by Paul Nurse
Regardless, while waiting for the “remainder” of The Thousand and One Nights to arrive from Syria, and amid his librarian duties for Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, Galland sat down and began reading his new Arabic volumes with a view toward adapting Alf Laila wa Laila for French readers, as he had the fantastic voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.
Chapter 3
THE COMING
OF THE NIGHTS
Say whatso thou wantest of me? Here am I, thy Slave,
and the Slave to whoso holdeth the Lamp …
—“ALAEDDIN; OR, THE WONDERFUL LAMP”
Disappointed at what he thought was the incompleteness of his Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript, Galland still found himself as charmed by its tales as he had been with Sindbad’s voyages, although he also could not have been unaware that the text lacked any mention of Sindbad among its contents.
In any case, Galland soon set about translating the manuscript into French, using his usual method of spending his evenings relaxing by working on what he considered light literature; a pleasant diversion with which to recharge his mental batteries. This had been the method with Sindbad le marin—admittedly a much shorter work—but after receiving the Nights manuscript late in 1701, Galland must have found the going relatively easy, for within two years he had enough translated stories to begin issuing volumes.
In a letter of August 1702 Galland writes, “I have finished a clean copy of a six-hundred page work … I had started … this year upon my return to Paris, working on it only after dinner…. The other work … is entitled The Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Tales, Translated into French…. A thousand and one Nights! and I have only finished seventy; this can give you an idea of the length of the entire work.” For all his familiarity with the oriental collections of Parisian libraries, Galland seems to have been unaware that a nine-volume Turkish edition of Alf Laila wa Laila already existed, and had been housed in Paris since 1660. Nowhere before the publication of his first volumes does he mention this Ottoman translation of the Nights or an Arabic manuscript in Marseilles belonging to a former French consul to Egypt. As far as Galland was concerned at the time, he possessed the only copy of Alf Laila wa Laila in France—for all he knew, in Europe—and it was from this manuscript that he initially worked.
Once there were sufficient stories for the first volumes, Galland repeated the process he followed with Sindbad le marin, approaching his patroness, the Marquise d’O, with manuscript copies for her and the Duchesse of Bourgogne’s enjoyment before winning the Marquise’s support to see the work through the press. In his avertissement (“foreword”) to the first volume, Galland wrote of his appreciation for the Nights’ fine literary qualities, in particular his delight at finding that the author (or authors) had included so many genres within one work, which seemed proof of the superiority of Arabic composition in respect to the stories of other nations.
He was particularly impressed by the ingenious nature of Scheherazade’s frame tale, allowing for a “surprising quantity and diversity of narratives, admirably linked to each other.” This quantity Galland found perhaps the work’s most significant characteristic. “I say ample collection,” he writes, “because the Arabic original, entitled The Thousand and One Nights, consists of thirty-six parts,* and it is merely the translation of the premiere [part] that is being presented … to the public.”
As would some later translators, Galland saw the Nights as more than a simple storybook. To his mind, the work was also a useful text regarding eastern manners, customs and faith. Ironically for such a well-travelled man, he claimed that
all the Orientals, Persians, Tartars and Indians are characterized … and appear as they are, from the sovereigns down to persons of humblest condition. Thus the reader will have the pleasure of seeing and hearing them without taking the trouble of travelling to seek them [out] in their own nations.
All well and good, but in this same passage Galland also notes that the book’s greatest worth lies in its overriding morality—a text offering lessons through the medium of stories. Superficially these might appear to have no purpose beyond entertainment, but in reality they contain ethical illustrations from which readers may benefit. Having already translated the moralistic Indian Fables of Bidpai, Galland hoped readers of what he called Les mille et une nuits—“The Thousand and One Nights”—might “profit from the examples of virtues and vices that they will find [in the tales].”
This was one of the functions, if not actually an explicit goal, of the rawi, who provided social instructions for listeners through their stories. As an outgrowth of this tradition, the literary Nights expresses this aim in its introduction: “Verily the works and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befell other folk and may therefrom take warning….”
Galland’s views on the Nights’ purpose as a vehicle for moral instruction are similar to beliefs held by other writers throughout literature. In a tradition extending from the classical world to the early modern age of Galland’s time and beyond, authors have often paid heed to the moral power of literature and its potential as a social force. In this regard, as well as possessing the ability to entertain, fiction and poetry have the added capacity of instructing, warning or condemning by providing illustrations of ethical behaviour or the results arising from unethical action. Aesop’s Fables, the works of Plato and Aristotle, Dante’s poetical journey through the afterlife, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie (1595), John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)—even a children’s author like Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss—have all employed literature as a medium for conveying moral lessons or have produced considerations about literature’s capacity to effect change. Contemporaries of Galland’s held that fiction, however pleasing, nevertheless has as its primary function a distinct moral and political agenda whereby virtue must always triumph and vice, no matter how alluring, meet with inevitable defeat and reprisal. By reinforcing the idea that virtue is the desired path to follow (even if for no other reason than to avoid retribution), readers are thereby educated to their responsibilities as integrated members of society.
Traditional European folklore that has been altered to provide moral direction for readers—the Brothers Grimm come readily to mind—almost invariably follows this scenario of seeing righteousness triumph over wickedness, offering the comforting hope that good is rewarded and villainy always punished. Despite the abundance of arbitrary cruelty found within the world of the Nights, to Galland’s way of thinking the work remains overwhelmingly moral both in its spirit and general intent, as numerous exemplary lessons are provided and dozens of villainous characters are punished (often ingeniously) for their crimes against others, in a world that is not merely fantastical but often just, as well.
Once again Galland’s remarkable luck held. Not only was he among the new generation of orientalists produced by the Enlightenment surge of interest in the East, and thereby had an enormous sphere to work from, but he also knew he had arrived on the folklore scene just as a vogue for French contes de fées (national fairy tales) was starting to run its course, leaving the field open for something new.
During much of the preceding century, salon society had enjoyed a craze for oral folk tales French peasants supposedly told their children and which were then collected, read and passed among sophisticated, upper-class circles. In 1697 eight such tales, including “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Puss ’n Boots” and—surprisingly—”Bluebeard,” were compiled into a single volume by the lawyer and author Charles Perrault. Entitled Contes du temps passé (“Stories of the Past”) but subtitled Contes de la mere l’Oye (“Mother Goose Stories”) after the famously garrulous female goose-herders of the rural districts, Perrault’s work proved an immediate and enduring classic, spawning countless other collections.
Although academics of the time dismissed contes as foolish romances used to put children to sleep, thes
e and similar tales created a fashion in literary salons for stories involving supernatural episodes, setting the stage for the appearance of other imaginative narratives. Galland was aware of this trend, remarking in a February 1701 letter that his forthcoming Nights contains “tales just as good as the fairy stories published these last years in such profusion.” For his part, the man who started the literary fashion for the fairy tale, Charles Perrault, was likewise aware of the growing interest in oriental matters, praising d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale as introducing readers to something new—the heaven and earth of the Muslim world about which Europeans had previously been so unaware. They shared the same publisher, and sources indicate that Perrault and Galland were at least acquaintances, very possibly friends, but because he died in 1703, Charles Perrault did not live to see the next stage in the emerging European imaginative tradition, though he unconsciously passed the torch to the first volumes of Galland’s Mille et une nuits.
If parallels can be made between the Nights and the Bible, they can also be made between the Nights and the contes de fées that almost immediately preceded it. While by definition nearly all European fairy tales involve fantastical elements, not all Arabian Nights stories contain supernatural plots or references, even as such tales remain essential parts of the work’s mystique. Many stories, especially the humorous anecdotes or those involving historical characters, revolve around ordinary, reality-based situations with nothing of the miraculous about them. Yet in the western imagination of the early eighteenth century and even today in most abridged editions, European fairy tales and the Arabian Nights are linked by the perception that they are similar collections of imaginative tales. The setting of the Nights—the romantic, magical-seeming lands of the East—imbued even the most commonplace tales with mythic qualities, endowing otherwise ordinary stories with the sense of exotic distance necessary to associate western fairy tales with those appearing as their eastern counterparts.
For French readers, the very world of the Nights had the effect of transforming its stories into exotic things. Readers who consumed volumes of Galland’s work as if they were petites pâtisseries did so with the comforting notion that they were perusing contes largely removed only in setting from their own indigenous folklore. If the Holy Bible acted as the Arabian Nights’ historical forerunner in bringing eastern wonder tales to the West, the Nights’ new cosmos had its trail blazed first by a European cousin, the western fairy tale.
The first two volumes of Les mille et une nuits were published by Claude Barbin in January 1704, followed by Volumes 3 and 4 later that same year. As all eastern versions of the Nights existed only in handwritten manuscript at this time, this was not only the first publication of Alf Laila wa Laila in the West but also the first printed version to appear anywhere. The next year two more volumes were published, with the seventh appearing in 1706. Thereafter, successive volumes arrived at irregular intervals, with Volume 8 in 1709, 9 and 10 three years later and the final two issued in 1717, two years after Galland’s death. Unlike some of the massive editions that appeared in the following centuries, Galland’s volumes were small in size and content—about three inches by five inches, and only between two and three hundred pages long.
The tales in the first six volumes corresponded roughly to the sequence in Galland’s Syrian text. By then he had nearly exhausted the contents of his three Arabic volumes, so after Night 236, Volume 6 is supplemented by another story, “Qamarazzaman,” taken from an unidentified source. Volume 7 contains the two remaining stories in Galland’s manuscript, completing what he had bought from Syria. But there were still five volumes to come, containing a host of tales that do not appear in Galland’s surviving source material. Where did these come from, how did Galland happen upon them, and are they in fact actual Alf Laila wa Laila stories?
The answer to all these questions is that Galland used whatever material he deemed appropriate and worthy, including at least one more Arabic manuscript of Nights stories now lost. In the dedication of the first volume to the Marquise d’O, Galland states that he had worked from four—not three—Arabic manuscripts of Alf Laila wa Laila. This is not a slip, for in addition to “Qamarazzaman,” some later stories for which Galland provides translations exist in Arabic manuscripts of the Nights postdating the work he obtained from Syria. Galland probably believed that the Sindbad voyages he inserted in Volume 3 existed in some fuller Arabic version of the Nights (as he had been told), and so felt justified by including them as part of his work.
But he also included stories that did not appear in his Syrian manuscript, some of which have their counterparts in other Arabic compilations of Alf Laila wa Laila, but a number of which are considered orphan stories without provenance, since they find no counterpart in surviving Arabic manuscripts of the Nights predating Galland’s translation.* Believing a complete Arabic version existed somewhere in the Arab world, Galland was stymied for years by his inability to find one, and remained under near-constant pressure from publisher and public to come up with more stories. He was never to know that a “complete” Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript with an actual 1001 Nights is as mythical as the Man in the Moon, or that his search would inadvertently muddy the waters for all those coming after him.
Ironically, Galland’s surviving three-volume manuscript is now held to contain the earliest and best Arabic collection of Alf Laila wa Laila stories in existence, although there is evidence that the great British orientalist Sir William Jones possessed another, more extensive Syrian copy which is now lost, but which may have been as much as twice the length of Galland’s work. In the meantime, Galland used whatever stories he had at his disposal for further volumes of his Nights. Even if he suspected he was misinformed about the Sindbad voyages, he still could have believed it might be part of a greater work, and so had no qualms about including it in his text. The mysterious, lost fourth volume Galland employed was in all likelihood not a sequential continuation of his Syrian manuscript but a different Alf Laila wa Laila with additional tales, which Galland came across and used once his first source was depleted.
It was not for lack of trying, however, that Galland failed to find an “entire” Alf Laila wa Laila. For years after receiving his Syrian manuscript, he hunted for a full version of the Arabic Nights to augment his sources. From mention of four manuscripts in his avertissement, Galland must have found the fourth text sometime between 1701 and publication of his first volume in 1704. This would have given him sufficient reason to believe that more stories were available in Arabic, and it would only be a matter of time before he found a complete version.
There was some reason for hope. In 1711, Galland received a letter from a M. Brue, a secretary attached to the French embassy in Constantinople, informing him that a Jew residing in the Ottoman capital supposedly owned an Arabic manuscript containing the entire Thousand and One Nights. Galland’s correspondent went on to say that he would do his best to buy it and have it forwarded to France. This must have been a false trail, for in subsequent mentions in his journals, Galland grows increasingly discouraged about the ability of Brue or anyone else to procure such a work; by late 1712, he refers to the subject no more, probably having resigned himself to the fact that he would be unable to find a full Alf Laila wa Laila in whatever years were left to him (he was then sixty-six).
An earlier lead, however, proved to be more significant. In 1709, still searching fruitlessly for a thirty-six part Alf Laila wa Laila, Galland found another source, this time through a living person. That year, he made the acquaintance of the celebrated French traveller Paul Lucas. Like Galland, Lucas had travelled in the Levant looking for oriental collectibles, so with much in common, it can be assumed that he and Galland quickly became friendly. Lucas had just returned from Syria, bringing with him a Maronite Christian friend from Aleppo named Youhenna (called “Hana” by Galland) Diab, who proved a fount of further tales. Galland’s journal shows that on March 17 of that year, he visited Lucas and met Diab for the firs
t time. Besides Arabic, Diab spoke “Provençal and French tolerably well.” On this or a second visit a week later, Galland probably asked Diab about the Nights, perhaps mentioning his trouble in finding a full manuscript of the work. Learning of the Frenchman’s interest in storytelling, the next time they met, Diab began telling Galland “some wonderful Arabic stories, which he promised to put into writing and give to me.”
There are only a few more brief mentions of Diab in Galland’s journals, but before his departure from France later that year, Diab gave Galland—either in Arabic manuscript form or dictated orally—some fourteen stories. Seven of these provided Galland with most of the material used for future volumes of Les mille et une nuits although, still searching for the elusive full Alf Laila wa Laila, he would not bring these out until 1712—a hiatus of six years following the release of Volume 7, which he considered the last “legitimate” Nights volume to appear before Volume 9.
Of these seven published tales, two are among the most famous stories in history, their very names representative of the classical Muslim world. On November 3, 1709, Galland notes in his journal that he has started to read the Arabic story “The Lamp,” “written for me almost a year ago by the Maronite … whom Paul Lucas had brought with him….” Two months later, he writes, “I have finished the translation of Volume 10 … based on the Arabic text I have received in Hana’s handwriting.”
The story Galland calls “The Lamp” was, of course, retitled “Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp.” It involves a fatherless tailor’s son living in China named Aladdin (Ala al-Din in Arabic: “Excellence of Faith”), who is tricked by an African sorcerer into retrieving an old oil-lamp from a booby-trap-filled cave. Aladdin discovers that the lamp contains a genie pledged to fulfill the wishes of whoever possesses it, and is thus transformed from a pauper into a rich man who marries a princess. But just when his happiness seems assured, the sorcerer returns in the guise of a peddler, still searching for the lamp by advertising his wares in the streets with the cry, “New lamps for old!” The princess, not understanding the worth of Aladdin’s lamp, trades it for a newer one. After much trouble, Aladdin manages to win back his old lamp—the low-born outfoxing the trickster figure—and everything ends happily.
