Scheherazade's Children

Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights

Philip F. Kennedy, Marina Warner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479830756
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires du Moyen-Orient

Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations.

Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights ’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

PART I
Translating

1
The Sea-Born Tale

Eighteenth-Century English Translations of The Thousand and One Nights and the Lure of Elemental Difference

ROS BALLASTER

When British readers first encountered the tale sequence of the Nights in the early eighteenth century, what species of writing did they take it to be? And what kind of expectations and contexts for successful reading of the tales were promoted by its first English “translators”? The first two volumes of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments in English were published in London in December 1705, as we know from notices appearing in the Flying Post or the Post Master (December 8–December 11, 1705, issue 1635) and the Post Man and the Historical Account (December 4–December 6 1705, issue 1557). There are no copies extant of these first translations, but the text of the Flying Post advertisement reproduced the text found on the title page of the first volume:

Just published,
ARABIAN Nights’ Entertainments, consisting of one thousand and one Stories, told by the Sultaness of the Indies to divert the Sultan from the execution of a bloody Vow he had made, to marry a Lady every Day and have her cut off next Morning, to avenge himself for the Disloyalty of his first Sultaness, which contain a better Account of the Customs, Manners and Religion of the Eastern Nations, viz. Tartars, Persians and Indians, than is to be met in any Author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Manuscript by M. Galland, of the Royal Academy, and now done into English. In two Volumes. Printed for A. Bell, at the Cross-Keys and Bible in Cornhill, near Stocks Market.

We should not assume, however, that the only form in which British readers gained access to the Nights was that of the twelve small octavo volumes translated from Antoine Galland’s French rendering by one or more anonymous “Grub Street” hacks between 1705 and 1717. That these volumes were popular there can be no doubt; by 1736 the complete twelve-volume sequence had gone into its eighth edition. The biweekly newspaper Parker’s Penny Post serialized the tales in the mid-1720s (see fig. 19). The author of the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal (November 1, 1729, issue 56) complains as follows:

It’s true we every Day see Pamphlets with odd out-of-the-way Titles, which have a great Run, and then as trifling and insignificant as those Things are, they have something in them which amuses either by a Jingle of Words, or surprizes by monstrous Relations.

The Business of the Reader is to divert his Time, or, as the French more emphatically express it, tuer le tems, murder his Time; for which nothing can be more suited than the above Productions.

If then these Pieces alone have the Power of pleasure, and our Authors become as contemptible as the Italians of the last Century, let it not be imputed to them their Business is to please; and when the Writing with Judgment and Perspicuity becomes the only Method, to raise their Characters, when the preposterous Infants of a wreck’d Imagination are rejected, nothing shall meet a favourable Reception, but what at the same Time instructs and pleases; when Wit and Morality shall be allowed to go hand in hand, Judgment alone be esteem’d the Basis of the former, and nothing be receiv’d with Applause, but what is attended by a true Merit, either the present Writers will exert themselves, or others will appear, who are able to stretch an Eagle-Wing, and vindicate the British Genius.

The author presents the Nights as imported fodder for an expanding print market; his complaint particularly revolves around the vitiated taste for the foreign. He longs for a British Genius (rather than the Arabic jinn) who can successfully combine the power to promote judgment with that of giving pleasure.¹ Britishness will harness and contain the pleasure-giving luxury associated with the Eastern tale. Yet the “universal spectator” cannot apparently resist reusing elements of the very tales he or she sees as tiresomely recycled by modern periodicals. The pun on “retelling” and “retailing” reminds us that Scheherazade trades her tales for her life and that one of the best known sequences of the Nights concerns the mercantile achievements of the merchant-adventurer Sinbad, who profits from each successive adventure. The readers are paralleled mockingly with the auditor of Scheherazade’s tales, the murderous Shahriyar, as they—like him—“kill time” indulging the tales. And finally the British writers are imagined as being lifted from the wreckage of these fanciful gruesome tales by the “eagle-wing” of genius, just as Sinbad in his second voyage escapes from a valley of diamonds and snakes, his coat pockets stuffed with gems, on an animal carcass lifted by a vast eagle.

For English readers of the translation of Galland’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, the sequence provided a window on cultures marked and marred by a despotism from which, they were repeatedly reminded, they were free. They were viewing not only the Tartars, Persians, and Indians (governed by Islamic sultanates) but also the French world of absolute monarchy, court favorites, and salon preciosity overseen by aristocratic women who exercised their sexual charms to political advantage. Parallels between the French court of Louis XIV and Islamic despotism were familiar from the hugely successful Eight Volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687–1694) by Giovanni Paolo Marana, a fictional sequence of letters by an Arabian spy for the Ottoman court posing as a Moravian translator in the French city of Paris. Montesquieu was in turn to exploit the anagrammatic potential of “Paris” and “Persia” in the sustained critique of private and political despotism rehearsed in his Lettres persanes of 1721. Louis XIV had been explicitly paralleled with the Persian emperor, Abbas the Great (1588–1629), in a satirical tale by Peter Belon, The Court Secret of 1689, who in the second part encourages and supports the exiled Ottoman emperor, Murat III (1574–1595), clearly a version of James II, who fled to France in the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Over fifteen years later, England could view its libertine courtly past as a culture of the past with the uxorious reigns of Mary II and Anne, Protestant-educated daughters of James II.

In what follows I take a closer look at the different English versions of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments through the consideration of a single tale not often addressed in the critical literature. The tale under discussion—“Jullanar the Sea-Born and Her Son King Badr Basim of Persia”—concerns not one but two protagonists, a mother and her son, who undergo a series of trials in order to achieve romantic happiness and political security. I summarize the changes of tone and lexical choices of successive eighteenth-century translators into English, often to make the story more accessible to Western readers and the story traditions familiar to them. I conclude with a consideration of Jullanar’s reappearance in George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814), both a reiteration of the magical attractions of her watery element and a means to voice resistance to Jullanar’s quietist politics of love won through submission to an absolute authority. Byron’s treatment makes visible the continuing tendency on the part of English redactors of the Arabian Nights, their versions all derived from and in conversation with Galland’s “translation,” to deploy the Arabian Nights sequence as a means of differentiating English liberties from Oriental and Gallic despotism. Small but telling “liberties” were taken with the French source in English versions, I argue, to promote this comparative French/English, Catholic/Protestant, absolutist monarchy / limited contractual monarchy reading of the tales. However, the tale of Jullanar and Badr is also a tale (as are many in the Nights) about the appeal of difference itself, a tale of attraction between the creatures of different elements. The power of language to generate the allure of the strange is at the center of the tale and its telling. So, like all the versions of the Nights in different languages, these first English versions are creative transformations that make the tales “speak” in ways familiar to the cultures they enter but also voice their own attraction to the wild incommensurability of, and the inability to fully assimilate, elemental difference.

Jullanar and Badr

The “Jullanar and Badr” story appears in the seventh volume of the first English translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments under a title which significantly erases the maternal figure. “The Story of BEDER, Prince of Persia, and GIAHAURE, Princess of Samandal” couples the prince not with his mother but with the woman he pursues in marriage (see fig. 17). This may already be a hint that one way in which the stories of the Arabian Nights were mediated to a new audience unfamiliar with this story sequence was to associate it with an already familiar form, in this case the French fairy tale and stories of princes and princesses brought together through adversity, tales in which good mothers die and their children struggle against evil surrogate stepmothers; Charles Perrault’s Contes were published in France 1691–95, including “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella.”² The fairy tale, like its “sister genre,” the Oriental tale, was received as a vehicle for the private critique of despotic rule exchanged between women. The old gossip instructs her young female aristocratic charge not only in moral absolutes but also in political diplomacy through fairy tales gathered from folk resources in the collections of Charles Perrault and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy;³ the older sister Scheherazade tells her stories gathered from the folk tales of the East to her younger sibling, Dinarzade, as a covert means of correcting the murderous despotism of her husband. The Eastern genie, forged from the element of fire and able to govern the destinies of earthly mortals, is closely related to the fairy or the fée (creature of the air, whose name derives from the Latin term fatum, for a god of destiny)

The Jullanar tale is indeed a fairy tale, but probably one of Persian origin. It is found in the oldest preserved manuscript of the Arabian Nights, which contains only thirty-five and a half stories and belongs to the core corpus of the Nights. The story is told over the course of nights 230 to 271. It has been found in another medieval Arabic text, the fourteenth-century Kitâb al-Hikâyât al-’ajîba. Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen describe the two parts as follows: “a love story in which good behaviour is rewarded, and a love quest in which the hero falls in love by hearsay and sets out to conquer his beloved in magic worlds and dangerous lands.”⁴ The tales of mother and son, however, are not so simply summarized. The stories hinge on the pursuit of attractions across elemental divisions and in a context of an ambivalent attitude to the powers of verbal language as opposed to physical evidence.

Let us start with the “original” story insofar as such a thing exists in the context of the Nights. Husain Haddawy translates Muhsin Mahdi’s critical edition based on the Syrian three-volume manuscript from which Galland worked and which is housed in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale; this manuscript Mahdi dated to the fourteenth century, but it is now considered to date from the latter half of the fifteenth.⁵ What is most striking in reading Haddawy’s translation of Mahdi’s edition is the careful disposition of the four elements in “Jullanar of the Sea”: earth, water, air, and fire.⁶ While the mother Jullanar is associated with the sea, her son is more often affiliated with air. Jullanar’s name in Persian derives from jul, meaning “rose,” and anár, “pomegranate,” whereas in Arabic it forms the collocation gul/rose and nár/fire); she is the mysterious mute slave given to a powerful, generous, and benevolent king of Persia by a traveling merchant. He is so enamored that he gives up all his mistresses to live monogamously with his silent queen. A year later she responds to his pleas for her to speak in order to inform him that she is pregnant and hopes to give birth to the son he longs for; she also reveals, “I am an exile and a captive in a foreign land, with a broken heart aching for my people.” She is the sister of a king of the sea named Sayih, whom she fled having in her temper declared an intention to throw herself into the “hands of a man of the land.”⁷ The king encourages her to invite her brother, mother, and their sea court to his castle, where, after his initial fear at their fire-breathing volatility, the king lives with them in good companionship. Jullanar gives birth to a son, who is named Badr (the full moon). The protective father is terrified to see his eleven-day-old son plunge into the se...