mahdi, a Baghdad-born professor of Arabic at Chicago and Harvard universities, decided
to return the Arabic
Nights
to as close a rendition of early versions as was possible.

It took him a full quarter of a century. Beginning in 1959, Professor Mahdi compared the Galland Manuscript word for word with other surviving texts, taking careful note of errors and variations in words and phrasing. Battling his way through often difficult-to-read handwritten manuscripts strewn throughout the libraries of Britain and Europe, Mahdi was able to create preliminary archetypes of the Syrian and Egyptian traditions of
Alf Laila wa Laila
stories. Then, through near-Holmesian deduction, he constructed a common ancestor to both branches—a close, penultimate, written archetype of the
Nights
as it would have looked in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. It was from this archetype or something very much like it, Mahdi maintained, that Antoine Galland worked to make a translation and bring the
Nights
to the West. Mahdi published his Arabic reconstruction in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1984 to world acclaim, creating the first ancient text of
Alf Laila wa Laila
available in the modern era.

The result of Professor Mahdi's Herculean labours is a meticulous recreation of an important early version of
The Thousand and One Nights
, containing significantly fewer stories than either the handwritten or printed Arabic texts that came later, but closer to how actual copies of the
Nights
looked during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Containing just thirty-five and a half stories told over approximately 270 Nights, this is probably as close to a “true” version of the Arabic
Nights
as it is possible to attain.

Mahdi's efforts have also put to rest many myths surrounding the
Nights
in the West, including the idea that original Arabic versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” have been found, or that western translators and compilers in former centuries used complete Arabic manuscripts to create their versions. It is now plain that the tale of the
Arabian Nights
in the West contains practically as much—maybe
more—deception, error and misinterpretation as it does careful study and reasoned conjecture.

For all this, not everyone believes Mahdi's contention that Arabic editions of the
Nights
appearing after the period of his reconstructed archetype are the result of “polluting” factors. His belief in an anonymous Syrian compiler of this earliest manuscript has met with opposition from other researchers, who point out that even as a text, the
Nights
was never treated as a concrete whole in classical Islam—certainly not by the
rawi
, who never hesitated to fill in the vacant parts of any copies they happened to have. The idea of a pure or near-pure Arabic version of the
Nights
, while valuable, does not address the central issue of the work's malleability or take into account the fact that Mahdi's reconstructed
Alf Laila wa Laila
is itself probably quite different from the Persian
Hazar Afsanah
that spawned it.

Such questions can never be satisfactorily answered. But even Muhsin Mahdi's great contributions to the
Nights
' complex history are not the last words on the issue of the work's composition—something reflected in the English translation of his critical edition. In 1990, another Baghdad-born Arab scholar, Husain Haddawy, translated Mahdi's Arabic text of the
Nights
into English with a fine introduction on its history and major western editions. Compared with many previous translations, Haddawy's edition is immensely easy to read, not least because he has modernized many terms for better understanding.

Nevertheless, in what is probably the latest instance of
Arabian Nights
irony, the lack of some beloved stories in this edition created a demand from disappointed readers for a semi-sequel. Haddawy consented, and six years later published an edition of several popular external orphan stories, including “Sindbad,” “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” ones that Muhsin Mahdi would have considered contaminating material inserted into
Alf Laila wa
Laila
, but which centuries of familiarity in both hemispheres have welded onto the body of the
Arabian Nights
with unbreakable seals of affection.

By now, Haddawy's approach seems to be the best way with which to treat the orphan stories of the
Arabian Nights
. While admitting that such tales are likely not part of early versions of the work, it must also be acknowledged that they cannot be ignored, since centuries of readership in both the East and West have melded them onto the book to create the work as it is known around the world. The acorn may be ancient collections of
Alf Laila wa Laila
stories, but the globe-spanning tree that has sprung from its roots is the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
.

And the translation of the
Nights
continues to this day. In 2004, a new German version, translated by Claudia Ott, was released in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Galland edition. Four years later, the first “complete” (i.e., taken from Calcutta II) English translation since Sir Richard Burton's 1885–88 version appeared. Rendered into English by Cambridge scholar Malcolm Lyons and his wife Ursula, it has been acclaimed as a graceful replacement for Burton's celebrated, but often-ponderous, translation.

Even magic carpet rides have their bumpy moments, buffeted by forces threatening to impede or even destroy their flight. The history of
The Thousand and One Nights
is long and eventful, marked by confusion, mystery and misdirection, but withal there has never been any real doubt about the work's worth as a collection of stories. As one of humanity's most defining features, the telling of wonderful tales can never be separated from the species creating it, and there is probably no work—certainly none in the western
world—where the tradition of storytelling merges so happily with wonder than in the
Arabian Nights
.