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vasha's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
There's been a fair bit written about 1001 Nights translations and translators, and I've read some of it; but the contents of this book were new to me. Paulo Lemos Horta discusses four eighteenth- and nineteenth-century renditions: Galland's, Torrens's, Lane's, and the intertwined works of Payne and Burton. He's not just interested in the cultural setting the translators worked in, but highlights the aspect of crosscultural encounter involved, and in particular is interested in the writers' sources and inspirations: these generally are obscured in the published text, and so Horta has had a lot of work to do to bring them to light.
It was only in the late 19th century that Antoine Galland's notebooks turned up with transcriptions of stories he was told by the Syrian traveler Hana Diyab, and even later that Diyab's own autobiography was published from a manuscript, so that the origins of "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" can be properly evaluated: cultural encounter goes two ways in these, the latest additions to the Nights corpus, which reflect Diyab's experience of Syrian storytelling along with his travels. (Diyab is having a well-deserved moment of attention lately, with a recently-published translation of his autobiography and a new translation of "Aladdin" by a French-Syrian writer.)
There is a bit of a disjunction in the book between these first two lively chapters and the remaining five, which really could stand without them. They concern the sources and uses of knowledge in the 19th-century British Empire. Torrens worked in colonial India during a time when Indian scholars, and their language teaching and cultural interpretation, were an integral part of the British system, before the increasing marginalization of native languages (Horta discusses Torrens's part in the debate over native languages vs. English in colonial affairs). Burton, too, was educated in this system, but his need to present himself as a unique authority, as having absorbed comprehensive knowledge by superior observational powers on his travels alone, led him to entirely erase any reference to his many teachers from his works.
Horta makes good use of the irony that although Burton vaunted his ability to comprehend the Nights in a way that no reader of English could, because of his supposed immersion in Arab culture, in fact his translation's text was taken almost verbatim from other writers--in particular Payne, who was no traveler or Orientalist or Arabic-reader at all, but a poet who wrote a version of the Nights that drew heavily on ideas about an Oriental "dreamland." However, Burton's real effort went into the copious notes with which he accompanied the stories. It was there that he attempted to demonstrate to his Victorian contemporaries the advantages to be gained from a knowledge of many cultures (not least, this commentary was the most visible part of his famous or infamous campaign for sexual broadmindedness), all mediated by himself as the ideal cosmopolitan mind as he saw it, not parochially European, but also able to dispassionately evaluate foreign cultures.
If Burton was largely successful in erasing others from his commentary, the same is not the case with Edward Lane, who decades earlier had written another commented translation based on his experiences living in Cairo. To be sure, Lane usually referred to his sources anonymously as "knowledgeable authorities" or the like. But Horta was able to come up with enough information about the particular individuals that Lane frequented in Cairo to make the two chapters devoted to them some of the most interesting in my opinion. Lane, who struggled with a literal-mindedness that hindered him in interpreting conversations involving any sort of irony or humor, depended very heavily on having cultural nuances explained to him, and he set down these explanations in his ethnographic works. He had two or three particular Egyptian friends whose influence, Horta argues, is omnipresent in his writings. There's something a little sad in Lane's largely failed quest: he was a frustrated mystic who went to Egypt thinking that there, he could find the extraordinary experiences that eluded him in Britain. It seems that his contemporaries (in both England and Egypt) entirely failed understand his attempts to reconcile Islam and Christianity. Instead, his writings, the production of an authoritative British citizen in Egypt, after his death became part of the apparatus of British rule through knowledge.
Indeed, that is the undercurrent in the stories of Torrens and Burton as well: whatever their own attitudes, wherever they went crosswise to the tendency of the times, they too didn't have entire control over the production and reception of their writings. At least here, in this excellent book in a new century, current readers can try to hear the hidden sources of those Victorian translations in a way that the original readers didn't.
It was only in the late 19th century that Antoine Galland's notebooks turned up with transcriptions of stories he was told by the Syrian traveler Hana Diyab, and even later that Diyab's own autobiography was published from a manuscript, so that the origins of "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" can be properly evaluated: cultural encounter goes two ways in these, the latest additions to the Nights corpus, which reflect Diyab's experience of Syrian storytelling along with his travels. (Diyab is having a well-deserved moment of attention lately, with a recently-published translation of his autobiography and a new translation of "Aladdin" by a French-Syrian writer.)
There is a bit of a disjunction in the book between these first two lively chapters and the remaining five, which really could stand without them. They concern the sources and uses of knowledge in the 19th-century British Empire. Torrens worked in colonial India during a time when Indian scholars, and their language teaching and cultural interpretation, were an integral part of the British system, before the increasing marginalization of native languages (Horta discusses Torrens's part in the debate over native languages vs. English in colonial affairs). Burton, too, was educated in this system, but his need to present himself as a unique authority, as having absorbed comprehensive knowledge by superior observational powers on his travels alone, led him to entirely erase any reference to his many teachers from his works.
Horta makes good use of the irony that although Burton vaunted his ability to comprehend the Nights in a way that no reader of English could, because of his supposed immersion in Arab culture, in fact his translation's text was taken almost verbatim from other writers--in particular Payne, who was no traveler or Orientalist or Arabic-reader at all, but a poet who wrote a version of the Nights that drew heavily on ideas about an Oriental "dreamland." However, Burton's real effort went into the copious notes with which he accompanied the stories. It was there that he attempted to demonstrate to his Victorian contemporaries the advantages to be gained from a knowledge of many cultures (not least, this commentary was the most visible part of his famous or infamous campaign for sexual broadmindedness), all mediated by himself as the ideal cosmopolitan mind as he saw it, not parochially European, but also able to dispassionately evaluate foreign cultures.
If Burton was largely successful in erasing others from his commentary, the same is not the case with Edward Lane, who decades earlier had written another commented translation based on his experiences living in Cairo. To be sure, Lane usually referred to his sources anonymously as "knowledgeable authorities" or the like. But Horta was able to come up with enough information about the particular individuals that Lane frequented in Cairo to make the two chapters devoted to them some of the most interesting in my opinion. Lane, who struggled with a literal-mindedness that hindered him in interpreting conversations involving any sort of irony or humor, depended very heavily on having cultural nuances explained to him, and he set down these explanations in his ethnographic works. He had two or three particular Egyptian friends whose influence, Horta argues, is omnipresent in his writings. There's something a little sad in Lane's largely failed quest: he was a frustrated mystic who went to Egypt thinking that there, he could find the extraordinary experiences that eluded him in Britain. It seems that his contemporaries (in both England and Egypt) entirely failed understand his attempts to reconcile Islam and Christianity. Instead, his writings, the production of an authoritative British citizen in Egypt, after his death became part of the apparatus of British rule through knowledge.
Indeed, that is the undercurrent in the stories of Torrens and Burton as well: whatever their own attitudes, wherever they went crosswise to the tendency of the times, they too didn't have entire control over the production and reception of their writings. At least here, in this excellent book in a new century, current readers can try to hear the hidden sources of those Victorian translations in a way that the original readers didn't.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny, Racism, and Colonisation
Minor: Homophobia, Infidelity, Slavery, Religious bigotry, and Classism
rosie_khan's review
5.0
Incredible book on the history of the Arabian Nights! I read it for a research paper for my world literature class, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in knowing the truth about the storytellers, translators, travelers, and other characters involved in the making of the Arabian Nights. It's very well-written, even funny at times. I only closely read the first two chapters and skimmed the rest, because my paper focused on Hanna Diyab, Paul Lucas, Antoine Galland, and the origins of the story of Aladdin, but the latter part of the book focused on the English translators was still deeply engaging and educational. I'm so glad my university library had a copy of this book.
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