The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights)
The Thousand Nights and a Night
Whereat Al-Rashid marveled and summoning the Kazi and his witnesses, bade draw up the marriage contract between Abdullah and the damsel whom he had brought from the City of Stone. And so he went in to her, and wedded her, and they lived together and enjoyed all manner of delights for many years until at last there came to them the Destroyer of Destinies and Sunderer of Companions. And extolled be the perfection of Allah, who dieth not. Moreover, O auspicious King, I have also heard a tale about...
The Arabian Nights is a collection of tales collected over centuries, and has a claim to be the most famous literature in Arabic. The full Richard Burton translation runs for ten volumes. It probably has more words than Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, supposedly the longest work in the 1001 books set; many shorter editions exist, and you can be considered to have "read the Arabian Nights" without going through the full Richard Burton set. I actually did read the Burton set a couple of years before I began writing Bookposts, and really, it’s not worth a second journey this soon. Seriously. Ten volumes. In a few years more, I may try reading some of these to my kid, but for the purposes of this review, I decided to go with the Harvard Classics “Tales from the Arabian Nights” version (Vol. 17 of the Harvard Classics set), which has some of the best stories. Read it and for literary discussion purposes, you’ll have read the Arabian Nights.
DID YOU KNOW: Sinbad the sailor appears in the original 1001 Nights, but Alladin and Ali Baba, the two stories best known to western readers, do not. For them, you have to go to the Supplemental Nights, an ADDITIONAL seven volumes in Burton’s set (I’m not making this up; seventeen total).
Other verbose authors are accused of being paid by the word, but Scheherazade, who narrates, had an excuse. Her husband the Caliph was going to kill her when she stopped talking, and so we can forgive her for packing the tales with lots of extra description. The typical story does not begin with “There was a woodcutter with three sons, the youngest of whom was called Simpleton”. No, here, we begin with the father’s story, usually a king or rich man who has much to satisfy him, but who lacks only a son, and so, after a few nights’ worth of adventures, during which the man says “There is no God but the One god, and Mohammed is his prophet” a lot, he meets with a mysterious magician or old crone, who gives him a potion or directions for a spell that gets his wife with child. And so the son is born, and maybe a sibling or two, and THEN the real story of the favored child’s adventures begins. And this happens over and over and over....in the full set, the stories necessarily get repetitious, but Scheherazade's murderous husband never complains, and always asks for the next tale.
Those of us who played early Magic the Gathering games will remember the Arabian Nights supplement and will be bemused to learn why, for example, the Drop of Honey and Abu J’afar cards do what they do. For the most part, the set is best read in small batches.
Whereat Al-Rashid marveled and summoning the Kazi and his witnesses, bade draw up the marriage contract between Abdullah and the damsel whom he had brought from the City of Stone. And so he went in to her, and wedded her, and they lived together and enjoyed all manner of delights for many years until at last there came to them the Destroyer of Destinies and Sunderer of Companions. And extolled be the perfection of Allah, who dieth not. Moreover, O auspicious King, I have also heard a tale about...
The Arabian Nights is a collection of tales collected over centuries, and has a claim to be the most famous literature in Arabic. The full Richard Burton translation runs for ten volumes. It probably has more words than Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, supposedly the longest work in the 1001 books set; many shorter editions exist, and you can be considered to have "read the Arabian Nights" without going through the full Richard Burton set. I actually did read the Burton set a couple of years before I began writing Bookposts, and really, it’s not worth a second journey this soon. Seriously. Ten volumes. In a few years more, I may try reading some of these to my kid, but for the purposes of this review, I decided to go with the Harvard Classics “Tales from the Arabian Nights” version (Vol. 17 of the Harvard Classics set), which has some of the best stories. Read it and for literary discussion purposes, you’ll have read the Arabian Nights.
DID YOU KNOW: Sinbad the sailor appears in the original 1001 Nights, but Alladin and Ali Baba, the two stories best known to western readers, do not. For them, you have to go to the Supplemental Nights, an ADDITIONAL seven volumes in Burton’s set (I’m not making this up; seventeen total).
Other verbose authors are accused of being paid by the word, but Scheherazade, who narrates, had an excuse. Her husband the Caliph was going to kill her when she stopped talking, and so we can forgive her for packing the tales with lots of extra description. The typical story does not begin with “There was a woodcutter with three sons, the youngest of whom was called Simpleton”. No, here, we begin with the father’s story, usually a king or rich man who has much to satisfy him, but who lacks only a son, and so, after a few nights’ worth of adventures, during which the man says “There is no God but the One god, and Mohammed is his prophet” a lot, he meets with a mysterious magician or old crone, who gives him a potion or directions for a spell that gets his wife with child. And so the son is born, and maybe a sibling or two, and THEN the real story of the favored child’s adventures begins. And this happens over and over and over....in the full set, the stories necessarily get repetitious, but Scheherazade's murderous husband never complains, and always asks for the next tale.
Those of us who played early Magic the Gathering games will remember the Arabian Nights supplement and will be bemused to learn why, for example, the Drop of Honey and Abu J’afar cards do what they do. For the most part, the set is best read in small batches.