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
of white and negro nudities. And such is the Solomon who fantastically
complains that I have disdained to be enlightened by his "modest suggestions."
Au reste the article is not bad simply because it borrows--again
Americanicè--all its matter from my book. At the tail-end, however comes the
normal sting: I am guilty of not explaining "Wuzú" (lesser ablution), "Ghusl"
(greater ablution), and "Zakát" (legal alms which constitute a poor-rate),
proving that the writer never read vol. iii. He confidently suggests replacing
"Cafilah," "by the better known word Caravan," as if it were my speciality (as
it is his) to hunt-out commonplaces: he grumbles about "interrogation-points a
l'Espagnole upside down"(?) which still satisfies me as an excellent
substitute to distinguish the common Q(uestion) from A(nswer) and he seriously
congratulates me upon my discovering a typographical error on the fly- leaf.
No. iii. (August 14, '86, handling vols. vi., vii. and viii.) is free from the
opening pretensions and absurdities of No. ii. and it is made tolerably safe
by the familiar action of scissors and paste. But--desinit in piscem--it ends
fishily; and we find, after saturnine fashion, in cauda venenum. It scolds me
for telling the English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of
cooking meat (à propos of kabábs) and it "trembles to receive vols. ix. and x.
for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems
nothing of which the translator might not be capable"--capable de tout, as
said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet
Zerubbabel. This was indeed high praise considering the Saturday's sympathy
with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury
of ill it was a brutum fulmen. No. iv. (August 30, '87) was, strange to say,
in tone almost civil and ended with a touch simulating approval:--
"The labours of a quarter of a century," writes the translator in L'Envoi,
"are now brought to a close, and certainly no one could have been found better
suited by education and taste to the task of translating the 'Nights' than is
the accomplished author of the 'Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.' His summing
up of the contents and character of 'The Thousand and One Nights' in the
Terminal Essay is a masterpiece of careful analysis and we cannot do better
than conclude our notice with a paragraph that resumes with wonderful effect
the boundless imagination and variety of the picture that is conjured up
before our eyes:--
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