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Arabian Nights week 23
Not a great deal to summarise on the stories, as we've just read the extended versions by Galland.
These stories are much shorter than Galland's versions, and would only take about ten minutes to tell. These versions hit all the major story beats, but lack much of the detail of Galland's written versions.
Do you prefer the longer or shorter versions?
Personally, I'd like something a bit more expanded than Diyab's notes, but found Galland's retellings a bit long and flabby. What doesn't come through in these notes is any real idea of the personalities of the characters involved. They're story outlines, rather than stories with dramatic change and character growth.
Comments
Yes I agree with this. The tales felt a lot more like shorthand notes than stories. However, it did make me wonder about the process of transmission of these stories. A few years back I read up on oral traditions, mainly focusing on Alfred Lord's book The Singer of Tales, which explores classical Greek storytelling and the extent to which that survives in the Balkans. So it's not altogether clear to me how much that way of thinking applies here, since we don't see (at least in translation we don't) some of the standard storyteller's devices that were such a prominent feature of the Mediterranean tradition - not just stock descriptions, but the ability to expand or contract episodes according to audience interests, and such like.
So in this context I was wondering how an "apprentice" 1001 nights storyteller would learn from a "master"? Would there be the kind of abbreviated notes we see here, where in any actual retelling the "apprentice" would in fact expand liberally on the bare bones? One of the features that Lord identified was a propensity of storytellers to claim that they were repeating what had been handed down to them verbatim, whereas in fact they varied the telling quite significantly on different occasions.
So, for example, might we imagine a version of Ali Baba not set "in a city of Persia close to the borders of India" but maybe "in a city of Egypt close to the borders of Libya" or "in a city of Turkey close to the borders of Greece", with the locations all swapped around to suit a local audience? Or is part of the mystery that the setting is deliberately "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."?
One thing I do wonder is why they put so much emphasis on getting the translation from the French correct? Galland was only making notes to himself to flesh out later, so these words are at best incomplete, and likely he never expected he was going to stick to them when writing the final tale. So why is the accuracy of the translation so important (in a book to us the general reader)? I’m sure from a scholarly perspective it’s important, so I can understand why someone would go to such lengths - I’m just not really sure why they bothered to explain it to us.
Yes, totally agree. I'm more interested as a lay reader in how faithful Galland was to his source, rather than the accuracy of the next stage on. I suppose the only exception to that would be if Galland used some idiomatic word of his time that had a specific shade of meaning that we might lose. There's an example in the next section where the English translator says of the substitute for the princess "a misshapen piece of meat" where the French term is more specifically used of a deformed foetus. In other words something more like an aborted or highly premature baby rather than something you've bought from the butcher.