Paulo Lemos Horta - The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights

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From the 1855 edition of the Persian translation of The Thousand and One Nights, illustrated by Mirz 'Ali-Qoli Kho'i. Reproduced from the personal archive of Ulrich Marzolph, with permission.

CONTENTS

This story collection has gone by different titles in different times and places. When referring to the Arabic versions that preceded European translation, I use One Thousand and One Nights, a title that is closer to the original Arabic title, Alf Layla wa-Layla. Because this selection includes tales like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves added by the French translator from the tales of a Syrian storyteller in 1709, I refer to it by the English title most used for the more inclusive body of tales: Arabian Nights. We refer to the characters by the names familiar from popular translations, such as Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad, and from recent scholarly translations, such as Shahrazad and Shahriyar. Arabic words and proper names are transliterated without diacritical marks.

Painting by Dia al-Azzawi, 1986. Artist Dia al-Azzawi, born in Baghdad in 1939, became a central figure in the development of modernist art in Iraq. Based in London since 1976, al-Azzawi continues to be influenced by issues of justice in the Arab world. This painting is one of a series of pieces inspired by the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. Printed with the permission of the artist.

W HEN MY FATHER was a boy, he used to sneak into the ancient coffeehouse and listen to the master make poems out of air.

The El Feshawy coffeehouse in Cairos Al Hussein neighborhood has been in continuous operation, by the same family, for more than 220 years. Under the light of the copper chandeliers, in the shadow of the great mosque and the sprawling Khan al-Khalili bazaar where my father spent so much of his childhood, it has served dictators and diplomats, poets and kings. Among its most famous regulars was Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian legend and the only Arab to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is rumored he wrote parts of his most famous work, The Cairo Trilogy, at one of the tables here, sipping on mint tea brewed in a nearby basin of sand.

Every week or so, a constellation of cultural luminariespainters, singers, writers, and poetswould descend on the coffee shop to engage in what might be called a literary salon of sorts, conversing about the issues of the day before inevitably launching into a battle of improvised verse.

Whenever this happened, my father, who lived down the street, would find his way into the coffee shop. Along with some of the other neighborhood kids, hed tuck himself beneath one of the nearby tables and listen to the poets slinging verse back and forth. On this went into the early morning, until the rhymes became too profane, at which point the proprietor himself, Hajj El Feshawy, would run over and shoo the kids away with a broom.

My father died too young. It has been more than a decade since our final conversation, a phone call while he was on vacation with my mother in Italy; hed found a clothing store he liked and wanted to know my shirt size. The following night, he suffered a heart attack in his hotel room. He was a good man and I miss him dearly.