The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition) Read Free Page A

classic, for no sooner had his translation begun to appear than a Grub Street English version followed (1706–8), went into many editions, and was itself followed by other translations, pseudotranslations, and imitations, so numerous that by 1800 there were more than eighty such collections. It was such hack versions that inflamed the imagination of Europe, of general readers and poets alike, from Pope to Wordsworth. The Nights could shine in the dark.
    These translators did not deviate from the letter of the original because they did not know sufficient Arabic. On the contrary, a careful comparison between any given Arabic passage and their own respective translation of it reveals an admirable command of Arabic diction, grammar, and syntax, except where the text itself poses severe problems, as it often does. Although the tales are generally written in the conversational style of the storyteller, they modulate between the colloquial and the literary, and even ornate, within a given passage, from passage to passage, and from story to story, and both types pose problems in regards to diction, grammar, and syntax. A great many words are thirteenth-century Syrian and Egyptian colloquial idioms, which have long since disappeared from usage or whose meanings have been altered; and many others are of Persian origin, either used without alteration or Arabized. The sentences are often ungrammatical, hence capable of several different and often contradictory readings. The typical structure is that of an interminable running sentence, consisting of brief coordinated clauses, often without apparent regard for place, time, or causality. The translator is therefore forced to interpret and reorder the clauses in a subordinated and logical sequence, in order to suit the European habits of reading and thinking, if his reader is to understand the passage at all. To make matters worse, the text, including Mahdi’s, normally bears neither diacritical nor punctuation marks. In Arabic, the diacritical marks distinguish one letter from another, thus differentiating between words that share the same letters but have different roots and therefore different meanings. Thus a word may offer two very different readings in a given sentence. This is not a problem when one of the meanings is unlikely in the context, but when both are possible, the translator must choose a single interpretation. The diacritical marks also indicate the forms of conjugation and declension. Their absence, therefore, coupled with the faulty grammar of some sentences, makes every sentence an encounter, assuming, that is, that one always knows where a sentence or a unit of expression begins or ends, for the Arabic text uses no punctuation, not even question marks.
    What makes a coherent reading or translation of such a text possible is an eye familiar with Arabic prose and an ear attuned to the rhythm of the spoken language, ideally the eye and ear of someone who reads, writes, and speaks Arabic like a native. It is a wonder, therefore, that foreign translators, like Lane, Payne, and Burton, made so few mistakes, yet no wonder that they made them. In diction, for instance, when they met words they could not understand, they often dropped them from their text. In grammar, a misreading, for instance, of the conjugation of the verb “to overtake,” which also means “to realize,” leads Burton to translate the refrain “But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence,” as “And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.” This example would seem innocuous enough were it not that it is repeated one thousand times and were it not that it spoils the dramatic poignancy of the situation, when the morning, the hour of her execution, finally catches up with Shahrazad. In syntax, reordering the clauses for a coherent reading often requires knowledge of Arab life and culture. For example, the following passage,