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The Caravanserais at Sultanhani, Turkey This picture shows a mosque in the courtyard of this historic caravanserais. The whole structure was built in 1229. |
The first identifiable written version of the Arabian Nights seems to have been a book of Persian tales called Hazar Afsanah (A Thousand Legends), translated into Arabic around A.D. 850. |
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In the Egyptian desert just after the Second World War a fragment of paper dating from the ninth century and containing the opening lines of the Arabian Nights frame story was discovered and subsequently published by Nabia Abbott. For more details about the exciting discovery of Kitab Hadith Alf Layla, please visit the page that I have devoted to this document. The Arab writer Al-Mas'oodi (who died in A.D. 956) refers to this book, and reveals that it is known as Alf Layla (A Thousand Nights). He also gives a brief summary of the prologue. This original book is however lost, and although the framework story of Shahrazad and the Sultan Shahriyar has remained largely unchanged and is thought to be Indian in origin, there is much debate over the genesis of the individual stories contained within the Nights. In the Middle East, the stories were kept alive by professional story tellers, who would perform their act in coffee houses in Persia, Arabia and Egypt. The first major European translation of the Nights was by Antoine Galland (1646-1715), the first edition appearing in 1704. The manuscript that he used to work from was acquired from Syria, and dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. This three volume manuscript is now in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale; and is (barring the above-mentioned fragment) the oldest surviving edition of the Nights. To view this manuscript on the Bibliothèque Nationale site please click here. Galland's twelve volume edition Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français was extremely influential, but it does provide the textual analysts with problems for several reasons: |
1. There are significant differences between Galland's rendering and the original manuscript. These details are sometimes confirmed by other surviving manuscripts of the Nights; indicating that Galland had access to a second manuscript that is now lost.
2. Galland's translation includes other stories that were dictated by his friend that he first met in 1709 from Aleppo, Hanna Diab. He gave Galland fourteen stories, seven of which appear in Galland's Les Mille et une nuits. These include the stories of 'Aladdin', 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' and 'Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari Banou'.
3. Galland also includes the stories of 'Aladdin', 'Prince Ahmed and his Two Sisters', 'Ali Baba' and 'The Ebony Horse', none of which have been found in any surviving Arabic manuscript predating Galland, leaving open the possibility that subsequent Arabic versions may actually be re-translations from Galland's French original. He also seems to have added the stories of 'Sindbad the Sailor' (originally an independent Persian cycle created during the Abassid period) to the Nights, although it cannot be ascertained for certain that he was the first to include the Sindbad cycle. In this famous set of stories, Sindbad takes a river boat from Baghdad down the Tigris to Al Basrah, which then served as Baghdad's port on the Persian Gulf.
4. The eighth volume of Galland includes stories translated from a Turkish manuscript by another orientalist (Pétis de la Croix) without Galland's knowledge.
5. Galland thought it necessary to censor or suppress any overtly sexual or overly exotic passages for his intended readership.
It should be added that some experts have theorised that the three volume Syrian manuscript used by Galland may have had a fourth or even a fifth volume, subsequently lost.
Galland's edition was swiftly translated into English; the early editions of the so-called 'Grub Street version' first appearing in 1708. The search for a complete copy of the Arabian Nights was attempted and proved unavailing; however in the first half of the nineteenth century four important printed versions appeared, known as Calcutta I, Calcutta II, the Bulaq text and the Breslau text. Although none of these documents are entirely satisfactory, the Bulaq text from Cairo (printed in 1835 and also known as the Vulgate text) has been considered important by most subsequent scholars. It was based on an Egyptian manuscript whose editor had added many stories to make the total amount of material large enough to accommodate the full one thousand and one nights. According to Robert Irwin, "the Arabic of Bulaq's source was generally more correct than the garbled and semi-colloquial renderings given by the manuscripts used in the compilations of Calcutta I and Breslau". He also mentions that it was used as a source for the text compiled by Macnaghten, known as Calcutta II.
Many subsequent translations have appeared based on these versions, the best of them cutting out the gibberish and improving on the crude original. Some of the supposed 'translations' were just new versions of the Galland translation. For more information on just how mind-bogglingly complex the process of translation from Arabic is, I refer the reader to Robert Irwin's book "The Arabian Nights - A Companion", found in the list of recommended reading following this article. Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) brought out his celebrated and daring version of the Calcutta II text in 1885 in ten volumes available by subscription; followed by six volumes from other printed texts appearing in 1886-8.
Other notable translations were by Dr. Jonathan Scott (1800), Edward Wortley Montague (1811), Henry Torrens (1838 - literal of the first fifty nights), Edward W. Lane (1838-41 - expurgated), John Payne (1882-4 - ponderous), Andrew Lang (1898 - actually a version of Galland expurgated heavily for children) and J.C. Mardrus (in French, 1899-1904, rendered into English by Edward Powys Mathers). T.E. Lawrence, who was approached by his publisher with a view to rendering Mardrus into English, wrote "Much the best version of the Nights in any language (not excepting the original which is in coffee-house talk!) and it's ambitious to make a still-better English version: and yet I think it's possible. Better, I mean, as prose. The correctness of Mardrus can't be bettered. The rivalry in English isn't high. Payne crabbed: Burton unreadable: Lane pompous." Nothing however came of this translation because his publisher [Cape] had discovered, to Lawrence's dismay, that a translation of Mardrus by E. Powys Mather was about to be published by a rival.
What with the difficulties involved in translation and finding original texts, none of the above versions are considered really satisfactory by contemporary experts - which is a pity because they all devoted substantial parts of their lives to the task. With his aforementioned translation, Edward Lane included copious notes that remain valuable to this day. It is my pleasure to be able to present some of them on this site.
In 1984 the latest key event in the story of the Nights occurred with the appearance of an edition by Muhsin Mahdi, former professor of Arabic at Chicago and Harvard. He began work in 1959, and painstakingly compared a family of Syrian manuscripts, including that used by Galland, in order to reconstruct the common ancestor of all the Syrian manuscripts. He then did the same with the Egyptian manuscripts. Then by comparing the two reconstructed versions, he reconstructed a common ancestor, or 'archetype'. Mahdi speculated that this archetype was itself copied from a mother source in Syria in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and that this was based on an earlier version of the Nights from Iraq. His edition was published in Arabic as Alf Laylah Wa Laylah.
In 1990 Husain Haddawy kindly translated this into English. His version therefore contains only the stories that were found in the earliest Syrian manuscript; and even then he didn't include "The Story of Qamar al-Zaman", as the Syrian manuscript only contained a few pages of this story. Haddawy bowed to public pressure in 1994 and produced a second volume containing his translation of a few of the most popular of the later Nights tales from Bulaq and other sources.