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Arabian Nights week 25
City of Gold
- A cruel way to raise children. Is this opening bit necessary for the story? Isn't ordinary pampering enough?
- Signal of death by blood from a knife: same as in the Jealous Sisters tale.
- Third prince: clever to lie to the princess, a selfless act is rewarded
- Racism: why point out the princess is sleeping with a black man on this night?
- The princess's father isn't the one to punish her for her crime. And is death the appropriate punishment?
Sultan of Samarkand
- Gold and silver, I can see. Rock crystal, maybe. But fishbones?
- Assertion of proety, in that the rituals must be done before moving into the houses.
- Again, the third and youngest sibling is the creative, adaptable one.
- Again, transformation between animals and people. But why?
- Prince is killed by the jinni! But saved by the jinni's daughter. Why did she do this? And why did the other sisters marry the other princes?
- The brothers don't pull up their youngest brother? Six coloured oxen? Where is this story coming from?
- The youngest prince falls asleep while waiting for the beast to devour the princess: what's the role of this detail in the story?
- The prince cuts off part of his own leg to feed to the rukh. But it gets better.
- The youngest prince kills his two elder brothers? What is the moral of this tale?
Purse, dervish trumpet, figs, horns
- There must be much elided before the son find the magical sack of coin transmutation.
- At least this man is using the magic items to turn a profit! He may spend the profit pursuing a princess, but at least he's using the money.
- Again, a man (Ebn Ali Cogia) has his heart set on the beautiful-appearing woman. No consderation of anything except physical beauty, no consideration of what the woman may want.
- I like the idea of the figs that make giant antlers appear.
- But in the end Ebn Ali Cogia doesn't marry the princess?
Comments
Reflecting on the extensive use of ‘etc.’ in the text, and often in what seems like bizarre places. I’ve always read ‘etc’ to mean ‘and so on’, or ‘and more, following the same logic’. But Galland is not using it that way, because it appears in a great many places where there isn’t more that can logically follow. Like -He went back and told her everything, etc.- What can follow on from ‘everything’?. Or sometimes it’s used after saying someone was put to death, but what more can follow death? So instead I read these as being shorthand notes to himself to mean ‘embellish this later’.
Yes I agree these stories were very abbreviated, to the point where it was sometimes hard to see how a "proper" story version might build up from these. My best guess (going back to the transmission of oral tradition) is that the "working notes" were deliberately vague so as lots of "proper" stories could be built form the same notes. For example, is it an important or irrelevant distinction that some of these three-sibling stories have two princes and a princess who succeeds, and some have three princes, the youngest of whom succeeds? Would an original audience have taken away a different life-lesson from the two cases?
Some other thoughts I had
1) The prince cuts off the head of the black man sleeping with the princess and leaves it there - was this consciously picked up in The Godfather_ with the horse's head and the offer that he could not refuse, or is this coincidence?
2) "He also took the princess along, but he put her to death along the way" - well, it gets to the point of the story pretty quickly, but one might have expected a bit more detail here?
3) "an abundant spring was blocked by an animal to whom a young girl is exposed to be devoured every Friday" - very reminiscent of the Perseus and Andromeda Greek myth, though not mentioned by the commentator.
Use of etc - I agree, a bit mysterious. I'm currently interpreting it as "I need to fill in a lot here but will use stock scenes and wording to do so". So very much like @Apocryphal 's "embellish this later".
It's often quite a chore to determine what other "text" is meant to be inserted. When combined with the fluidity of text produced by the intersection of oral tradition with text, especially when orality is held in higher esteem than published text, it also leads to variation.
I think the real question these kind of things pose is "Where is the authority grounded?" I doubt it ever is in university professors, or foreign interpreters, no matter how well intentioned they are, or how strident they assert their dominance.
Edit because writing on my phone, whose spell checker leaves much to be desired.
That's a great point, and reminded me a bit of how early musical notation didn't bother to show details of (say) the bass continuo line, the assumption being that any skilled person rooted in the tradition would know exactly what was intended to be played without having explicit directions.
And I thought the same thing re: The Godfather.
Probably doesn't warrant it's own thread, but I read the remaining Diyab Notes stories and my reaction is much the same - too cursory to really enjoy (especially the last), but they have the bones of otherwise good adventurous stories, I think.
Now moving on to the translators...
Sorry, I was away at the weekend and didn't read the chunk before I left. I'll catch up.