by Paul Nurse
p. 28, “and Scheherazade related to her a tale of elegant beauty”: ibid.
p. 31, “truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling”: Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), Vol. 2, 713–14.
p. 41, “die as ransom for others”: Nights, I, 15.
Chapter 2: A Frenchman Abroad
p. 54, “Made for letters”: Nights, X, 96.
p. 56, “orner nostre France”: Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Antoine Galland, n.d. Quoted in Charles Schefer (ed.), Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son séjour à Constantinople, 1672–73, 2 vols. (Paris: Charles Schefer, 1881), II, 275.
p. 63, “marvels of the East”: Galland, Bibliothèque orientale (Paris: Compagnie des libraries,1697), preface, n.p.
p. 64, “my native place”: Nights, VI, 4.
p. 65, “One day my mind will become possessed”; “seized with longing for travel and diversion”: ibid., 14, 23.
p. 66, “Know … that my story is a wonderful one”: ibid., 4.
p. 68, “Three or four days ago, a friend from Aleppo”: Galland to Pierre-Daniel Huet, October 13, 1701. Quoted in Muhammad Abd al-Halim, Antoine Galland: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1964), 414.
p. 68, “collection of stories people recite in that country”: ibid.
p. 68, “I have only four or five hundred”: Galland to Gisbert Cuper, n.d., 1702. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 191.
Chapter 3: The Coming of the Nights
p. 70, “I have finished a clean copy”: Galland to Pierre-Daniel Huet, August 1702. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 267.
p. 70, “surprising quantity and diversity of narratives”: Antoine Galland, Les mille et une nuits, hereafter Nuits, 9 vols. (Paris: Chez le normant, 1806), I, xxix.
p. 70–71, “I say ample collection because the Arabic original”: ibid., xxix–xxx.
p. 71, “All the Orientals, Persians, Tartars and Indians”: ibid., xxxi.
p. 71, “profit from the examples of virtues and vices”: ibid., xxxii.
p. 72, “Verily the works and words of those gone before us”: Nights, I, 1.
p. 74, “tales just as good as the fairy stories”: Galland to Huet, February 25, 1701. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 261.
p. 78, “Provençal and French tolerably well”: Galland journal entry for March 17, 1709. Quoted in Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, hereafter Thousand (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 31–32.
p. 78, “some wonderful Arabic stories”: Galland journal entry for March 25, 1709. Quoted in ibid., 32.
p. 79, “written for me almost a year ago”: Galland journal entry for November 3, 1710. Quoted in ibid., 32.
p. 79, “I have finished the translation”: Galland journal entry for January 10, 1711. Quoted in ibid.
p. 83, “more remarkable for decision, action and manliness than the male”: Nights, X, 192.
p. 87, “not part of the Nights”: Galland, Nuits, V, i.
p. 87, “the infidelity done to him”: Galland, Nuits, V, ii.
p. 88, “a high degree that art of telling a tale”: Nights, X, 95.
p. 90, “It is sufficient that readers be informed of the intention of the Arab author”: Galland, Nuits, IV, i.
p. 92, “that nonsense work brings me more honour”: Galland to Gispert Cuper, July 10, 1705. Quoted in Mahdi, Thousand, 205–6, n86.
p. 94, “simple in life and manners”: Nights, X, 103.
p. 95, “this excellent man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and litterateur”: ibid., 96.
p. 96, “the glamour of imagination, the marvel of the miracles”: ibid., 99.
Chapter 4: “These Idle Deserts”
p. 98, “pitchforked into Gallic English”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” Part One, The Nation 71 (August 30, 1900), 167.
p. 99, “Arabian Nights Entertainments: consisting of one thousand and one stories”: Antoine Galland, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: 1706). Title page.
p. 99, “Read Sindbad and you will be sick of Aeneas”: Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, June 30, 1789. Quoted in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), XI, 20.
p. 100, “store house of ingenious fiction”: Henry Weber, Tales of the East, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1812), I, i.
p. 103, “senseless stories that mean nothing”: Voltaire, Zadig, and Other Tales, trans. Robert Bruce Boswell (London: G. Bell, 1910), 50.
p. 103, “Monsters and monsterland were never more in request”: Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Advice to an Author,” section iii, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols., ed. John M. Robertson (Gloucester, Mass: P. Smith, 1963), I, 221–25.
p. 104, “the product of some Woman’s imagination”: Bishop Francis Atterbury to Alexander Pope, September 28, 1720. Quoted in Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 4 vols., ed. George Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), II, 53–56.
p. 104, “whether the tales be really Arabick”: James Beattie, On Fables and Romance (London: 1783). Quoted in Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, hereafter Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), 17.
p. 106, “the Arabian and Turkish Tales were owing to your Tale of a Tub”: Dedication of Charles Gildon’s Golden Spy: or a Political Journey of British Nights’ Entertainments (1709) to Jonathan Swift.
p. 106, “the Arabian Tales was the fairy godmother”: Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 243.
p. 114, “Visions of palaces underground”: Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, 2 vols. (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849), I, 25.
p. 115, “will always please by the moving picture of human manners”: Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: Nelson, 1966), 36.
p. 115, “most freely … and the work of his manhood”: G.M. Young, Gibbon (London: P. Davies, 1932), 13–14.
Chapter 5: The Nights and the Romantic Spirit
p. 119, “a little yellow canvas-covered book”: William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Book V, 194.
p. 120, “made so deep an impression on me”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), I: 1785–1800, 347–48.
p. 120, “of Faery Tales, and Genii etc.”: ibid., 354.
p. 122, “Lady M.W. Montague … History of the Turks”: Quoted in Leslie A. Marchand, Byron (London: John Murray, 1971), 14.
p. 122, “had much influence on my subsequent wishes”: ibid.
p. 122, “For correctness of costume”: Byron’s note to Line 1328 of the original edition of “The Giaour” (London: John Murray, 1813).
p. 123, “stories from the Persian”: Byron, Don Juan, 1821 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1996), Canto III, XXXV; 165.
p. 124, “Oh! That the Desert”: Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1812–18, in The Works of Lord Byron (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), Canto IV, CLXXVII; 243.
p. 127, “so positively marvellous”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” 1838, in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 612.
p. 128, “so vast it is not necessary to have read it”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights,” 1936, in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1984), 57.
p. 129, “The Desert is pre-eminently the Land of Fancy”: Richard F. Burton, The Gold Mines of Midian (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1878), 357.
Chapter 6: Searching for the Nights
p. 131–32, “Oh, now all common things”: Charles Dickens, “The Christmas Tree,” 1850, in Christmas Stories (London: Dent, 1965), 9–10.
p. 133, “vapid, frigid, and insipid”: Nights, X, 110–11.
p. 135 (n.), “vainly troubled friends and correspondents�
��: ibid., 93n.
p. 137, “We are … as much acquainted”: Richard Hole, Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: T. Cadell Jr., and W. Davies, 1797), 10.
p. 137, “the same resemblance … as an oriental mosch”: ibid., 17.
p. 138, “probably a tissue of tales invented at different times”: Weber, Tales of the East, I, vii.
p. 138, “Enchanted Horse [is] evidently [the same as] the Horse of Chaucer”: ibid., I, xxxiii.
p. 140, “the learned Baron’s”: Nights, X, 78.
p. 153–54, “I am told they have no balls”: Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 138–39.
p. 157, “a most valuable, praiseworthy, painstaking, learned and delightful work”: James Henry Leigh Hunt, “New Translations of the Arabian Nights,” London and Westminster Review, 1839. XXXIII, Art. iii, 113.
p. 157, “excessively perverted the work”: Edward William Lane, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, hereafter Arabian Nights (London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1859), 7.
p. 157, “lameness, puerility and indecency”: Stanley Lane-Poole, Preface to Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1859). Quoted in Irwin, Companion, 24.
p. 158, “amiable and devoted Arabist”: Nights, I, xii; “garbled and mutilated”: Richard F. Burton, Supplemental Nights, 6 vols., hereafter Supplemental Nights (London: Printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1886–88), VI, 422.
p. 158, “the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters”: Nights, I, xii.
p. 158, “When he [Lane] pronounces The Nights”: Nights, X, 79.
p. 159, “right to omit such tales, anecdotes, etc.”: Arabian Nights, 12.
Chapter 7: The Victorian Rivals
p. 163, “an uncontrollable imagination and a fondness for fun”: Thomas Wright, Life of John Payne (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919), 15.
p. 164, “segregate himself in a crowd”: ibid., 76.
p. 165–66, “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god”: quoted in Arthur Symons, “A Neglected Genius: Sir Richard Burton,” Dramatis Personae (London: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923), 23.
p. 167, “this wondrous treasury of Moslem folk lore”: Nights, I, ix.
p. 167, “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy”: ibid.
p. 168, “that wonderful work, so often translated”: Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, 2 vols. (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1894), I, 26.
p. 168, “moral putrefaction … the most familiar of books”: ibid.
p. 168, “very little of his [Steinhaeuser’s] labours”: Nights, I, ix.
p. 169, “an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction”: ibid., vii.
p. 169, “the first two or three chapters”: Lord Redesdale, Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1915), II, 573.
p. 169, “fitfully … amid a host of obstructions”: Nights, I, ix.
p. 170, “These tales … strung together”: Richard F. Burton, Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1894), xviii.
p. 170, “Here was produced and published for the use of the then civilized world”: ibid.
p. 170, “They are not without a quaintish merit”: Huntington Library Collection. Quoted in Mary Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 470.
p. 171, “My work is still unfinished”: Athenaeum, no. 2822 (November 5, 1881), 703.
p. 171, “Your terms about the royalty”: Burton to Payne, March 20, 1882. Quoted in Wright, Life of Sir Richard Burton, 2 vols., hereafter Life of Burton (London: Burt Franklin, 1968), II, 35.
p. 172, “You are ‘drawing it very mild’”: Burton to Payne, May 12, 1883. Quoted in ibid., 42.
p. 172, “What I mean by literalism”: Burton to Payne, Oct. 1, 1883. Quoted in ibid.
p. 172, “This book is indeed a legacy”: Nights, I, xxiii.
p. 173, “He succeeds admirably”: ibid., I, xiii.
p. 173, “begun … by Galland, a Frenchman”: ibid., X, 95.
p. 174, “ordering … old scraps of translations”: Supplemental Nights, VI, 390.
p. 177, “I may tell you that the work”: Burton to Bernard Quaritsch, n.d. Quoted in Lovell, 670.
p. 177, “My conviction is that all the women”: Burton to Payne, September 9, 1884. Quoted in Life of Burton, II, 54.
p. 177–78, “mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales”: Athenaeum, no. 2822 (November 5, 1881), 703.
p. 178, “I am going in for notes”: Burton to Payne, August 12, 1884. Quoted in Wright, Life of John Payne, 80.
p. 178, “a chef-d’oeuvre of the highest”: Nights, I, xi.
p. 178, “a book whose speciality is anthropology”: ibid., I, xviii.
p. 178, “an opportunity of noticing in explanatory notes”: ibid., I, xix.
p. 179, “did not fit into Mr. Payne’s plan”: ibid., I, xviii.
p. 179, “a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book”: ibid., I, xiii.
p. 179, “is highly composite; it does not disdain”: Supplemental Nights, VI, 410–11.
p. 180, “she snorted and snarked”: Nights, I, xiv.
p. 181, “of Benedictine monk, a Crusader, and a Buccaneer”: Quoted in Life, II, 85.
p. 182, “O thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores”: Nights, I, 76.
p. 183, “I don’t care a button”: Quoted in Lady Isabel Burton, Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893), II, 284.
p. 183–84, “one of the most important translations”: St. James Gazette, September 12, 1885. Quoted in Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 290.
p. 184, “simply priceless”: The Morning Advertiser, September 15, 1885. Quoted in Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 288.
p. 184, “the most complete, laborious, uncompromising, and perfect translation”: Vanity Fair, no. XXXIV (October 24, 1886), 233.
p. 184, “As a bold astute traveller, courting danger”: ibid.
p. 184, “Probably no European has ever gathered”: Stanley Lane-Poole, “The Arabian Nights,” Edinburgh Review, CVIIV (July 1886), 184.
p. 185, “I struggled for forty-seven years”: Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 442.
p. 187, “his great work”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” The Nation, 71, Part One (August 30, 1900), 168.
p. 189, “The girl is soft of speech”: Nights, V, 159.
p. 189, “every man at some … turn”: ibid., X, 124–25.
p. 189–90, “dazzled by the splendours which flash before it”: ibid.
p. 190, “literary Brighton Pavilion”: Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), xxv.
Chapter 8: The Arabian Nights Today
p. 192, “the most popular book in the world”: James Henry Leigh Hunt, “New Translations of the Arabian Nights,” London and Westminster Review XXXIII, Art. iii, 106.
p. 193, “ceased to be part of the common literary culture”: Irwin, Companion, 274.
p. 197, “Where they’ll cut off your nose if they don’t like your face”: “Arabian Nights,” from Aladdin. Music and lyrics by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The author heard the original lyric in-theatre early in 1993 before the change.
p. 205, “the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice”: Abbot, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights,’” 133.
p. 206, “neutral territory … between the real world”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Introductory Essay: The Custom-House,” in The Scarlet Letter (New York: Rinehart, 1961), 31.
p. 207, “Much the best version”: T.E. Lawrence to Jonathan Cape, June 4, 1923. Quoted in Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1989), 719.
p. 207, “The correctness of Mardrus”: ibid.
p. 207, “beneath criticism”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” Part Two, The Nation (Septe
mber 6, 1900), 185.
p. 208, “For the first time in Europe”: J.C. Mardrus, Arabian Nights (Le livre des mille et une nuits), 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), I, i.
p. 212–13, “Then there lived after them a wise ruler”: Nights, X, 61–62.
Chapter 9: Infinite Delights
p. 217, “there is divinity (the proverb says luck)”: Nights, X, 75.
Suggestions for Further Study
For some reason, there are very few works dealing with the Arabian Nights that are written with the non-specialist in mind, although you might think that the longevity and impact of the book on global culture would lend itself to something designed as a general history. The enormous number of scholarly studies published in the past generation has helped some, but most of these studies are written, understandably, both by and for the academic community, and are unlikely to provide the general reader with an overall picture of an admittedly complicated subject.
Nevertheless, there are some texts and related material that can be recommended for readers wanting to delve deeper into the history and themes of the Nights. Foremost among these are three books that are essential reading, and without which this present volume could not have been written. Although all are written by scholars, each can be recommended to the non-specialist wanting to probe into the labyrinthine world of The Thousand and One Nights and not lose his or her way.
Robert Irwin published his invaluable The Arabian Nights: A Companion in 1994 to wide acclaim. Since reprinted, it has become the standard text for examining various aspects of the Nights—its history and translators, its sources and texts, influence and thematic concerns. Although Irwin divides his text into themed chapters touching on specific subjects such as the various translations, sexuality and literature influenced by the Nights, his work is the closest thing available in English to a general overview, incorporating sundry related aspects into a true “companion” to any edition of the Tales.
Muhsin Mahdi published his English-language The Thousand and One Nights fifteen years ago, to accompany his Arabic recension of Alf Laila wa Laila. In this focused work Professor Mahdi concentrates on presenting—in remarkable detail—the early history of the Nights in the West from the details surrounding the construction of the Antoine Galland translation, Galland’s “successors” (including Dom Denis Chavis, Jacques Cazotte and Duncan Black MacDonald), and ending with an examination of the four printed Arabic texts that appeared in the nineteenth century.
