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Arabian Nights week 4
Introduction
Modern and postmodern
- Many western authors intrigued by nesting of tales, structure.
- Arabian authors treat as commentary on politics and power
- Shahrazad as feminist pioneer
- Ongoing invitation to add stories, to be heard
The annotated Nights
- Summary of tales in the book
- Justification for what's included.
The Seale translation
- The need of a new translation, free of Victorian worldview (essentialism, exoticification)
- Need to show women characters a whole people
- Claim that this is a truer translation than what has gone before, inclusion of Diyab
- Original Arabic text is unadorned language.
- Outline of Seale's choices in this translation
Notes and questions
- How many of these stories can be read as invitations to hear contemporary voices?
- Are there any references to modernism and postmodernism in the introduction?
- Are there any tales here you're particularly interested in reading?
- How beautiful should the prose be?
- Have you appreciated Seale's prose in the stories so far? (e.g. description of jinni in "Fisherman" tale)
Stories
Second old man
- First two brothers lose all on foreign trading trips, waste gifts given by third brother
- Eventually persuaded him to go on trading trip, make large profit
- Third brother marries a disguised jinniya
- First two brothers grow jealous, attempt to kill the third.
- He holds his wife back from vengance
- But her sister curses the brothers
Third old man
- Adulterous wife curses her husband, butcher's daughter breaks the spell
- Daughter gives the husband the means to curse his wife
Merchant and jinni
- Jinni enjoys the tales, agrees to let the merchant live
Fisherman and jinni
- Poor fisherman has no luck for first three times
- Fourth time, finds a jar and releases a jinni
- Jinni threatens the fisherman, tells his tale
- Fisherman tricks the jinni back into the jar
Notes
Second old man
- Another tale of shape-shiftting and magic
- A good wife being faithful and obeying husband, while retaining agency
Third old man
- Short!
- Demonstration of how to punish without killing?
Merchant and jinni
- Another example of violence tempered, this time by a story. Lesson for Shahriyah?
Comments
Notes on Fisherman and jinni
My thoughts from the intro notes:
"Fernando Pessoa... musing... on the power of novelistic characters to acquire a presence stronger than that of friends or acquaintances in the real, visible world"
This is something I could definitely relate to - and I would personally extend that not just to reading novels but also to writing them. I write for fun and personal satisfaction rather than public acclaim or to gain a real income, but the characters in those books are absolutely real to me, not just during writing but as kind of permanent shadowy figures in alternate worlds. I strongly suspect that the same is true of characters that you play in a game - whether reading, writing, or gaming, it seems to me that part of the immersion in the fiction is to make real the characters inside that sub-created world (to borrow a phrase from CS Lewis).
However... when I raised a similar question in The Eyre Affair discussion ("What book would you most want to go into and/or meet characters from?") the responses suggested that this was a rather strange and unusual thought
I'm trying to think how to reconcile those two perspectives,l and in particular whether the habit of perceiving characters in novels as really real is not nearly so universal as I had presumed!
I also liked the connection made with Guillermo del Toro, which I would never have joined up prior to reading this.
From the story:
I am increasingly struck by the repetitive nature of the "real-world" passages involving Shahrazad, the king, and her sister. I had vaguely expected that there would be variation as we went along, but the passages seem quite formulaic. Maybe nowadays we use introductory sequences in TV shows in the same way - we all recognise that the particular sequence is introducing or closing down a story and not really part of it.
The djinn and his prison - and in particular the role of Solomon. Not being well up on the Islamic traditions about Solomon, I am finding this to be a quite fascinating aspect of the tales. It is also helping to fill in some background to the book we read together at the start of the year A Master of Djinn where again Solomon's role was crucial.
General thoughts about your notes:
Yes I am enjoying Yasmine Seale's prose style, and wish I knew enough about the original to know how much is her and how much is from the source(s). Biblical translators tend to "wash out" differences between different source passages and create a more homogeneous whole than is, perhaps, fair or appropriate, and I keep wondering what the variation is like here. My guess is that it is very diverse, partly because of the unapologetic way that diverse sources (from both written and oral traditions) are fused.
The notes before the tales - I start reading them but am finding them a bit lengthy and realise that I am skimming them in order to get to the stories themselves.
The poetry - yes, love reading this! It's always hard to know how to translate poetry from one language, with its particular quirks, into another. I like the fact that she largely abandons end-rhyme as this doesn't have much of a place in much Middle eastern poetry (it's hard to generate much interest-value in end-rhyme when the endings of words are largely governed by grammar rather than stylistic choice) - though a different author / translator might have used end-rhyme and converted the poems into something much more in the traditional English style. But instead we have a lot of alliteration and the like, which (to me at least) suggests a greater degree of faithfulness to the original.
I'm not sure what you mean here "invitations." Within the frame I don't think so far that the material Shahrazade presents is meant to invite Shahriyar to pay attention to the people of the kingdom. They are still moral tales, but unlike her father they are not peopled by animals as advisors of conduct, but representations of human conduct when facing the non-human. If you mean for readers of this book, I did find the boosting of Seale to be off-putting. If it is so good I think that we can figure that for ourselves. Maybe it's a professional deformation of Horta being a university professor who tells people what's what.
I didn't find any worthy explanation of what Horta means by them. They struck me as buzzwords.
This is an interesting question to me. There are several different proses and prose authors here. I think Horta's prose in the introduction is adequate, but lacking in information that I am interested in - see my comment about buzzwords. We get told a lot that this text is really important as a source for modern literature, but from what I gather the text is thoroughly "modern," a hybrid that is neither a "traditional" European tale nor a "traditional" Arab tale. Produced by the relation of a member of the colonisers (Galland) and a member of the colonised (Diyab), it is being treated as a source-text for Arab traditions because elements of those are found within it, but in such a large introduction I would expect a discussion of the earlier provenance of these stories. There is an extremely ancient literature here, and so far no discussion of it. I am not yet persuaded that the Arab tales are not already modern - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism I am doubtful of this as a method for producing worthwhile knowledge of traditional societies and literature.
So perhaps the introduction is post-modern, because it has lost the capacity to use any material from before modernity? As I read further I am finding it kind of strange, with apparatus of scholarship, but watered down so the book will sell to a non-scholar audience. Presumably the targeted audience is people who want to look scholarly to their friends, but won't read the book with their own critical tools. Lots of interesting pictures, but I don't find they have contributed much to me as a reader of the stories. They are great as travelogue however - that is a genre not discussed here, and I think it should be with reference to the similarities and differences among traditional and modern forms. So far my impression is that it's a book about a book which doesn't seem to have any actual historical existence - The version here was produced to write about, rather than be read. Very post-modern I guess.
But this is about the prose in the introduction ...
Yes I have. So far I am finding the book a bit difficult to deal with because I am doing a lot of flipping to get to the parts I want to read, which is what Seale has composed. I am still unclear about the textual sources for these Arab tales - are they notes Galland took? The Diyab book? I'd appreciate anyone clearing this up for me.
Eco calls this technologisation the heavy industry of dreams. I'm interested in how this shadowy world feeds back into this world by presenting people as who they imagine themselves and others to be, with the possibility of concomitant loss of connection to who they are in this less shadowy world. The use of transcendence to produce immanent self used to be the domain of what we call religion, but in the modern state it seems to have been adopted and intended to produce subjects who, because satisfied with imagined power in place of the absence of any actual power, are fit to be possessed.
This is the kind of thing that leads me to think we are looking at modern literature (mis)representing traditional orality here, rather that traditional literature.
This is interesting to me. I think that the production of diversity within modernity by appropriating descriptions of traditional voices as if they were the traditional voices themselves is exactly what what modernity is about. Orientalism is just an aspect of this attitude.
I'm not saying that doing so is bad, or even that there is much we can do about it, but I think this process obscures as much about the past, now called "sources," as it reveals, by using its own particular history to tunnel back to an imagined shadow world that is not the actual past. Once that non-existent past is established as more "real" than the non-existent past which shaped our present, the foundations of our present are likewise obscured, and I am concerned that in moments of absent-mindedness it might be easy to lose track of what is actually going on.
I also think that there are only so many ways you can write the same thing. The other translation I read has those bits in-line, and I mostly skip them.
Good question! I have no idea. But I also think we have be careful not to have the idea of a "definitive corpus" of the Tales. Everything I've read about is that it's a loose banner, and perhaps less coherent than the mass of stories that are attributed to "The Arthur Cycle" in Brtiain.
I also don't sound out words when I'm reading, so much of the style of the prose just glances off me.
Personally, I'm not a poet so I think I get little from it. But it's good to hear others' opinions.
This is a good point. The Tales seem to go back thousands of years, certainly pre-Islam. Yet we're considering essentially what a European published a couple of hundred years ago. Now, there's nothing wrong with that in it's own right, but you're right that it's a different thing from older or separately-evolved Arabic stories.
That was mentioned in the introduction. Someone (Land?) wanted to use the stories and illustrations to educate European readers about the Middle East.
We've finished the introduction now, so hopefully that problem will go away. As for the sources of these tales, I'm not sure exactly what Seale is drawing from.
About the three merchants: When I read the tale about the three brothers and the loss of wealth reminded me of the the parables of the prodigal son, and of the talents; and I realised that in the parables the plot device is simply failing to participate in society, here in these stories there is an agency (the djinn) who have their own society and function outside of human society. God is mentioned, but seems not to be participating in any direct way other than being a guide or support for human activity.
I have a few confused ideas about the challenge of maintaining relations with kin (the merchants and brothers / wives) and with God - just like humans some djinn submit to God, and some do not. I think part of how these stories are working at their explicit level is the djinn are like a mirror in which the human can be seen and differentiated, just as we can see ourselves in a mirror and recognise ourself as another.
As I think about these nested mirrors I am thinking of two things: 1) The underlying structure of tales starts to become obvious because the repetition of repetition proceeds through an eliding of what is the same in the stories. This casts the listener back upon itself as the source of understanding through memory, while at the same time revealing that speaking of the past alone is sterile. While a speaker is necessary for a listener to be a listener, and the past necessary for the present, but neither alone will produce significance. 2) As these nested mirrors, or Russian dolls, become obvious, the hidden agency of the mirroring and nesting is revealed, even though never seen in the stories themselves. Being utterly immersed in stories is a kind of ignorance.
Last, the tale within a tale has been scrubbed of its disruptive supermundane agency by being turned into a flash-back, which treats the imagined past as if not beyond the world.
A bit of a dog's breakfast, but maybe bits will prove to be of some use.
I'm not quite sure what this means, either, but I'm going to say it's probably too early to tell, since we've yet to read two full stories.
If we can accept that that postmodernism is a rejection of most everything that came before, It seems this whole book is the product of an exercise in postmodernism - so that's one reference, at least.
Not really - all of them, I suppose. I guess I'm interested is seeing the tonal differences between the 'traditional' tales in the first part of the book and the Diyab tales in the second part.
Interesting question, but to answer it I must pose a second question: At what point does beautiful prose become so beautiful it's ugly?
Yes, I'm quite enjoying it. Though the stories themselves are so far a bit inconsistent with respect to the amount of ornamentation (for example, the first brother's tale compared to the third). This might well reflect the source material (afterall, this cycle of brother tales might never have been composed as such, but assembled by a long lost griot.) I prefer the more in-depth tales, so far.
I like the intros, generally speaking, but I agree they do interrupt the overall flow. Normally I like to read a text the first time in the order it has been presented - but I may well go back and re-read only the tales themselves, without interruption.
Yes, I rather liked it. It was more like prose than poetry in any case, but it was used to speak to Allah, so in that sense it made an interesting tonal change between the mundane voice and the profane voice.
I was not, though I also wasn't surprised being (it seems a familiar trope). I actually thought he was going to wish to die of old age as a way of getting out of it, but (having read wish stories before) that would probably have just resulted him aging really quickly and dying of old age on the spot. See? I didn't reach 54 just by accident.
I'm also unclear - it if was specified in the intro, I've already forgotten. If they're translations of Galland, then they aren't translations from Arabic - which is what I thought we were getting. So I'm assuming the base texts are older than Galland, and quite possibly not a single source. As for Diyab, we won't hit his stories until we get to Ali Baba just before Christmas. That said, I'm also not clear if these are from Diyab's book, or from Galland. I'm guessing the latter. Which is perhaps why it was important to have someone who could translate from both Arabic and French.
OMG You should pick up a copy of the book I just read, Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov. It's all about our relationship to the past and how we access it through memory, story, history, collective history, and national myth.
Ditto, though I try. I actually appreciate Richard's reactions to poetry much more than I appreciate the poetry, so thanks for being my lens in this over the years, pal!
A small point of caution - the tales themselves likely have a diversity of origins, some of which are pre-islamic, and some of which originate from outside the Arab world.
You're in this club, too?
Like me! To wit: I've managed to collect at least these three of the books mentioned in the intro. Are I not scholarly? (I haven't read them yet, but am now more inspired to)
I was thinking again overnight about the whole "source materials" thing, and suspect that with a long oral history of the tales (in whole or more likely in many parts) we are never going to get very close to listing out original sources. Some time ago I read Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Singer_of_Tales) which explores Homeric oral tradition through the lens of recordings and interviews with contemporary Serbo-Croatian performers.
In brief, his view is that there is no such thing as "definitive source" for many of the common songs and other works performed - each performer presents the work differently depending on context (time available, audience, etc) whilst still asserting continuity with some (probably imaginary) ur-text. So we don't have access to anything like an original source - all we have is the material at the point it was first committed to writing, which in many cases is comparatively modern. Much the same could be said of collections of English or Scottish folk music - what we have is a set of "captures" at a particular point of time, often at the point where it was feared that a particular tradition might not survive in the wild much longer. There is clearly a much longer history of development but we can only really speculate about that.
So here in Arabian Nights we don't have access to very much "original material" (apart from some scattered hints of Indian or Persian texts which may have developed into what we now have) - all we have are collections made comparatively recently, either by Arabic or European collectors who undoubtedly had their own agenda for making the collection, which in turn drove the selection of particular tales in or out. That doesn't, of course, stop anyone from exploring issues like original context, focus, adaptations through the years, and so on, but it does mean that we can't really hope to test such explorations against older versions.
I don't know what sources Seale is drawing from, but I think she's drawing on both Galland's translation and Arabic texts. As for the Diyab tales, I get the clear impression she's looking at both Diyab's and Galland's texts.
In any case, I think there's no one "authentic" source of the tales. There are many versions, you make choices.
Yes, and many that originate from within the Islamic world. Quite a few hark back to an earlier "golden age" of Islamic caliphates.
Will do. Is it an easy read?
Since this is coming up a few times, what do need to know about the relation of the Arab and Persian World? I am more familiar with the South Asian context, and I have to admit I found the Introductions were guilty of essentialising story-telling that struck me as resonating of India, as if it belonged to some particular group of people.
For quite a while now. Luckily I have people around who keep me on track. Or so they keep telling me.
Of course you are! We spend our leisure, free time, and rest in lecture, disputation, and discussion. Sounds like TTRPBC to me!
Agree in entirety with the issues you raise in your post. But I want to clarify, I am not seeking the ur-text that Seale supposedly should have translated from, but the actual texts that were translated, together with their dates etc. I am sure that there is some Arab text somewhere that was used, and given all the stuff critiquing authenticity in the Introductions I tyhink it's reasonable to expect some transparency and clarity about what book we are reading. An example of the kind of questions I am asking myself "Which parts of this are translation, which parts interpolation, which parts new?" e.g. the tag dialogue used to interrupt the stories: Is that a translation of an 19th century Arabic book, 20th century, 21st century, or something like "Once upon a time ..." which when used now in a YA book means something quite different than what it means in a children's book?
I agree with you, but Horta spends quite a bit of time in the Introduction arguing that there are inauthentic translations which have deformed the stories. As if a translator has a duty to a text that a story-teller does not, because their duty is to the story, which is what? Not a text? If Burton is inauthentic (rather than a boor), then it seems reasonable that we be given a text to measure this "translation" against. And if it is about the story, isn't it a good thing if the teller improves it for us? If we care about the story, why worry about the text?
Again I agree, but what about say the Mughals? And the Ottomans? Perhaps I missed the references, but I nopticed their absence from the Introductions.
Of course none of this interferes with enjoying the stories. I found this article which deals with some of the issues I sense might be hidden underneath the Introductions: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-new-translation-brings-arabian-nights-home :
The year 1956. I am always uncertain about words like "genuine," "authentic," "real," etc. but there's hints of a conflict about who gets to decide canon here. The idea of "Canon" is itself authenticated by this.
There's something lurking in the story-telling here about truth and narrative that I think is quite important if we are to understand the world. The genre "history" is narrative, but explicitly claims it is meant to be (partly) measured against the truth of the past. While these stories can be measured against the past, I am thinking that they come from a Syrian text, but we don't hear much about the Syrian culture, and a lot about the Arab. So I am interested in what motivates this revision of the tales as examples of "Arab" culture.
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> Yes, I rather liked it. It was more like prose than poetry in any case, but it was used to speak to Allah, so in that sense it made an interesting tonal change between the mundane voice and the profane voice.
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If you're able to give a clear unequivocal definition of the difference between prose and poetry you should publish it and be famous
Some folk argue for a third intermediate layer often called "elevated prose" or similar, which is intended to cover prose which has a conscious level of artistry - think perhaps of a motivational speech using rhetorical tools to engage with the hearer... "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers" or "we shall fight them on the beaches etc".
But what do we make of technical legal prose? It's highly structured, but also intended to be definitive and unambiguous (when read by a suitably trained reader). Or engineering specification documents?
Back with the prose-poetry distinction, Wordsworth (among others - I just happen to be more familiar with him) was accused by some of his contemporaries of not writing poetry at all, but rather prose which happened to be presented in text with a particular delineation. Wordsworth for his own part argued 1) that he wanted to use the everyday vocabulary of working people and not the formal diction of the elite, and 2) that he based his poetry around the rhythm of walking. The argument has continued more recently with the "free verse" movement, for which again critics argue it is just ordinary prise chopped up into little pieces. Many folk when they something "isn't poetry" mean that it doesn't accord with the particular principles they are used to, eg a specific rhyming scheme or syllable count - but that inevitably runs into difficulties when trying to translate poetry between cultures and traditions.
I think Horta is overstating his case, both for the authenticity of this text (or any other he approves of) and the importance of the Arabian Nights on European literature. That overstating means I'm increasingly sceptical about many of his claims.
Yes! I think we should accept that there's no one "definitive" source of the Arabian Nights tales that anyone can point to. It's an umbrella for stories to be collected, and those stories come from many places. The corollary is that we should be sceptical of anyone claiming "authenticity".
Saying that, most people agree that some translations and collections are less "authentic" than others. For instance, most scholars agree that Burton's translation was modified to appeal to British taste for the exotic and salacious, and to move closer to the norms of English literature.
That was mentioned in the introduction to this volume, and mentioned in the other translation I read (the recent Lyons edition). It relates to the inclusion of poetry in the stories, an attempt to give them a veneer of respectability.
That's a complex question in its own right. There is a pan-Arabophone culture, but I don't know the details. If I rephrased your question as "We don't hear much about Kansas culture and a lot about American" it may hint towards the complexity of that question. (The analogy hopefully illuminates even if it doesn't bear any weight.)
@BarnerCobblewood
I posted a review of Time Shelter: https://www.ttrpbc.com/discussion/943/novel-review-time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov/p1?new=1
The text is not difficult, but extracting meaning is more of a challenge.
On the question of 'why don't we hear about X', this is partly a question of diffusions, I think, but also a questions or orientalization - the mashing together of Near Eastern cultures into one concept - Arabian. But keep in mind we're dealing with a religion (Islam), a language (Arabic), and a culture (Arab) which are not necessarily co-terminus in influence, any more than the English Language, English Culture, and Anglican religion are.
@NeilNjae @Apocryphal
I get it. Having plowed through all those pages of introduction, I'm just a little peeved that
I'm looking for Time Shelter now.
Re: points 1 and 2 - yep.
A bit behind this week so will get to week 5 tomorrow (if you see what I mean) - but here's an additional thought on week 4 contributed by my other half. I was saying as how (unlike Disney Genie) the sealed bottled contained the disobedient and highly dangerous djinni, and her response was "so that means that bottled and covered things are seen as perilous in that tradition - what does that mean in other spheres of life like clothing, housing etc?"
Generally I experience novels as imaginary films, which can get very visceral, but I would never ever conceive of going into a book and meeting a character. I guess that is what some people did in Star Trek TNG's holo rooms now that I think of it. Huh!
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I like that simile! makes sense to me!
Having written extensively about Djinn in Outremer, this is something basic to the concept of Djinn, and why having a Djinn sealed in some object like a lamp makes sense.
I also like her style! Thumbs up!
As a Lyricist I write poetry all the time. Poetry is a very information rich medium, using metaphor, reference, alliteration, word connotations and other tools to condense an experience. A rather short poem can unpack fully in the readers mind into a vast landscape and an intricate story. I do love her handling of poetry here.
Agreed!
Ha! Interesting thought!