A review by vasha
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights by Anonymous

adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? N/A
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

This is one eye-catching book: huge and beautiful, typeset with care, on creamy, pleasant-textured paper, with hundreds of illustrations from old and new, European and Middle Eastern editions [I only complain that the illustrations should have been printed a little larger]... The centerpiece of this book is the stories translated by Yasmine Seale; I would rate her writing 6 out of 5, since I've read these stories in several other translations, but never found them so lively, immediate, full of captivating details and with attention paid to the rhythms and sounds of the words. 

The editor, Paulo Lemos Horta, talks about how this translation differs from previous English versions -- it's not the first "modern" one, it's not the first by someone with roots in an Arabic-speaking country, it's not quite the first by a woman (Ursula Lyons having contributed some to the Penguin edition), but it's the first that's all of those. More important than reckoning up identity is the attention that the translator and editor paid to the role that women played as audience and storytellers during the transmission of these stories. They were listening to these stories, and they were in them, as villains and heroes both. This volume, long as it is, could only contain a few stories. Horta selected several of the most famous, including "The Porter and the Three Women of Baghdad" which contains some of the most remarkable appearances by women, and added "The Tale of Dalila the Crafty" -- a lesser-known story, one of several featuring the amusing cheats of famous thieves (these were added to the collection in 14th/15th century Cairo). Dalila appears in a number of thief stories, but in this one she and her daughter Zaynab run the whole show. Horta points out that Seale paid close attention to avoiding sexist language. For example, women are usually disparagingly said to have "wiles," which is not one of the words Seale uses for Dalila's and Zaynab's ruses.

The "Annotated Arabian Nights" as a whole, unfortunately, is a bit of a sprawling omnium gatherum. Horta has been spending many years researching Hana Diyab, a Syrian traveler who told stories to the first European translator of the "Nights," Antoine Galland. Galland included several of Diyab's stories in his edition, and they (for example "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba") have proved to be some of the most popular with European readers--the Syrian storyteller evidently knew his audience. The issue of what Diyab contributed, and what Galland, to the stories as they were published, has been a matter of much debate. Horta's interest accounts for the fact that Diyab occupies a quite outsize place in this collection--all of Galland's versions of his tales are included along with Galland's notes from the sessions when he heard them, and notes from several stories he didn't publish. This long section is certainly quite interesting (I really like the  original version of "The Forty Thieves," bare-bones though it is; it centers not on Ali Baba but on his clever slave Marjana) -- but I almost feel it ought to have been a separate book. Then, too, the editor included a number of famous stories inspired by the "Nights." They're all public domain and easily accessible, so why take up page space with them here? Yes, it's interesting to point out the allusions in them. But I nonetheless would have preferred more of the original stories; there are several not included which Horta refers to repeatedly in his notes. By the way, the notes combine things like literary analysis, remarks on the multiple manuscript sources and consideration of the original audiences, so they are very different from the notes of Lane's or Burton's translations for example, which used the stories as a jumping-off point for telling the readers things about contemporary culture in Arabic-speaking areas. 

I hope the text (only) of Yasmine Seale's translation gets published in an accessible edition and is very widely read!