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

translated literally, reads:
    After a while, our mother also died, and left us three thousand dinars, which we divided equally among ourselves. I was the youngest. My two sisters prepared their dowries and got married.
    Burton translates it as follows:
    After a while my mother also deceased, leaving me and my sisters-german three thousand dinars; so each daughter received her portion of a thousand dinars and I the same, albe’ the youngest. In due course of time, my sisters married with the usual festivities.
    But it should read:
    After a while, our mother also died, leaving us three thousand dinars, which we divided equally among ourselves. Since I was the youngest of the three, my two sisters prepared their dowries and got married before me.
    For what is at issue here is not the Islamic law of inheritance but marriage customs in Arab society.
    Moreover, the problem for the translators was compounded in that, as often as not, a given passage had already been altered by the editor of a manuscript or a printed edition or by both. For the tales, for all their popularity among the people, were regarded with condescension and contempt by the Arab literati of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These included the editors themselves, self-appointed men of taste and judgment, who, trained during the period of the decline of Arabic literature, had little judgment and no taste. They regarded these folk tales as entertaining in substance but vulgar in style, and they undertook to improve them according to their own light.
    Their method was to condense, amplify, or alter. They took a given passage, summarized it, and recast it in correct, polite, or literary Arabic, often sacrificing vivid details vital to the art of the story-teller for empty academic phrases or poetic diction. For instance, “The Story of the Hunchback” opens with this passage:
    It is related, O King, that there lived once in China a tailor who had a pretty, compatible, and loyal wife. It happened one day that they went out for a stroll to enjoy the sights at a place of entertainment, where they spent the whole day in diversions and fun, and when they returned home at the end of the day, they met on the way a jolly hunchback. He was smartly dressed in a folded inner robe and an open outer robe, with gathered sleeves and an embroidered collarband, in the Egyptian style, and sporting a scarf and a tall green hat, with knots of yellow silk stuffed with ambergris. The hunchback was short, like him of whom the poet ’Antar said:
    Lovely the hunchback who can hide his hump,
    Like a pearl hidden in an oyster shell,
    A man who looks like a castor oil branch,
    From which dangles a rotten citric lump.
    He was busy playing on the tambourine, singing, and improvising all kinds of funny gestures. When they drew near and looked at him, they saw that he was drunk, reeking of wine. Then he placed the tambourine under his arm and began to beat time by clapping his hands, as he sang the following verses:
    Go early to the darling in yon jug;
    Bring her to me,
    And fete her as you fete a pretty girl,
    With joy and glee,
    And make her as pure as a virgin bride,
    Unveiled to please,
    That I may honor my friend with a cup
    Of wine from Greece.
    If you, my friend, care for the best in life,
    Life can repay,
    Then at this moment fill my empty cup,
    Without delay.
    Don’t you, my tantalizer, on the plain
    The gardens see?
    . . . [W]hen the tailor and his wife saw the hunchback in this condition, drunk and reeking of wine, now singing, now beating the tambourine, they were delighted with him and invited him home to sup and drink with them that night. He accepted gladly and walked with them to their home.
    I have deliberately chosen this lengthy passage in order to show how drastically the Egyptian editor reduces and excises (in this case two entire poems) and to show the extent of the substance and flavor the reader misses as a result. Payne’s translation is