by A. S. Byatt
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Various Western writers have been tempted to write the Thousand-and-second Tale, including the American Edgar Allan Poe and the Viennese Joseph Roth. Roth’s tale of the decadent days of the Austrian Empire, the border between East and West, is full of furtive and voluptuous sex, sly analysis of the operations of authorities, substitutions of women, vanishing jewels. Poe’s Scheherazade makes the mistake of telling her ageing husband about modern marvels like steamships, radio, and telegraphs. He finds these true tales so incredible that he concludes that she has lost her touch and has her strangled after all. Poe is a combative and irreverent Yankee at the Persian court. John Barth, in his “Dunyazadiad,” appears in person as a balding bespectacled genie who tells the nervous Scheherazade the tales she will tell because he has read them in the future and she is his heroine—thus creating another false eternity, a circular time loop, in which storytellers hand on stories of storytellers….
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Then there are the modern oriental fabulists, Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie, both threatened with death for storytelling. Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days is a collection of magical tales, with a political edge and a spiritual depth. His stories rework the Nights; his Shahriyar slowly learns about justice and mercy, the Angel of Death is a bric-a-brac merchant, and genies play tricks with fate. Salman Rushdie’s narratives are all intertwined with the storytelling of the Nights. Haroun and the Sea of Stories pits a resourceful child, Haroun, against the evil Khattam-Shud who wants to drain the Ocean of the Streams of Story, which are alive, and replace it with silence and darkness. Rushdie’s tale, like Scheherazade’s, equates storytelling with life, but his characters and wit owe as much to western fantasies, to Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz, as they do to the ancient Ocean of Stories or the Thousand and One Nights. Another cross-fertilization, another conversation.
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Rushdie’s Sea of Stories is “the biggest library in the universe.” Jorge Luis Borges, to whom libraries, labyrinths, and books were all images of infinity, wrote in “The Garden of Forking Paths” of “that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and one Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity.” This circular tale fascinated Italo Calvino (who failed to find the episode in any translation of the Nights). Calvino’s own marvellous If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is the endless tale of a lost Reader who keeps beginning books only to find the rest is missing, and the replacement copy turns out to be always another, quite different beginning. This novel contains a novelist, as Borges’s tale contains Scheherazade within Scheherazade, who wants to write a book that will contain only the pure pleasure of anticipation of the beginning, “a book that is only an incipit,” a book with no ending, perhaps like the Arabian Nights.
Marcel Proust saw himself as Scheherazade, in relation to both sex and death. He describes his Narrator’s ingenious excuses for not accompanying Albertine on her little expeditions as an exercise of ingenuity greater than Scheherazade’s. Albertine, however, is the one of the pair who is “insatiable for movement and life.” The narrator remarks gloomily that unfortunately, whilst the “Persian storyteller” put off her death with her ingenuity, he was hastening his own. And at the end of the almost endless novel, he writes a triumphant meditation on the love of death, the sense of the presence of death, which drives him to create his great and comprehensive book, the book of his life. At one point he even personifies this presence of death as “le sultan Sheriar” who might or might not put a dawn end to the nocturnal writing of what could not be the Thousand and One Nights he had so loved as a child. As a child, “superstitiously attached to books I loved, as to my loves, I could not without horror imagine a work which would be different.” But he has learned that one can only remake what one loves by renouncing it. “It will be a book as long as the Thousand and One Nights, but quite other.” Malcolm Bowie, in his excellent Proust Among the Stars, comments that “the big book of death-defying stories” with which Proust’s novel compares itself is not Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which death appears as a “horrifying initial trigger to tale-telling” but the Nights, “where stories are life.” “Narrate or die,” for Proust’s narrator as for Scheherazade is the imperative. “By mere sentences placed end on end, one’s sentence is commuted for a while, and the end is postponed.”
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The Judaeo-Christian culture is founded on a linear narrative in time. It moves forward from creation through history, to redemption in the Christian case, at one point in time, and looks forward to the promised end, when time and death will cease to be. The great novels of Western culture, from Don Quixote to War and Peace, from Moby-Dick to Dr. Faustus, were constructed in the shadow of the one Book and its story. People are excited by millennial events as images of beginnings and ending. There is a difference between these great, portentous histories and the proliferation of small tales that are handed on, like gifts, like objects for delight and contemplation. Storytellers like Calvino and Scheherazade can offer readers and listeners an infinity of incipits, an illusion of inexhaustibility. Calvino’s imaginary novelist sits and stares at a cartoon of Snoopy, sitting at a typewriter, with the caption “It was a dark and stormy night …,” the beginning of a circular shaggy dog story. Both cartoons and soap operas are versions of Scheherazade’s tale-telling, worlds in which death and endings are put off indefinitely—and age too, in the case of Charlie Brown. High modernism escaped time with epiphanic visions of timeless moments, imagined infinities which have always seemed to me strained, not in the end offering any counter to fear and death. But the small artifices of elegant, well-made tales, and the vulgar satisfaction of narrative curiosity do stand against death. The romantic novelist Georgette Heyer kept few fan letters, but I saw two—one from a man, who had laughed at one of her comic fops on the trolley going to a life-threatening operation, and one from a Polish woman, who had kept her fellow prisoners alive during the war by reciting, night after night, a Heyer novel she knew by heart.
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During the bombardment of Sarajevo in 1994 a group of theater workers in Amsterdam commissioned tales, from different European writers, to be read aloud, simultaneously, in theaters in Sarajevo itself and all over Europe, every Friday until the fighting ended. This project pitted storytelling against destruction, imaginative life against real death. It may not have saved lives but it was a form of living energy. It looked back to the 1001 Nights and forward to the millennium. It was called Scheherazade 2001.
Published as “Narrate or Die: Why Scheherazade Keeps on Talking,” The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999.
A. S. BYATT is the author of Possession, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize, Elementals, and her latest novel, The Biographer’s Tale. She lives in London.
PREFACE
This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labour of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half-clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency. Impossible even to open the pages without a vision starting into view; without drawing a picture from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and “respectable” surroundings, the Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as ether, whose every breath raises men’s spirits like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure front of the western firmam
ent; and the after-glow transfiguring and transforming, as by magic, the homely and rugged features of the scene into a fairy-land lit with a light which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the woollen tents, low and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste of lion-tawny clays and gazelle-brown gravels, and the camp-fire dotting like a glow-worm the village centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild weird song of lads and lasses, driving or rather pelting, through the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled with the bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds; while the reremouse flitted overhead with his tiny shriek, and the rave of the jackal resounded through deepening glooms, and—most musical of music— the palm-trees answered the whispers of the night-breeze with the softest tones of falling water.
And then a shift of scene. The Shaykhs and “white-beards” of the tribe gravely take their places, sitting with outspread skirts like hillocks on the plain, as the Arabs say, around the camp-fire, whilst I reward their hospitality and secure its continuance by reading or reciting a few pages of their favourite tales. The women and children stand motionless as silhouettes outside the ring; and all are breathless with attention; they seem to drink in the words with eyes and mouths as well as with ears. The most fantastic flights of fancy, the wildest improbabilities, the most impossible of impossibilities, appear to them utterly natural, mere matters of every-day occurrence. They enter thoroughly into each phase of feeling touched upon by the author: they take a personal pride in the chivalrous nature and knightly prowess of Taj al-Mulúk; they are touched with tenderness by the self-sacrificing love of Azízah; their mouths water as they hear of heaps of untold gold given away in largess like clay; they chuckle with delight every time a Kázi or Fakír—a judge or a reverend—is scurvily entreated by some Pantagruelist of the Wilderness; and, despite their normal solemnity and impassibility, all roar with laughter, sometimes rolling upon the ground till the reader’s gravity is sorely tried, at the tales of the garrulous Barber and of Ali and the Kurdish Sharper. To this magnetizing mood the sole exception is when a Badawi of superior accomplishments, who sometimes says his prayers, ejaculates a startling “Astaghfaru’llah”—I pray Allah’s pardon!—for listening, not to Carlyle’s “downright lies,” but to light mention of the sex whose name is never heard amongst the nobility of the Desert.
Nor was it only in Arabia that the immortal Nights did me such notable service: I found the wildlings of Somali-land equally amenable to its discipline; no one was deaf to the charm and the two women-cooks of my caravan, on its way to Harar, were incontinently dubbed by my men “Shahrazad” and “Dinazad.”
It may be permitted me also to note that this translation is a natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah. Arriving at Aden in the (so-called) winter of 1852, I put up with my old and dear friend, Steinhaeuser; and, when talking over Arabia and the Arabs, we at once came to the same conclusion that, while the name of this wondrous treasury of Moslem folklore is familiar to almost every English child, no general reader is aware of the valuables it contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists. Before parting we agreed to “collaborate” and produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original, my friend taking the prose and I the metrical part; and we corresponded upon the subject for years. But whilst I was in the Brazil, Steinhaeuser died suddenly of apoplexy at Berne in Switzerland and, after the fashion of Anglo-India, his valuable MSS. left at Aden were dispersed, and very little of his labours came into my hands.
Thus I was left alone to my work, which progressed fitfully amid a host of obstructions. At length, in the spring of 1879, the tedious process of copying began and the book commenced to take finished form. But, during the winter of 1881–82, I saw in the literary journals a notice of a new version by Mr. John Payne, well known to scholars for his prowess in English verse, especially for his translation of The Poems of Master Francis Villon, of Paris. Being then engaged on an expedition to the Gold Coast (for gold), which seemed likely to cover some months, I wrote to the Athenæum (Nov. 13, 1881) and to Mr. Payne, who was wholly unconscious that we were engaged on the same work, and freely offered him precedence and possession of the field till no longer wanted. He accepted my offer as frankly, and his priority entailed another delay lasting till the spring of 1885. These details will partly account for the lateness of my appearing, but there is yet another cause. Professional ambition suggested that literary labours, unpopular with the vulgar and the half-educated, are not likely to help a man up the ladder of promotion. But common sense presently suggested to me that, professionally speaking, I was not a success; and, at the same time, that I had no cause to be ashamed of my failure. In our day, when we live under a despotism of the lower “middle-class” Philister who can pardon anything but superiority, the prizes of competitive services are monopolized by certain “pets” of the Médiocratie, and prime favourites of that jealous and potent majority—the Mediocrities who know “no nonsense about merit.” It is hard for an outsider to realize how perfect is the monopoly of commonplace, and to comprehend how fatal a stumbling-stone that man sets in the way of his own advancement who dares to think for himself, or who knows more or who does more than the mob of gentlemen-employés who know very little and who do even less.
Yet, however behindhand I may be, there is still ample room and verge for an English version of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
Our century of translations, popular and vernacular, from (Professor Antoine) Galland’s delightful abbreviation and adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster’s, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey’s, which is a re-correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef-d’œuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy-book, a nice present for little boys.
After nearly a century had elapsed, Dr. Jonathan Scott (LL.D. H.E.I.C.’s S., Persian Secretary to the G. G. Bengal; Oriental Professor, etc., etc.), printed his Tales, Anecdotes, and Letters, translated from the Arabic and Persian, (Cadell and Davies, London, A.D. 1800); and followed in 1811 with an edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments from the MS. of Edward Wortley Montague (in 6 vols., small 8vo, London: Longmans, etc.). This work he (and he only) describes as “Carefully revised and occasionally corrected from the Arabic.” The reading public did not wholly reject it, sundry texts were founded upon the Scott version and it has been imperfectly reprinted (4 vols., 8vo, Nimmo and Bain, London, 1883). But most men, little recking what a small portion of the original they were reading, satisfied themselves with the Anglo-French epitome and metaphrase. At length in 1838, Mr. Henry Torrens, B.A., Irishman, lawyer (“of the Inner Temple”) and Bengal Civilian, took a step in the right direction; and began to translate, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, (1 vol., 8vo, Calcutta: W Thacker and Co.) from the Arabic of the Ægyptian (!) MS. edited by Mr. (afterwards Sir) William H. Macnaghten. The attempt, or rather the intention, was highly creditable; the copy was carefully moulded upon the model and offered the best example of the verbatim et literatim style. But the plucky author knew little of Arabic, and least of what is most wanted, the dialect of Egypt and Syria. His prose is so conscientious as to offer up spirit at the shrine of letter; and his verse, always whimsical, has at times a manner of Hibernian whoop which is comical when it should be pathetic. Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed would have contained nine or ten.
That amiable and devoted Arabist, the late Edward William Lane, does not score a success in his New Translation of the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1839), of which there have been four English editions, besides American, two edited by E. S. Poole. He chose the abbreviating Bulak Edition; and, of its two hundred tales, he has omitted about half and
by far the more characteristic half: the work was intended for “the drawing-room table;” and, consequently, the workman was compelled to avoid the “objectionable” and aught “approaching to licentiousness.” He converts the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters, arbitrarily changing the division and, worse still, he converts some chapters into notes. He renders poetry by prose and apologizes for not omitting it altogether: he neglects assonance and he is at once too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He had small store of Arabic at the time—Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale’s Koran by their anglicized Latin, their sesquipedalian un-English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of The Nights; re-published, as these notes have been separately (London: Chatto, 1883), they are an ethnological textbook.
