Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
makes open love to "the master." Habib calls the "good old lady," his
governess "Esek! Esek!" which in Turk. means donkey, ass. I need hardly
enlarge upon these ineptitudes; those who wish to pursue the subject have only
to compare the two versions.
At the end of the Frenchified tale we find a note entitled:--Observations by
the French Editor, on the "History of Habib and Dorathil-goase, or the Arabian
Knight," and these are founded not upon the Oriental text but upon the
Occidental perversion. It is described "from a moral plane rather as a poem
than a simple tale," and it must be regarded as "a Romance of Chivalry which
unites the two chief characteristics of works of that sort,--amusement and
instruction." Habib's education is compared with that of Telemachus, and his
being inured to fatigue is according to the advice of Rousseau in his
"Emilius" and the practice of Robinson Crusoe. Lastly "Grandison is a here
already formed: Habib is one who needs to be instructed." I cannot but
suspect when reading all this Western travesty of an Eastern work that M.
Cazotte, a typical littérateur, had prepared for caricaturing the unfortunate
Habib by carefully writing up Fénélon, Rousseau, and Richardson; and had
grafted his own ideas of morale upon the wild stem of the Arabian novel.
Appendix.
NOTES ON THE STORIES CONTAINED IN VOLUME XVI.
By W. F. Kirby.
The Say of Haykar the Sage (Pp.1-30).
Haykar's precepts may be compared advantageously with those of other nations
of the East and West (at a corresponding stage of civilisation) which, as a
rule, follow very similar lines. Many of them find their parallels not only in
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as we might reasonably expect, but even in the
Havamál of the Elder Edda, respecting which Thorpe remarks in his translation
(i. p. 36 note): "Odin is the 'High One.' The poem is a collection of rules
and maxims, and stories of himself, some of them not very consistent with our
ideas of a supreme deity." The style of the Icelandic poem, and the manners of
the period when it was composed, are of course as wide apart from those of
Haykar as is Iceland from Syria, but human nature remains the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account