Anonymous - The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 2 (Penguin Classics)

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

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

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Translation of Nights 295 to 719 copyright Malcolm C. Lyons, 2008
Translation of alternative version of The seventh journey of Sindbad
copyright Ursula Lyons, 2008
Introduction and Glossary 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/Turkish and
Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul/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: 978-0-14-194352-7

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TALES OF 1001 NIGHTS
VOLUME 2

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 : 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 medieval Arabic story collection of Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Thousand and One Nights, is best known in English as The Arabian Nights. It is reasonable to ask how old this classic work of Oriental fiction is, who wrote or compiled it and how many stories it contains. But such questions are almost impossible to answer. The collection was put together in a haphazard, unpoliced fashion over many centuries.

In the opening story which frames all the other stories in the Nights, the monarch Shahriyar, who has been sexually betrayed by his wife, cuts off her head and, thereafter, he takes a different virgin to bed every night and has her killed in the morning. In order to break the bloody cycle, Shahrazad, daughter of the kings vizier, volunteers to give herself to Shahriyar, but, in order to avert her execution, she starts to tell a story to her sister, Dunyazad, whom she has brought with her into Shahriyars bedroom. Shahrazad leaves her story unfinished at the break of dawn, and Shahriyar spares her life in order to hear the rest. And so things proceed, with Shahrazad finishing one tale only to start a new one. This goes on night after night until, after a thousand and one nights, Shahriyar repents of his decision to have her killed.

This frame story of a clever bride telling stories to a jealous king in order to prolong her life goes back to a lost Sanskrit original dating from no later than the eighth century. At some point, stories from this Indian story collection were translated into Pahlavi Persian. The tenth-century Arab polymath al-Masudi refers to the Persian version, which was called Hezar Afsaneh, A Thousand Stories. We do not know what was in this story collection. Although the Persians seem to have had an extensive literature of entertainment, no examples have survived in their original Persian form. However, it seems likely that the stories of the