The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition) Read Free

circulating since the ninth century, that has been heard and read for centuries by young and old everywhere, and that has become a world classic should wait until very recently for a proper edition. This is curious yet understandable as one of the anomalies of comparative cultural studies. While the history of textual scholarship in the West has been, since the Renaissance, increasingly one of keen accuracy and authenticity, its counterpart in the East, especially in the case of the Nights , has been one of error and corruption, at the hands of Eastern and Western scholars alike, the result of ignorance and contempt. It is all the more gratifying, therefore, that the most recent edition of the Arabic text of the Nights should be by far the best. After years of sifting, analyzing, and collating virtually all available texts, Muhsin Mahdi has published the definitive edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale ( Alf Layla wa Layla , Leiden, 1984). Mahdi fills lacunae, emends corruptions, and elucidates obscurities; however, he refrains from providing punctuation and diacritical marks or corrected spellings. What emerges is a coherent and precise work of art that, unlike other versions, is like a restored icon or musical score, without the added layers of paint or distortions, hence, as close to the original as possible. Thus a long-standing grievance has been finally redressed, and redressed with a sense of poetic justice, not only because this edition redeems all others from a general curse, but also because it is the work of a man who is at once the product of East and West. And it is particularly gratifying to me personally, because it has provided me with the text for my translation.
    Past Translations
    NOT SO FORTUNATE were the major translators of the work into English, Edward Lane (1839–41), John Payne (1882–84), and Richard Burton (1885–86). Lane based his translation on the Bulaq, the first Calcutta, and the Breslau; Payne on the second Calcutta and the Breslau; and Burton on the Bulaq, the second Calcutta, and the Breslau editions. These translators did not, as one might expect, compare the various editions to establish an accurate text for their translations (assuming that, given what they had, such a task was possible); instead they deleted and added at random, or at will, from the various sources to piece together a text that suited their individual purposes: in the case of Lane, a detailed but expurgated version; in the case of Payne and Burton, versions that are as full and complete as possible. In effect, they followed the same Arabic editorial tradition, except that whereas the editors of Bulaq and Calcutta produced a corrupt text in Arabic, the translators of London produced an even more corrupt text in English. Even the two less significant twentieth-century translations followed this pattern. Edward Poweys Mather based his English version (Routledge, 1937) on a French translation by J. C. Mardrus, which was based on the Bulaq and second Calcutta editions. Since he knew no Arabic, he altered the French text, ignorant of what he was doing to the Arabic or how far he had strayed from it. And N. J. Dawood, who translated a selection of tales (Penguin, 1956), which includes less than three of the eleven basic stories of the Nights , followed the second Calcutta, “editing” and “correcting” here and there in the light of the Bulaq edition.
    Interestingly, the only exception to this pattern is Galland himself, the very first to translate the work in Europe (1704–17). His French translation of the basic stories was based on none other than the fourteenth-century Syrian text, as well as other sources. But instead of following the text faithfully, Galland deleted, added, and altered drastically to produce not a translation, but a French adaptation, or rather a work of his own creation. He did succeed, however, in establishing the work as a