Arabian Nights
blog.pgdp.net
blog.pgdp.net
Borges suggested Galland might simply have made up the story of Aladdin on his own, others that is might be an original creation by the Maronite storyteller.
Folklorists have pointed out that the set of stories recorded from the storyteller have a number of story tropes more characteristic of European rather than Middle Eastern folk tales.
Wikipedia carefully states: "Aladdin is a folk tale most probably of Middle Eastern origin".
That sounds a lot like the origin story of Don Quixote... (within the text, it was allegedly told to Cervantes by Cide Hamete Benengeli)
A lot of the original stories may be verbal oral and not necessarily written, another lot may be lost (burn libraries etc) and this all happened from 400 to 1000 years ago, so not exactly yesterday.
But it is also possible that the Maronite storyteller was from a somewhat different storytelling tradition. Maronites are a Christian minority in the Levant which was traditionally involved in maritime trade, so they might have different sources for stories. In the end it is all guesswork since Gallard is the only known source of the story.
At one point a manuscript was found with Aladdin in Arabic, but it turned out to be an Arabic translation from Gallard!
Here is a great article about the question: https://ajammc.com/2017/09/14/who-wrote-aladdin/
Interesting, could you give us an example of these characteristics?
Islamic and European societies during the period of these stories were different in unique ways, and for that reason I'm not exactly sure how those characteristics were more similar to the one rather than the other.
The issue with Alladin, Sinbad, and Ali baba, is that they lack most of the common motifs of Arabian nights tales (IE the slave whose mistake solves the problem, bedtricks, the sultan who solves everything, the discovered needed object) but do possess motifs very characteristic of 17 and 18th century French folktales (notably alladins rags to riches story, and the princesses cup trick). They also are less motif heavy in general! That doesn’t mean the translator made them up by the way... the resemblance to French folktales could be an accident, and they could be from another storytelling tradition, but they don’t seem like Arabian nights stories
It's great to see they have left the footnotes, that are some of the most interesting aspects of the translation (trigger warning: Burton was a Victorian and exhibits all the casual racism of his epoch, despite being very forward-looking in surprising ways).
My favorite one is from volume 1:
[FN#543] Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history.
> AT TRIESTE, IN 1872, in a palace with damp statues and deficient hygienic facilities, a gentleman on whose face an African scar told its tale — Captain Richard Francis Burton, the English consul — embarked on a famous translation of the Quitab aliflaila ua laila, which the roumis know by the title, The Thousand and One Nights. One of the secret aims of his work was the annihilation of another gentleman (also weatherbeaten, and with a dark Moorish beard) who was compiling a vast dictionary in England and who died long before he was annihilated by Burton. That gentleman was Edward Lane, the Orientalist, author of a highly scrupulous version of The Thousand and One Nights that had supplanted a version by Galland. Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton we must understand this hostile dynasty.
Borges also admires Burton's footnotes:
> Thus Volume Six (which I have before me) includes some three hundred notes, among which are the following: a condemnation of jails and a defense of corporal punishment and fines; some examples of the Islamic respect for bread; a legend about the hairiness of Queen Belkis’ legs; an enumeration of the four colors that are emblematic of death; a theory and practice of Oriental ingratitude; the information that angels prefer a piebald mount, while Djinns favor horses with a bright-bay coat; a synopsis of the mythology surrounding the secret Night of Power or Night of Nights; a denunciation of the superficiality of Andrew Lang; a diatribe against rule by democracy; a census of the names of Mohammed, on the Earth, in the Fire, and in the Garden; a mention of the Amalekite people, of long years and large stature; a note on the private parts of the Moslem, which for the man extend from the navel to his knees, and for the woman from the top of the head to the tips of her toes; a consideration of the asa’o [roasted beef] of the Argentine gaucho; a warning about the discomforts of “equitation” when the steed is human; an allusion to a grandiose plan for cross-breeding baboons with women and thus deriving a sub-race of good proletarians. At fifty, a man has accumulated affections, ironies, obscenities, and copious anecdotes; Burton unburdened himself of them in his notes.
The Burton translation is of more interest as an psychosexual glimpse into the guy's mind, and an Orientalist artifact, than for the story istelf. Burton wrote in a bizarrely archaicized English that has no counterpart in the text, which reads like all oral storytelling everywhere—repetitive, engaging, and fun.
I started the Burton translation but found the wording - dense? It seemed it should be more authentic though since it was a direct English translation.
Burton, as I have glimpsed, was quite a character.
Like any ancient work, it's worth hopping between a few translations over the years depending on what you're currently into. I've got a shelf full of Iliads and Odysseys because I can't decide which I like best.
Here's an example from the introduction to Dawood's translation, which I happen to have handy:
"But she rejoined by saying, 'Allah upon you both that ye come down forthright, and if you come not, I will rouse upon you my husband, this Ifrit, and he shall do you to die by the illest of deaths'; and she continued making signals to them."
I'm sure that's an accurate enough translation of the relevant bit of the Nights. But it's not good English. "Allah upon you"? "do you to die by the illest of deaths"? Maybe the idea is to give it an exotic flavour, but the stories themselves provide enough of that, and so far as I know the original language wouldn't feel exotic to a native reader.
It sounds like a pidgin, or literal translation. Can anybody compare the grammar used to that of the original text? Or is it a work of complete imagination?
There's (obviously) absolutely nothing with liking deliberately archaic, slightly high-flown language. Personally I find it rather annoying in Burton but like it in the KJV, but different people have different tastes.
Though ... A lot of people who read the KJV are doing so not so much for the enjoyment of its literary style, but because they believe it to be the Word of God; unfortunately this means that many people are seeking divine enlightenment from a translation that (1) in many cases they don't understand well just because its language is hundreds of years separated from what they're accustomed to speaking and reading, and that (2) is based on now-outdated textual scholarship and therefore does a suboptimal job of reporting what the allegedly divinely inspired writers actually wrote. That seems unfortunate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszjwy
Programme description from the above page:
> The One Thousand and One Nights are a collection of fantastical stories of flying carpets, magic and genies whose ancient origins go back to the 7th century or earlier. The tales are told by Scheherazade who uses the power of storytelling night after night to stop her Sultan husband from beheading her.
> These highly influential stories were brought to the West in the 18th century, when more tales like Aladdin and Ali Baba were said to have been added by the French translator, and it has continued to evolve over the centuries. Rajan Datar and guests explore why these stories became so popular around the world and what they mean to us today.
> Joining Rajan is Wen Chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic at SOAS in London; Dr Sandra Naddaff, senior lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University; and the Iranian TV producer Shabnam Rezaei.
But then, let's be fair, their depiction of China sounds like it was just a placeholder for "far away land"
So if your friend lives across town and you are inconvenienced, in Arabic you would say "why do you live in China?".
https://twitter.com/TommSciortino/status/1357376440170258434
Just checked the "mobi" version of the volume 1 from this link, and it looks like all paragraphs are just walls of texts with no paragraphs and the footnotes don't really work unless you scroll manually. I guess it's better than nothing, but not very comfortable to read.
Usually it's even worse with text from the margins, header than footer getting mixed with the normal text.
Does anybody know if there is a website or project where one could find "curated" or properly formatted books with expired Copyright? Maybe one where other people can collaborate?
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
Biggest so far (and biggest on SE at 1.2m words) has been Samuel Pepys’ Diary: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
Are there any plans to support non-English ebooks as well?
Edit: Regarding non-English ebooks, I was thinking about books like "Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst" (Birdflight As The Basis Of Aviation) by Otto Lilienthal (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54565). It's a fantastic book with nice hand-drawn illustrations, and it would deserve being presented/typeset in a beautiful way. Currently available ebooks are mostly bad.
That book is more than 2600 pages! How long did that take?
https://archive.org/details/diaryofsamuelpep01pepy/page/228/...
Typically, Standard Ebooks will try to avoid OCR unless it’s something that’s missing from Gutenberg.
(If you started some sort of AMA here I'm sure it would be successful.)
For those who loved the Andrew Lang rainbow-color fairy tale books, Lang also published a volume of The Arabian Nights, not a translation but a recounting of selected tales. I encountered the Richard Burton commodious 3-volume set as a child. It's amazing that nobody at the time thought to proctor my reading choice, given the racism, misogyny, salaciousness, naughty illustrations, everything delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone and just laid out there. To read it cover-to-cover is actually not terribly fun. There's lots of little folk tale snippets, fables, poetry, and Burton footnoted the hell out of everything.
That's work that really needs to be done by a fluent, literate user of that language, hopefully with background in that language's literature and experience in copyediting, and familiarity with publishing. It's not really work you can demand of someone who did a good job (I assume) of it in English; they won't do a good job of it in another language without deep experience in that language. Developing and publishing the works in the language also needs to be done by people fluent in the language.
The example of the English version can be a guide for other languages, and there's of course room for collaboration on software between languages, but asking the English language project to expand to other languages is unlikely to get good results unless the developers also are fluent in those languages.
We're actually looking for Spanish-speaking collaborators:
I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version and can share what this is about?
I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own language also has the same censoring.
Of the old translations, only the French translation of Mardrus and the uncensored variant of Burton were somewhat close to the original text. Even the "uncensored" variant of Burton was more distant from the original text than the Mardrus translation.
There exists a much more recent French translation which is said to be more faithful to the original text than any of the previous translations (while the Mardrus translation was not censored, there were many places where it was not a word-by-word translation).
I do not remember precisely, because I have read it a long time ago, but I believe that the new good French translation is that by André Miquel et al.; various editions of that may be found at Amazon. I am not aware of any decent English translation.
When I was very young, I have read a translation into my language of the French translation of Mardrus. The first few volumes matched the French text, so they were quite explicit. Then it seems that someone noticed that and ordered the translators to remove any explicit parts, so the following volumes were obviously censored, lacking many words or entire scenes from the French Mardrus text.
Other translations are muuuuuch more tame. Abridged versions probably skip it entirely. When I first read the unexpurgated Burton my mind was blown on the regular.
Maybe I missed a more convenient mirror. In which case I'd be really glad for links to convenient mirrors.
https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
(Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin are out of copyright in the USA, but not in Germany, but obviously there's more to it than that because different countries having different copyright durations is a very normal situation.)
No country has the same copyright law as USA. In those other countries, Project Gutenberg has not yet been sued. (Edit: and probably in some countries, people downloading from PG would be the only one in illegality, not PG)
For example Alfred Döblin's and Thomas Mann's books are not in the public domain in all of Europe, in most of South America, or in Australia.
IANAL, but it might be problematic to publish a modern version without any critical commentary as this could be interpreted as "glorifying naziism and the holocaust in public" which is a crime in Germany (§ 130 StGB [1]).
Before 2015 it was not banned in a political sense. The state of Bavaria claimed Hitlers copyright after the war and did not grant any rights to republish it. Ownership or sale of historical editions was always possible.
The project Gutenberg block is by them because they lost a copyright court case in 2018 (which was about ~20 books by 3 authors). See the other comment with a detailed link. They were not required to deny access to the complete site but only to these specific works.
[1]https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
I'm not seeing the last and seventh supplement volume (volume 17 of 17 in total), perhaps that was released recently?
In the OP, we have a female Persian name (Shahrzad, the story teller) and a male Persian name (Shahryar, the king).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights#Pe...
"The earliest mentions of the Nights refer to it as an Arabic translation from a Persian book, Hezār Afsān (aka Afsaneh or Afsana), meaning 'The Thousand Stories'."
Hezar means 1000. Afsan means fantasy/story. Now it's true that the modern version is called Hezaar-o yek Shab (Thousand and one nights). So possibly that 'one' story is the Arab contribution.
[Filed under the "The Gulf" files]
You are overthinking this. It is called Arabian Nights (in some translations) because the stories are translated from Arabic. It is like calling the Brothers Grimm fairy tales German, even though some of the stories may have originated somewhere else.
The 19 century orientalists were certainly chauvinist by modern standards, but did not in particular elevate Arab culture above Persian culture.
Suggesting that Arab culture supplied just one story to the collection makes you the chauvinist. The stories have all kinds of origins - Persian, Indian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Syrian, even European.
The major one, which one sees to this day in contemporary European sources (even scholarly matter), is how Arabs translated ancient sources into Arabic. This occulation of (substantial and far reaching) contribution of Iran to "Western civilization" is unique to European sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Clas...
Arab historians themselves, to their lasting credit, had the intellectual integrity:
“It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars…in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs…thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of Persian descent…they invented rules of (Arabic) grammar…great jurists were Persians… only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, ‘If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it”…The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them…as was the case with all crafts…This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana (modern Central Asia), retained their sedentary culture.”
- Muqaddimah, by Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī, translated by F. Rosenthal (III, pp. 311-15, 271-4 [Arabic]; Frye, R.N. (1977). Golden Age of Persia, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p.91).
Soviet Russian historians are equally factual regarding these matters. As I said, this is a remarkable feature of European version of history as far as Iran is concerned.
It is within the Soviet Russian research tradition (after all, most publications on the history of the languages and cultures of Central Asia and the Volga–Kama were produced then, when these regions were within the USSR) that the aforementioned term "Arabo-Persian" is heavily used.
Your posts on this matter make you appear to be one of those Persian nationalists who can’t stop banging on about how Persians aren't Arabs. I think many people here are capable of understanding the nuances involved, and it isn't really appropriate for you to continue to claim victimization.
Not correct and borderline ad hom. I am a Muslim and do not care for such ethnic distinctions.