Anonymous - The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights

Volume 1
Nights 1 to 294

Translated by MALCOLM C. LYONS ,
with URSULA LYONS
Introduced and Annotated by ROBERT IRWIN

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Translation of Nights 1 to 294, Note on the Translation and Note on the Text
copyright Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008
Translation of The story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves killed by a slave girl and Translating Galland
copyright Ursula Lyons, 2008
Introduction, Glossary, Further Reading and Chronology copyright Robert Irwin, 2008

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators and editor has been asserted

Text illustrations design by Coralie Bickford-Smith; images: Gianni Dagli Orti/Museo Correr,
Venice/The Art Archive

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101487884

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS
VOLUME 1

MALCOLM C. LYONS , sometime Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and a life Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, is a specialist in the field of classical Arabic Literature. His published works include the biography Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry and many articles on Arabic literature.

URSULA LYONS , formerly an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University and, since 1976, an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature.

ROBERT IRWIN is the author of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, The Arabian Nights: A Companion and numerous other specialized studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism. His novels include The Limits of Vision, The Arabian Nightmare, The Mysteries of Algiers and Satan Wants Me.

This new English version of The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand and One Nights) is the first complete translation of the Arabic text known as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II since Richard Burtons famous translation of it in 18858. A great achievement in its time, Burtons translation nonetheless contained many errors, and even in the 1880s his English read strangely.

In this new edition, in addition to Malcolm Lyonss translation of all the stories found in the Arabic text of Calcutta II, Ursula Lyons has translated the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, as well as an alternative ending to The seventh journey of Sindbad, from Antoine Gallands eighteenth-century French. (For the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories no original Arabic text has survived and consequently these are classed as orphan stories.)

The text appears in three volumes, each with an introduction, which, in Volume 1, discusses the strange nature of the Nights; in Volume 2, their history and provenance; and, in Volume 3, the influence the tales have exerted on writers through the centuries. Volume 1 also includes an explanatory note on the translation, a note on the text and an introduction to the orphan stories (Editing Galland), in addition to a chronology and suggestions for further reading. Footnotes, a glossary and maps appear in all three volumes.

As often happens in popular narrative, inconsistencies and contradictions abound in the text of the Nights. It would be easy to emend these, and where names have been misplaced this has been done to avoid confusion. Elsewhere, however, emendations for which there is no textual authority would run counter to the fluid and uncritical spirit of the Arabic narrative. In such circumstances no changes have been made.

The story collection of The Arabian Nights has drawn on many cultures and sources Indian, Persian, Greek. One of its parallel sources, which drew on the same ancient Indian materials, is a Sanskrit text known as the Kathasaritsagara, or The Ocean of the Streams of Story, compiled by the eleventh-century author Somadeva. The Arabian Nights is, like the Kathasaritsagara, a vast storytelling ocean in which the readers can lose themselves. One story, like a wave, is absorbed into the one that follows. The drift of the narrative tides carries us, like Sindbad, to strange places, and the further from home, the stranger those places are. Within the stories themselves, the sea operates as the agent of destiny which carries ships, men and magically sealed bottles and casts them upon unexpected shores: the Island of Waq-Waq where the women grow from trees, the island of the Magnetic Mountain presided over by its talismanic statue, the Black Islands of the Ensorcelled Prince and the islands of China. The tides are unpredictable, and mens fortunes founder and are wrecked upon the sea of destiny.

The vastness and complexity of the Nights is mesmerizing. In her story The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye (1994), A. S. Byatt has written:

What delights above all in the Arabian Nights is its form. Story is embedded in story, story sprouts out of the midst of story, like the Surinam toads out of the back of their mother toad, which Coleridge used as a metaphor for his unruly imagination. The collection resembles both a group of Russian dolls, formally similar, faces and colours different, and a maze or spider-web with threads and passages leading in all directions, both formless and orderly at once.

Plot motifs within the