"A Thousand and One Nights": The Story of a Grand Deception and a Great Work

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The book "A Thousand and One Nights" is included in the list of one hundred best books of all times and peoples. Plots from it have been repeatedly turned into plays, ballets, films, cartoons and performances. It seems that everyone knows at least a few tales from the book, not to mention the history of Scheherazade. However, in the twenty-first century, a scandal erupted around the collection. German orientalist Claudia Ott made the assertion that "A Thousand and One Nights" as we know it is nothing more than a falsification.

The book that fell in love with the East

At the very beginning of the eighteenth century, the French orientalist Antoine Galland began serially, volume after volume, to publish his translation of the Arabic collection of fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights." The story of the tsar, who became a cruel murderer after he saw three unfaithful wives, and the vizier's daughter, thanks to her mind and an endless supply of fairy tales in her memory, who managed to escape from the tsar's cruelty, charmed Europe. The thick oriental flavor, densely mixed with eroticism, dizzy. The West was swept by the general fashion for the East.

Galland's text was also translated into other languages: into German, English, Russian. Often, this cleared out erotic motives and all sorts of obscenities, which made the circle of readers wider. After "cleaning" the books could be safely presented to children and women, and the illustrated collection of Arabic fairy tales was indeed included in the list of good gifts that delight almost anyone. Djinn and peri, sorcerers and sultans, ornate speaking, acting contrary to European logic, captured the imagination of the reader. The book was a hit for centuries.

But Galland was not the only translator of the collection. Over time, there were many people who were interested in how the fairy tales looked in the original. New translations from Arabic have appeared. And the people who performed them discovered that they could not find all the fairy tales in the original collection, or the fairy tales have a slightly different look, and sometimes it was simply impossible to find a plot popular in Europe in Arab sources, but wonderful fairy tales in circulation were missed. They didn't make a scandal out of it. Often the newly found was matched to the canvas set by Galland. The Thousand and One Nights still began for the European reader with the story of two Shah brothers and their unfaithful wives.

Claudia Ott, an Arabist from Germany, has loudly criticized the prevailing idea of the collection. Working on the next translation of the collection, she discovered how far the version spread in Europe had gone from the original, how disrespectful the first translators, and especially Galland, had treated it.

For starters, the original collection did not contain a thousand and one fairy tales. There are a little less than three hundred of them. Strictly speaking, "a thousand and one" is simply a synonym for the expression "a lot." In addition, Galland strongly distorted the plots, making them more interesting for the European reader (he was guided, first of all, by the French royal court), emphasizing more on eroticism and exoticism. In order to get the number of fairy tales and publish the next volume, Galland included in the collection plots that had nothing to do with him, and some of the followers of Galland and his publisher did not hesitate to invent these plots at all. So among the tales from Shahrazada were the stories of Aladdin and Sinbad. The Arab and the Muslim world in general got acquainted with some "Arab" tales only after they were translated from European languages. Such tales include, with a high probability, "Ali Baba and the forty robbers."

Treasury of the Muslim East

Generally speaking, it is incorrect to consider "One Thousand and One Nights" as a monument of Arabic literature only. This collection is an evolution of the Persian book "Hezar Afsane" ("A Thousand Tales"), and Scheherazade is an Iranian character. For a Western person, there is probably no difference, but Persian-language and Perso-cultural literature is completely self-sufficient and well developed, it is not “just” a kind of Arabic, although it has a certain connection with it.

The translation of "Hezar Afsane" was made in the tenth century in Baghdad and in the same place, in addition to the Persian and Indian plots of the original collection, local tales, including the adventures of the Caliph Harun ar Rashid, revered in Baghdad, were enriched. New fairy tales were added for the same purpose as the Europeans later - readers wanted more and more new editions, more and more stories. When the collection began to be sold in Arab Egypt, it again acquired new subjects, now - characteristically Egyptian. This is how the classic Arabic version of the collection gradually took shape, namely The Thousand and One Nights. They stopped changing and adding to it, probably after the conquest of Egypt by the Turks.

From the collection's fairy tales (of course, if we take more accurate translations than Gallan's), one can largely judge the peculiarities of the mentality of the inhabitants of the Muslim world before the sixteenth century. It is easy to see that, although representatives of various social strata act in fairy tales, most often the plots revolve around merchants - it was the merchant who was the hero of his time (or rather, several eras in Muslim countries); only after the merchants are the caliphs, sultans and their sons. Most of the stories in the collection are built around deception as the main turning point, and in half of these cases, deception is good, helping to extricate the hero from an awkward situation or saving his life. Deception that resolves conflict and leads to peace is the constant plot of A Thousand and One Nights.

Another feature of the stories in the collection is the amazing fatalism of both the heroes and the storytellers (among them not only Scheherazade). Everything that happens is outlined, and you can't get away from it. Often it is not the act of the protagonist that saves or decides the fate, but a happy or unfortunate accident. In general, everything is in the will of Allah and only a little is in the forces of man.

The original collection contains a lot of poems, which is typical for Arabic literature. To a modern European, these poetic inserts seem to be squeezed into the text almost by force, but for an Arab of ancient times, quoting or adding poetry was common, as for modern Russian culture - quoting someone else's aphorisms or puns on the go.

Differences between the Ott translation and the versions familiar to us from childhood

The reader, who was born in the USSR, remembers well the inception of The Thousand and One Nights. One king discovered that his wife was unfaithful to him. He killed her and went to visit his brother, also the king. There they discovered that the wife of the second king was also unfaithful. Then the brothers went on a journey, and soon stumbled upon a genie, whose wife forced the brothers to sin with her right in the presence of her sleeping husband. She also boasted that she had several hundred lovers before her two kings.

One of the brothers, Shahriyar, was driven mad by the adventure. He returned home and there every day he took a new girl as his wife, had fun with her all night and executed her the next morning. This lasted until he married the scientist and beautiful daughter of his vizier, Scheherazade. Every legal night (a Muslim woman could not always share a bed with her husband) she told him stories, and when all the fairy tales in her memory ended, it turned out that they had already had three sons. Shakhriyar did not begin to kill her, and indeed he, apparently, somehow felt better. He no longer believed that all women were treacherous.

In the version provided by Claudia, there are no two brothers-kings. A certain Indian king was so beautiful that he did not get tired of admiring himself in the mirror and asking his subjects if there was someone more beautiful in the world. This lasted until one old man told the king about a beautiful youth, the son of a merchant from Khorasan. The king lures a young man from Khorasan to him with gifts, but on the way he lost his beauty - after all, just before leaving, he discovered that his young wife was unfaithful to him. In India, the young man, however, witnesses the infidelity of the royal concubine and blossoms again with joy that he is not the only one so unhappy and stupid. Then he reveals the truth about the traitor and the king.

Further, the canvas returns to what we know, but Scheherazade does not begin with the story of Sinbad. In general, some of the tales translated by Claudia may seem unfamiliar and some may seem distorted, they have different accents and other details. Well, if Ott really tried to translate the collection as closely as possible in meaning and form, then Galland inflated Europe much more than one could initially imagine, and we have a completely separate literary monument - the European collection of fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights", which opens to us, as Europeans saw (because they really wanted to see) the Muslim East. Maybe he should top the list " The most famous literary forgeries, in the authenticity of which almost everyone believed ».