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
will perforce be somewhat detailed: it is necessary to answer paragraph by
paragraph, and the greater part of the thirty-three pages refers more or less
directly to myself. To begin with the beginning, it caused me and many others
some surprise to see the "Thousand Nights and a Night" expelled the initial
list of thirteen items, as if it were held unfit for mention. Cet article est
principalement une diatribe contre l'ouorage de Sir Richard Burton et dans le
libre cet ouvrage n'est même pas mentionné', writes my French friend. This
proceeding was a fair specimen of "that impartiality which every reviewer is
supposed to possess." But the ignoble "little dodge" presently suggested
itself. The preliminary excursus (p.168) concerning the "Mille et Une Nuits
(read Nuit) an audacious fraud, though not the less the best story book in the
world," affords us a useful measure of the writer's competence in the matter
of audacity and ill-judgment. The honest and single-minded Galland is here
(let us believe through that pure ignorance which haply may hope for "fool's
pardon") grossly and unjustly vilified; and, by way of making bad worse, we
are assured (p. 167) that the Frenchman "brought the Arabic manuscript from
Syria"--an infact which is surprising to the most superficial student.
"Galland was a born story teller, in the good and the bad sense" (p. 167), is
a silly sneer of the true Lane-Poolean type. The critic then compares most
unadvisedly (p. 168) a passage in Galland (De Sacy edit. vol. i. 414) with the
same in Mr. Payne's (i. 260) by way of proving the "extraordinary liberties
which the worthy Frenchman permitted himself to take with the Arabic": had he
troubled himself to collate my version (i. 290-291), which is made fuller by
the Breslau Edit. (ii. 190), he would have found that the Frenchman, as was
his wont, abridged rather than amplified;[FN#448] although, when the original
permitted exact translation, he could be literal enough. And what doubt, may I
enquire, can we have concerning "The Sleeper Awakened" (Lane, ii. 351-376),
or, as I call it, "The Sleeper and the waker" (Suppl. vol.i.1-29), when it
occurs in a host of MSS., not to mention the collection of tales which Prof.
Habicht converted into the Arabian Nights by breaking the text into a thousand
and one sections (Bresl. Edit. iv. 134-189, Nights cclxxii. ccxci.). The
reckless assertions that "the whole" of the last fourteen (Gallandian) tales
have nothing whatever to do with "The Nights" (p. 168); and that of the
histories of Zayn al-Asnám and Aladdin, "it is abundantly certain that they
belong to no manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights" (p. 169), have been
notably stultified by M. Hermann Zotenberg's purchase of two volumes
containing both these bones of long and vain contention. See Foreword to my
Suppl. vol. iii. pp. viii.-xi., and Mr. W. F. Kirby's interesting notice of M.
Zotenberg's epoch-making booklet (vol. vi. p. 287).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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