Showing posts with label 1001 Nights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1001 Nights. Show all posts

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Fast Thinkers and Ghost Writers



Britannica: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)


A bit of wisdom here from Pierre Bourdieu:
Fast-thinkers ... think in clichés, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about - banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem. But whether you're talking about a speech, a book, or a message on television, the major question of communication is whether the conditions for reception have been fulfilled: Does the person who's listening have the tools to decode what I'm saying?
Like most people (I suppose), I used to worry about my inability to shine in contests of quick-flowing wit. I remember once meeting a friend who'd been at Graduate School in America, and had returned to New Zealand to show off some of what he'd become. The talk came thick and fast, with nary a space to insert a word of one's own, or query exactly what it was we were talking about.
When you transmit a "received idea," it's as if everything is set, and the problem solves itself. Communication is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred; or it only seems to have taken place. The exchange of commonplaces is communication with no content other than the fact of communication itself. The "commonplaces" that play such an enormous role in daily conversation work because everyone can ingest them immediately. Their very banality makes them something the speaker and the listener have in common.
- Pierre Bourdieu, 'On Television' (1996/98)
[reference courtesy of Australian novelist Christine Howe, who quoted it at the 'Critical Futures' symposium I attended a couple of years ago at the University of Wollongong]
Now, however (thanks largely to Christine Howe), I worry about it less.





Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body? (1923)


At one point the conversation with my friend-recently-returned-from-the-US shifted (for some reason I've now forgotten) to the detective novels of Dorothy Sayers. Now I'd read all of these, in sequence, on more than one occasion, and could easily have answered any random question on campanology or heraldry drawn from her books.

My friend dismissed her quickly with a wry reference to the naming of the evil surgeon Sir Julian Freke ("Freak" - get it?) in her very first novel, Whose Body?, as well as a claim that the book was anti-semitic, given that the murderer's victim was a wealthy financier called Sir Reuben Levy.



Sir Frederick Treves: The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923)


Now this seemed (and seems) - to me - rather a complex matter. The name of Sir Julian Freke had, to my mind, been carefully chosen to recall to the reader that most famous of British surgeons Sir Frederick Treves, discoverer (and promoter) of Joseph Merrick, the (so-called) "Elephant Man."

Treves certainly seems a far more sympathetic figure, so perhaps 'Freke' is supposed to hint at the Mr. Hyde-like double nature lurking in any God-like surgeon. Or perhaps Sayers knew more gossip about Treves than we do now.



Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)


As for the claims of anti-semitism, they don't seem to me to have that much behind them, gruesome though the details of this particular murder undoubtedly are. Certainly Freke is presented as being intensely anti-semitic.

The subject is canvassed interestingly in the Wikipedia article on Dorothy Sayers. Later, in 1936, when "a translator wanted 'to soften the thrusts against the Jews' in Whose Body?, Sayers, surprised, replied that the only characters 'treated in a favourable light were the Jews!'"

In other words: "How can I be a racist? Some of my best friends are [fill in as required ...]."

I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is that my friend, a fast thinker if ever there was one, was onto the next point before any real consideration could be given to this one, wrecked reputations left smoking in his wake. Dorothy Sayers - anti-semite; T. S. Eliot - anti-semite; Pound - Fascist ... and so on and so forth. A label for everyone and the mouth constantly moving on to new aperçus and subtleties: quick subtleties, mind you, so that no-one (such as myself) stoutly bringing up the rear, could be permitted any time to break down or examine the ideas presented.

Talking people down in this matter - battering down their resistance with a shower of facts and figures, flimsy literary and cultural parallels, and random contemporary events, is, of course, one of the more effective ways of ensuring victory in debate. On paper it can seem to work equally well just as long as no-one really reads what you write.

As long as they skate over it in the same way, and at the same speed, that you composed it, the knockdown argument is almost guaranteed.



I'm sorry to say that British cultural critic and historian Marina Warner does seem to me to exemplify some of these traits. Don't get me wrong: I've read a great many of her books, and have received much profit from them. They certainly cover many areas - European folklore and fairy-tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights - which are of profound interest to me. And yet they continue to frustrate me, perhaps because of the speed at which her mind moves from subject to subject.

Here's a list of the books by her I own:
  1. The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of T’zu-hsi (1835-1908), Empress Dowager of China. 1972. London: Cardinal: 1974.
  2. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. 1975. London: Quartet Books, 1978.
  3. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
  4. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996.
  5. The Mermaids in the Basement. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994.
  6. [Edited] Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Illustrated by Sophie Herxheimer. 1994. London: Vintage, 1996.
  7. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.
  8. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. 1998. London: Vintage, 2000.
  9. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  10. Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004.
  11. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights. 2011. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2012.

As you can see, they're a eclectic bunch: history, fiction, literature, folklore ... She certainly covers a lot of ground.



Her ideas on transformation, cultural fluidity, gender roles, are all very persuasive, and tend to get quoted approvingly by other like-minded writers. But is she reliable? Can you trust her when it comes to tedious matters such as facts and dates?

Not always, I'm sorry to say. Let's take one small example:



In her introduction to the Folio Society's sumptuous six-volume edition of the Mardrus/Mathers translation of the Arabian Nights, she mentions that:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Hugh Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent lovers of Araby, produced translations based on these Arabic compilations. Their editions reflect their own attachments: Hugh Lane's is stuffed full of ethnographical details of Old Cairo (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful): Burton's version is an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo, and is also truffled with lore (much of it salacious, earning Burton his nickname, 'Dirty Dick.'). [p.xiv]
But who is this "Hugh Lane" she is speaking of? There was a Hugh Lane (1875-1915), drowned by the sinking of the Lusitania, who is famous for having attempted to leave his priceless collection of impressionist paintings to his native country, Ireland, only to be rebuffed by the local Dublin authorities.

But the Lane Warner means is clearly Edward William Lane (1801-1876), who was indeed the first major translator of the Nights from Arabic into English. I don't think anyone has ever accused him of writing especially "nostalgically" about "Old Cairo", though - let alone "fancifully". On the contrary, his classic work on the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), remains a most informative and detailed guide to the city, compiled - as it was - in consultation with a number of local Sheikhs. His main claim to fame, however, is the comprehensive Arabic-English Lexicon, which occupied him from 1842 until his death.

Warner is on safer ground with Richard F. Burton. Her description of his work as a "Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues" is certainly accurate enough. Fans of his version - such as myself - may feel a little affronted by her casual dismissal of this massive labour of love, but she is (of course) perfectly entitled to her opinion, which is by no means an uncommon one.



Marina Warner: Stranger Magic (2012)


A few years later, in her book Stranger Magic, she admitted having mainly relied on the most recent French translation of the Nights - by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel, 3 vols (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005-7) - in preference to any of the English ones. Had she actually read them? She certainly implies as much. Here, for instance, is her revised version of the paragraph quoted above:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Edward W. Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent Arabophiles, produced translations that reflected their own attachments. Lane's, published in 1838-41, followed close on the heels of his ethnographical description of contemporary Cairo (The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1835); Lane added a huge apparatus of notes on Arab Society (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful). The three-volume set of 1850 includes 600 engravings based on Lane's experiences in Cairo; my copy, which came originally from my great-grandmother's library, is one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child, and though it is pretty fustian, with Lane tranquillising so much of the book's agitated emotions and adventures, it is readable to a degree that Richard Burton's lurid and archaising version, made fifty years later, never reaches. [p.18]
It's not for me to cast any doubt on the passage referring to her childhood reading of Lane. It just seems a bit odd that someone who didn't even know (or bother to check) his first name a decade before, should treasure a copy of his translation as "one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child."

The snap judgements of the first version of the passage remain - "rather fanciful," "translations that reflected their own attachments" - though she has softened some of the more egregious epithets: "lovers of Araby" has become "Arabophiles", and Burton's version is now "lurid and archaising" rather than "an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo ... truffled with lore (much of it salacious ...)."

I certainly don't question Warner's choice of texts to base her discussion on. I, too, am an admirer of the wonderful new French translation: It's just difficult to continue to believe in the reliability of a scholar who was hazy about E. W. Lane's first name - and certainly seems never to have read extensively in Burton's work - as a reliable guide to the intricacies of one of the world's longest books, with a complex textual history which spans cultures and continents as well as millennia of analogues.

In other words, beguiling as so many of Warner's generalisations and juxtapositions are, none of her statements - especially those centred around dates and names - can be trusted without further research. Which is really not much use. Even historical and cultural popularisers (a very worthwhile calling, IMHO) should be careful to check their facts. What exactly are they popularising, otherwise?





Helen Sword: Ghostwriting Modernism (2002)


My final exhibit is the book Ghostwriting Modernism, by Auckland University Academic Helen Sword. Like Warner's, Sword's pages are plastered her pages with allusions and lists of possible parallels. Unlike Warner's, though, her notes are a carefully composed repository of bibliographical leads and further information.

In terms of readability, it's probably no accident that Warner's book flew off the shelves whereas Sword's is obtainable only in university libraries and from specialist booksellers. If it weren't for my fascination with its subject-matter - the manifestation of spiritualist tropes in such canonical authors as Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, H. D., Plath and Hughes - I probably wouldn't have bothered to read it myself.

But, having now done so, I've shelved it close to hand for further consultation. This is a book which is more than the sum of its parts. It opens perspectives on masses of further work on such fascinating exhibits as James Merrill's Ouija-board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, or the spirit messages from dead RAF pilots which H. D. collected in the latter years of the Second World War, which have proved such an embarrassment to many of her admirers.

Everyone already knew that Yeats was a convinced Occultist, but simply collecting - in convenient form - so much data on the phenomena of 'ghostliness' in such mainstream twentieth century writers makes it almost impossible to continue to sideline it as some kind of individual aberration on the part of each of them.

That's not to say that there isn't something a bit loony about Sylvia and Ted crouched over the Ouija board receiving messages from the great unknown. But it certainly isn't nearly as odd and uncommon as many critics would like to believe. Did they do it, like Yeats, to access new "metaphors for poetry"? Or was it something more serious for them? All this, and much more, is discussed judiciously, and with ample cross-referencing, by Helen Sword.



Fast-thinkers or Ghostwriters? So many books now fall into the first category, I'm afraid. You start to read them, only to become gradually aware that they're little more than condensations of the idées reçues [received ideas] mocked so thoroughly by Flaubert in the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues" in his posthumous novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). The research is sloppy and second-hand, the editing perfunctory, and the whole thing a mere "interruption to our studies," in A. E. Housman's devastating phrase.

Think of all those war books which keep on flopping out year after year: Martin Middlebrook's The First Day on the Somme (1971) was regarded as a seminal and revisionist work when it first appeared some fifty years ago now. Now, of course, further research has thrown in doubt many of its conclusions, but do we really need successive legions of books with more or less the same title, gloatingly recounting the same devastating events?

There's a furtive voyeurism about the worst of these books. They look like real books - their publishers try hard to make them resemble genuine historical works - but actually they're just rehashes of the same tired clichés. How many hacks have written books designed to show that Sir Douglas Haig was a great general, a genius on the level of Napoleon or Marlborough? He won, didn't he? And he was British, after all.

The trouble is that the real books concealed in this crimson tide of white noise, those based on real research and genuine new thinking, increasingly seldom emerge from the ruck. Ghostwriting Modernism is such a book. It's not perfect by any means - but it's certainly based on careful reading over many years. Stranger Magic, despite all the extravagant encomia reprinted on its cover ("a flying carpet of a book" - Jeanette Winterson), is, I'm afraid, not. It's hard, even, to say what it's actually about. Does it have a point? Or a theme? If so, I'm not really clear what it is, despite having read it assiduously from cover to cover.

And, when it comes to new books about the Arabian Nights, I can assure you that I'm not a particularly critical reader. Pretty much any and all authors of such can rely on me as a captive audience!






Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Henry Torrens: The Forgotten Man of the 1001 Nights



Should you ever have occasion to look up the name of Henry Torrens on Wikipedia, you may have some difficulty actually locating him. You'll find Major-General Sir Henry Torrens KCB, author of that standard textbook Field Exercise and Evolutions of the Army (1824):



Sir Henry Torrens (1779-1828)


Chances are you'll also find his grandson, the even more eminent Lieutenant General Sir Henry D'Oyley Torrens KCB KCMG, without too much trouble:



Felice Beato: Henry D'Oyley Torrens (1833-1889)


What you won't find, unless you look very hard indeed, is the entry on Henry Whitelock Torrens, son of the first, and father of the second of the military gentlemen listed above:
Henry Whitelock Torrens (20 May 1806 – 16 August 1852), son of Major-General Henry Torrens, was born on 20 May 1806. He received his B.A. at Christ Church, Oxford (where he was a president of the United Debating Society), and entered the Inner Temple. After a short service under the Foreign Office, he obtained a writership from the Court of Directors of the East India Company and arrived in India in November 1828 and held various appointments at Meerut. In 1835 he joined the Secretariat, in which he served in several departments under Sir William Hay Macnaghten. In 1839 he assisted in the editing of the Calcutta Star, a weekly paper, which became a daily paper called the Eastern Star. He was secretary (1840–1846) and a Vice-President (1843–1845) to the Asiatic Society of Bengal (now the Asiatic Society). In December 1846, he was appointed Agent to the Governor-General at Murshidabad. Here in his endeavours to improve the Nizamat administration, his relations with the Nawab Nizam and his officials became greatly strained.
He was a clever essayist as well as a journalist and scholar, and his scattered papers were deservedly collected and published at Calcutta in 1854.
Torrens died of dysentery at Calcutta while on a visit to the Governor-General on 16 August 1852 and was buried in the Lower Circular Road Cemetery.
A bit of a nobody, one might feel tempted to conclude: a lawyer and journalist, who died young, leaving behind a son and a pile of "scattered papers."

What this entry fails to mention, however, is his importance as the author of the first serious attempt at a complete English translation of the 1001 Nights from the Arabic. He is included on the page devoted to Translations of One Thousand and One Nights, however:
Henry Torrens translated the first fifty nights from Calcutta II, which were published in 1838. Having heard that Edward William Lane began his own translation, Torrens abandoned his work.


There's a bit more to it than that, however. Luckily Richard Burton, in the preface to his own complete 1885 translation of the collection, is somewhat more expansive:
At length in 1838, Mr. Henry Torrens, B.A., Irishman, lawyer ("of the Inner Temple") and Bengal Civilian, took a step in the right direction; and began to translate, "The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night," (1 vol., 8vo, Calcutta: W. Thacker and Co.) from the Arabic of the Ægyptian (!) MS. edited by Mr. (afterwards Sir) William H. Macnaghten. The attempt, or rather the intention, was highly creditable; the copy was carefully moulded upon the model and offered the best example of the verbatim et literatim style. But the plucky author knew little of Arabic, and least of what is most wanted, the dialect of Egypt and Syria. His prose is so conscientious as to offer up spirit at the shrine of letter; and his verse, always whimsical, has at times a manner of Hibernian whoop which is comical when it should be pathetic. Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed would have contained nine or ten.
- Richard F. Burton, "The Translator's Foreword." A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols. Benares: Kamashastra Society, 1885. vol.1: xi.
You'll note that his wikipedia entry above made no mention of Torrens' Irish antecedents. Burton's remarks about the "Hibernian whoop" in his verses underlines it rather patronisingly ("plucky" seems a rather belitting epithet to apply to a fellow author, also). The curious thing is that Burton himself was often discriminated against as an Irishman by his intensely class and caste-conscious English contemporaries. Whilst he himself was born in Torquay, both of his parents were of Irish extraction.

Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, here are the title-pages of Torrens' two principal publications. Fortunately both are readily available online as free e-texts:


  1. Torrens, Henry. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: From the Arabic of the Aegyptian Ms. as edited by Wm Hay Macnaghten, Esqr., Done into English by Henry W. Torrens. Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co. / London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1838.


  2. Hume, James, ed. A Selection from the Writings, Prose and Poetical, of the late Henry W. Torrens, Esq., B.A., Bengal Civi Service, and of the Inner Temple; with a Biographical Memoir. 2 vols. Calcutta & London: R. C. Lepage & Co., 1854.

The editor of the second of these volumes explains that:
I have taken nearly all the poetry from the volume of the Arabian Nights ... because I found selection most difficult where all appeared good. The book is out of print, or nearly so I believe, and the severest critic will not blame me for preserving what otherwise might soon have been lost, or at any rate difficult to procure.
So who's correct? Did Torrens have any poetic talent or not? Burton (of course) had a tendency to play down the merits of any possible rivals. He himself has a reputation as a most execrable versifier (unlike his fellow Nights translator, John Payne).



William Harvey: The Ifrit and the Lady (1839)


Perhaps, then, you should judge for yourselves:
Then they both gave her rings from off their hands, and she said to them, "This Ufreet carried me off secretly on the night of my marriage, and put me into a coffer, and placed the coffer in a chest, and put on the chest seven strong locks, and laid me low in the midst of the roaring sea, the ever restless in the dashing of waves; yet he does not know that when a woman desires aught, there is nothing can prevail against her, as certain poets say.
"With confidence no women grace,
Nor trust an oath that's given by them;
Passion's the source and resting place,
Of anger and joy with them;
False love they show with lying face,
But ’neath the cloak all's guile with them;
In Yoosoof's story you may trace,
Some of the treacheries rife in them;
See ye not father Adam's case?
He was driven forth by cause of them.
Certain poets too have said,
“But alas! for you, who blame me
Fix the blamed one in his fault!
Is the sin with which you shame me,
Great and grievous as you call't?
Say, I be indeed a lover,
Have I done aught greater crime
Than in all men you discover,
Even from the olden time?
Ne'er at earthly thing I'll wonder,
Whatsoe'er the marvel be,
Till on one I chance to blunder
Scaped from woman's wile scot free."
The passage above comes from the frame-story to the Nights, where the two brothers Shahryar and Shahzaman, having executed their wives for adultery, are riding out to try and discover a virtuous woman. This one, even though she was abducted on her wedding night by a seemingly all-powerful Ifrit, has still managed to cuckold him more than 500 times.



Albert Letchford: The Ifrit and the Lady (1897)


Here's Burton's 1885 version of the same passage:
When they had drawn their two rings from their hands and given them to her, she said to them, "Of a truth this Ifrit bore me off on my bride-night, and put me into a casket and set the casket in a coffer and to the coffer he affixed seven strong padlocks of steel and deposited me on the deep bottom of the sea that raves, dashing and clashing with waves; and guarded me so that I might remain chaste and honest, quotha! that none save himself might have connexion with me. But I have lain under as many of my kind as I please, and this wretched Jinni wotteth not that Destiny may not be averted nor hindered by aught, and that whatso woman willeth the same she fulfilleth however man nilleth. Even so saith one of them:—
'Rely not on women;
Trust not to their hearts,
Whose joys and whose sorrows
Are hung to their parts!
Lying love they will swear thee
Whence guile ne'er departs:
Take Yusuf for sample
'Ware sleights and 'ware smarts!
Iblis ousted Adam
(See ye not?) thro' their arts.'
And another saith:—
'Stint thy blame, man! 'Twill drive to a passion without bound;
My fault is not so heavy as fault in it hast found.
If true lover I become, then to me there cometh not
Save what happened unto many in the by-gone stound.
For wonderful is he and right worthy of our praise
Who from wiles of female wits kept him safe and kept him sound.'"


John Tenniel: The Sleeping Genie and the Lady (1865)


And here's John Payne's (1882):
So each of them took off a ring and gave it to her. And she said to them, "Know that this genie carried me off on my wedding night and laid me in a box and shut the box up in a glass chest, on which he clapped seven strong locks and sank it to the bottom of the roaring stormy sea, knowing not that nothing can hinder a woman, when she desires aught, even as says one of the poets:
I rede thee put no Faith in womankind,
Nor trust the oaths they lavish all in vain:
For on the satisfaction of their lusts
Depend alike their love and their disdain.
They proffer lying love, but perfidy
Is all indeed their garments do contain.
Take warning, then, by Joseph's history,
And how a woman sought to do him bane;
And eke thy father Adam, by their fault
To leave the groves of Paradise was fain.
Or as another says:
Out on yon! blame confirms the blamed one in his way.
My fault is not so great indeed as you would say.
If I'm in love, forsooth, my case is but the same
As that of other men before me, many a day.
For great the wonder were if any man alive
From women and their wiles escape unharmed away!"


My 1001 Nights Project: The Ifrit and his Stolen Bride (tumblr)


So what do you think? I certainly think it would be difficult to claim that Torrens's version was any worse than either of the others. On the contrary, it's much easier to follow, and seems to mean much the same thing. As for Burton's accusation that the former's translation exemplified "the verbatim et literatim style," it's surely the case that both Payne and Burton make far greater efforts to follow the verbal and syntactical oddities of the original Arabic.

No doubt it's true that Torrens gave up on his project when he heard that Edward W. Lane was engaged in a not dissimiar work - not knowing, perhaps, how sadly bowdlerised the resulting translation would turn out to be. There's a curious echo, there, of Burton's discovery, fifty years later, that John Payne was embarked on the same project of a complete and literal translation of The Thousand Nights and One Night.

Unlike Torrens, though, Burton did not choose to step aside meekly. Instead he offered Payne priority of publication, but then went on to issue his own extensively annotated version a year later. The embarrassing similarities between large parts of the two translations has led to accusations of plagiarism on Burton's part. Whether or not this is true, even Burton admitted that when a previous scholar has hit on the perfect way to express something, it would be needless pedantry to insist on phrasing it differently. Make of that what you will.

It does seem possible that Burton was so scornful of Torrens because the latter resembled him in so many ways: the 'un-English' exuberance of manner, the gift for languages ... Unlike Torrens, though, Burton was sent down from Oxford without a degree, and managed to antagonise almost all of his well-wishers both in India and England.

Torrens, by contrast, managed to work harmoniously even with the eminent but eccentric William Hay Macnaghten, whose four-volume edition of the Arabic text of the 1001 Nights - the basis for his own translation - remains a monumental and irreplaceable work.



Of course, to anyone familiar with the history of nineteenth-century India, and particularly the ill-judged 1839 invasion of Afghanistan, Macnaghten is better known as the blundering political officer who was captured and killed by the Afghans in December 1841, shortly before the disastrous retreat from Kabul - generally thought to be among the worst military disasters in British history.

Macnaghten has a cameo role in the section devoted to the Afghanistan debacle in George MacDonald Fraser's irreverent but highly readable pisstake version of imperial history Flashman (1969), which purports to be the memoirs of the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays.



George MacDonald Fraser: Flashman (1839-42)


Interestingly enough, the city I live in, Auckland, is named after George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, Governor-General of India between 1836 and 1842, whose other great claim to fame is principal responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster.

My father could never walk past the toga'd statue of the great fool - originally erected in Calcutta in 1848, but donated to our city in 1969 - without shaking his fist and calling down curses upon his name.

The connections are all there, once you're ready to see them.



Monday, February 06, 2017

My New Massey Course on the 1001 Nights



Bronwyn Lloyd: Arabian Nights bookcase (3/2/17)


In three weeks from now, my new paper 139.329: Advanced Fiction Writing will be starting at Massey Albany (where I teach), as well as in an extramural version for distance students.

The most innovative aspect of this course is that it's centred firmly on the Arabian Nights - or, rather, on the almost infinite variety of fictional techniques on display in that work (if it is a work, that is, rather than just an eclectic anthology of stories collected over the centuries by different compilers in different languages and cultures).

How exactly am I proposing to do that? Well, if you're curious, you could do worse than check out the following link to the (publicly available) course website: http://albany139329.blogspot.co.nz/. That will give you a pretty good overview. If you're really interested, of course, we're always open to new enrolments. (After all, as an old Linguistics Professor told the idealistic young J. R. R. Tolkien when he first arrived at university, "What is a university, lad? It's a factory. And what does it produce? It produces fees").

For those of you who are bit less passionate about the subject, I thought it might be best here to reprint a kind of q-&-a interview I did on the subject with the Canadian-Sikh Indian writer Jaspreet Singh when he came to stay with us a few months ago. He was particularly intrigued by the large bookcase full of all the different translations and versions of the collection which we have in our living room.

Given his upbringing in North India, in Kashmir and New Delhi, Jaspreet preferred to use the Persian form of the title, Hazar Afsaneh [Thousand Tales], rather than the more familiar Arabic Alf Layla wa Layla [One Thousand Nights and a Night].





Bronwyn Lloyd: Arabian Nights bookcase [close-up] (3/2/2017)

Hazaar Afsaneh [The Thousand Nights]:
An Interview by Jaspreet Singh




John W. MacDonald: Jaspreet Singh (2008)


[Jaspreet:] Who introduced you to Hazaar Afsaneh as a child? How old were you? Where were you based?
[Jack]: You know, it’s quite hard to say. I suppose it must have been my father. At any rate he was the one who bought the beautifully illustrated editions of Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor which I remember poring over with such attention. I still have one of them now:

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Retold by Shirley Goulden. Illustrated by Maraja. London: W. H. Allen, 1964.
I suppose that puts it back well before the age of 10 or so. We were already in the house in Mairangi Bay. All my siblings were born and brought up there.

When did the Nights become an incurable obsession?
I think that they really took over – from being one of many other bookish interests – after I’d finished my PhD thesis and was utterly sick of the subject matter of said subject of study (books about South America in European literature). So that would put it around 1990: 25 years ago.

Tahiti?
Ah, well, you make a good point. It was while I was in Tahiti, studying French, in 1978, at the age of 16, that I bought my first substantive copy of the Nights (or, rather, arranged to have it given to me as a birthday present: they’d bought me another book which I already owned, and offered to exchange it. I – somewhat cheekily, in retrospect – asked to be allowed to swap it for the two volume Classiques Garnier edition of Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits.) I read virtually every word of it in French, then, long before I owned it in English.

Do you have a name for the bookshelf? Hazaar Afsaneh (1000 Stories) bookshelf?


Bronwyn Lloyd: Glass-fronted bookcase (2/2/17)

Just the Arabian Nights bookshelf, I suppose. Before that they were scattered all over the place: the main ones in that glass-fronted bookshelf I inherited from my grandmother.

When exactly did you start seeing your growing collection as a separate bookshelf?
I suppose, probably, when I was living in Palmerston North in 1991. I already owned a number of editions in various languages, and the sheer bulk of them was beginning to make it difficult to house them.

Strange, the bookshelf is only a few meters away from the room where you first read 'Sindbad the Sailor' and 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'!!! Talk a bit about this.
Yes that’s right. Of course, it’s true to say that if you stay in or around the same house for a very long time, it goes through a number of evolutions in your mind. That far-off house of my childhood is harder for me to remember than some of its more recent incarnations: the house my mother and father grew old in together, after all of us had left to the four corners of the globe.

Nevertheless, there is something strange about literally being in the same place – again. Comforting on the one hand, but also somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t seem to fit with the peripatetic nature of the modern world.

Memory/Story of the 'last' book you acquired for the bookshelf? The first 3 books (now part of the bookshelf)?

I think that the latest book I inserted into the bookshelf (every one that goes in means that another one has to go out now) was a beautiful little copy of Dr J. C. Mardrus’s The Queen of Sheba: Translated into French from his own Arabic Text. Translated into English by E. Powys Mathers (London: The Casanova Society, n.d. [1924]). I bought it in the Browns Bay market (of all places!) Mardrus’s turn-of-the-century version of the Nights is – though wildly inaccurate – extremely entertaining, and the English translation of it is in some ways even more stylish than the original (Powys Mathers was a far better poet than Dr. Mardrus).

The first three books I got for this bookcase were, I would imagine:

  • Les Mille et Une Nuits: Contes arabes traduits par Galland. Trans. Antoine Galland. 12 vols. 1704-17. Ed. Gaston Picard. 2 vols. 1960. Paris: Garnier, 1975. (bought in Tahiti in 1978)



  • Burton's Translation (1885-88)

  • The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Trans. Richard F. Burton. 1885. Decorated with 1001 Illustrations by Valenti Angelo. 3 vols. New York: The Heritage Press, 1934. (bought in Auckland sometime in the early 80s)



  • Lane's Translation (1839-41)

  • The Thousand and One Nights; Commonly Called The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Trans. Edward William Lane. 3 vols. 1839-41. Ed. Edward Stanley Poole. 1859. London: Chatto, 1912. (the first two volumes I found in one shop; the other, a couple of years later, in another – the coincidence has always intrigued me …)

But is it really a 'book'? What kind of a book is the 1001 Nights?

It’s more the assertion of a book than an actual book. Certainly there was (or must have been) a Persian collection called the Hazar Afsaneh, which almost certainly predated Islam. It doesn’t survive, however. What does survive is a tiny scrap of manuscript from the ninth century AD, which seems to be part of a translation of the frame-story of the Nights – though probably not quite as we know it. After that there are various not-entirely-consistent references in Arabic reference books around the turn of the millennium, and finally the Galland ms. – a fourteenth-century, 3 vol manuscript of the (so-called) “Syrian” version of the Nights. This is the oldest extant text and was – interestingly – also the first one to be translated more-or-less in full.

After that, after the Nights had become the rage of 18th century Europe, the pressure to find a “complete” version of the collection became overwhelming. It was possibly in response to this that the (so-called) “Egyptian” text was put together – it’s also known as “ZER” ("Zotenberg’s Egyptian Recension”) after the scholar who first identified it. It was a version of this text which was first printed in Cairo in 1835, and it was a variant of it which was translated by Lane, Payne, and Burton, the three most significant English translators.

In other words, it has no identifiable author, dates from a variety of eras, originated in a language and tradition different from the one with which it’s now identified, and has an endlessly varied table of contents. All that really makes it a book is the central idea of Scheherazade telling stories for her life to the tyrannical King Shahryar. In other word, a fictional character constitutes its main authority for being (a little like the Bible, perhaps, which similarly rests its status as a book on the fiction of “divine inspiration”: i.e. having God as its author) …



Galland's Translation (1704-17)


Storytelling techniques?
These are very interesting, and repay much study. While it’s true to say that it’s more of a library than a single book, nevertheless the central core of stories already present in the Galland ms.: “The Fisherman and the Genie,” “The Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad,” and the “Tale of the Hunchback” establish a set of conventions which, while gradually adulterated in much of the rest of the collection, give us our notion of an “Arabian Nights tale.” The Chinese box effect of tale within tale within tale is part of it (what Todorov calls “l’homme récit”: the person who is the story they have to tell); also the supernatural atmosphere of magic and enchantment, particularly the ubiquitous presence of genies and magicians alongside scenes from everyday life; also the convention of Haroun Al-Rashid’s boredom, which leads him to undertake visits to the seedier quarters of his own city; also the highly eroticised encounters between beautiful youths and maidens; also the cliffhanger convention of ending each story at a dramatic point each morning in order to take the serial up the next night; also the highly ritualised and repetitive language employed to maintain our interest (there are hundreds of poems embedded in the stories, also: each one quoted by a character as a kind of reflection on the situation they find themselves in). Is that enough?

Djinn or Gin?
The French word génie, which Galland used to translate the Arabic word “Djinn” (plural “Djinni”) of course really means “spirit” – hence its use as a loanword in English for a “genius” (great spirit). “Gin” in the sense of a gin-trap, yes indeed: since once I fell into this particular pit I quickly realised there was no obvious way out. As for other kinds of gin, I’ve always been more of a wine and beer man myself …

Will your bookshelf continue to grow?
I’d like to say no, but I fear that the real answer is probably yes.

What is unique and unusual about this bookshelf? Books absolutely essential? Books you are proud of? Trophy books? Books you would like to add? Books you would like to discard? Books you have given away?
Books you have tossed aside? Thrown away?
Books you would like to steal?
Books others would like to steal from your collection?

I suppose I treasure most the books I’ve had longest: the 1934 3-volume “Heritage Press” edition of Burton; my first complete 16-volume set of Burton’s Nights, that French edition of Galland I bought in Tahiti almost 40 years ago.

Ideal Hazaar Afsaneh bookshelf?

Well, that would include a complete copy of John Payne’s 1882-89 translation as well as my complete Burton (1885-88). It would include Henry Torren’s 1938 attempt at a complete translation (which he abandoned after one volume). It would also include a copy of the 4-volume 1839 MacNaghten Arabic edition of the Nights, as well as the 1835 Bulaq edition. I’d also like a copy of Weber’s three-volume Tales of the East (1812).

What does your mother think about it? Your partner? What would your father say? Your ancestors?
I think they all think (or would think, in the case of those no longer with us) that I’m quite mad on the subject.

The mind, and impulses, of a collector?
Strange, certainly. One can contemplate the assemblage with perfect satisfaction without it having any appreciable contact with the rest of your life. If the whole thing suddenly disappeared, would one be any worse off?

Have you read your entire collection?
No, not really. There are many versions of the Nights I haven’t read, as well as a lot of the associated collections. I proceed by fits and starts.

The number of times you've read the Nights? When and where and how?
It took me a number of starts to get to the end of the Burton edition, and as I worked my way through some of the more arid regions of the 16 volumes, I think at times I was impelled only by the desire to prove Borges wrong (he said it was impossible to get to the end of that version).

For instance, is it possible to read Hazaar Afsaneh in the kitchen?
I question whether I could read any book in the kitchen.

Do you prefer reading during day or night?
I used to be able to read any time of the day or night. Now I only really read first thing in the morning, over coffee, and last thing at night, before going to sleep. Sometimes I have a bit of a read in the middle of the day, in the guise of a siesta.

Did someone ever read them aloud to you? Did you?
No, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really experienced that outside movies and audio books, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Illustrators of the nights?
There are so many! Edmund Dulac, Marc Chagall, Kay Nielsen, Maxfield Parrish, and – going back a bit – the beautiful illustrations of William Harvey from the original edition of Lane …



Edmund Dulac: Arabian Nights (1907)



Maxfield Parrish: Arabian Nights (1909)



Marc Chagall: Arabian Nights (1948)




William Narvey: Arabian Nights (1839-41)


Translations of the nights?
Translators of the nights?

Some swear by the German translator Littmann; others (Marina Warner, for example) by the 3-volume French Pléiade translation of Bencheikh and Gabrieli; some like Malcolm & Ursula Lyons recent complete Penguin translation; personally, my adherence is still to Burton, for all his eccentricities. Joseph Campbell was a great fan of John Payne’s translation. For sheer entertainment, I think I would read Powys Mathers’ English version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus’ belle infidèle turn-of-the-century French translation.





The Lyons' Translation (2008)


Burton?
A landmark: indispensable, never to be superseded.

Talk a bit about your blog.
I put up the blog ["Scheherazade's Web"] because I couldn’t face the task of editing and reconciling all the various essays I’d written (and published, or read at conferences) about the Nights at various times into a single rational text. Instead, I just plonked them all online, together with a lot of the supplementary materials I’d collected. It seems to provoke a lot of correspondence from isolated Nights fanatics in far-off places.

Did the Nights inspire your own writing?


Jack Ross: EMO (2008)
Cover illustration: Emma Smith

It has had a certain influence, yes: one of my novels, EMO, has a character in it who has written a book about the Nights, said book being my own projected, half-written book about the Nights. It also comes up in quite a few short stories.

Do you recall ever dreaming about the 1001 Nights?
I’m not sure that I do, though I have had many dreams where I was in a second-hand bookshop making all sorts of amazing discoveries in the stacks …

Did you ever dream about your Hazaar Afsaneh bookshelf? About a paradisiacal library of sorts?
No, my dreams tend to be much more suffused by anxiety than that.

Borges and the Arabian Nights?
Well, I wrote an essay about that, as well as various other twentieth-century interpreters of the Nights (John Barth, Andras Hamori, Abdelfatto Kilito) – I even translated his poem on the subject (both are on the blog).

The whole world is within this bookshelf? Not W. G. Sebald's 'Rings of Saturn' but Jack Ross' 'Rings of Arabian Nights'?
In a sense, yes, though I’d hate to be condemned to read only the Arabian Nights for the rest of time. There are other stories, however all-encompassing this one collection has come to be.

Thoughts about Marina Warner? A. S. Byatt? Salman Rushdie?
All have been inspired by the Nights – none know quite so much about it as they think. Quite superficial thoughts about it keep on coming up again and again in their work. Rushdie, of course, has been more inspired by the Kathasaritsagara [Ocean of the Streams of Story] than by the Nights themselves. Warner failed to write the book she could have written on the subject. Byatt has done some nice, rather mannered, imitations of it.

Why are Non-Western books about the Nights not very popular in the West?
Interesting question. It’s true that Mahfouz and other Arabic novelists (especially female ones) who’ve been inspired by it are not widely read – but then, I’m not sure that any contemporary Arabic writing - most unjustly - is very much read in the West!

New Zealand Maori and Pakeha and the 1001 Nights?
I think that would be for Maori writers to say. If they see value in its structures and formulae, it would be very interesting to hear in just what way.

Do you recommend the Arabian Nights Encyclopedia?
Very much so. An indispensable work.

Freud, et al.?
I guess Freudian readings of the central Shahryar / Sharazad dilemma are pretty frequent and (some of them) pretty persuasive. But then I’ve always been rather a fan of Freud as a literary critic.

Edward Said, et al.?
He has little to say about it directly, but I imagine it would strike him as a particularly egregious piece of Orientalist clap-trap – in its larger cultural overtones, at least.

Future of Hazaar Afsaneh?
I think the Academic mill has only just begun to grind away at it. I hope they don’t succeed in crushing its appeal altogether.

Future of your bookshelf?
I like to fantasise about presenting it to some appreciative institution, but I doubt that will ever happen. Sooner or later, I fear, it will be dispersed into a second-hand bookshop somewhere and hopefully continue to fertilise and inspire future bookworms like myself …



Early Copies of Lane's Translation (1839-41)

[13/7-22/8/15]





Kay Nielsen: Scheherazade (1922)