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
Public opinion was highly favourable to the "Suite" when first
issued. Orientalism was at that time new to Europe, and the
general was startled by its novelties, e.g. by "Women wearing
drawers and trousers like their husbands, and men arrayed in
loose robes like their wives, yet at the same time cherishing, as
so many goats, each a venerable length of beard." (Heron's
Preface.) They found its "phænomena so remote from the customs
and manners of Europe, that, when exhibited as entering into the
ordinary system of human affairs, they could not fail to confer a
considerable share of amusive novelty on the characters and
events with which they were connected." (Ditto, Preface.)
Jonathan Scott roundly pronounced the continuation a forgery. Dr.
Patrick Russell (History of Aleppo, vol. i. 385) had no good
opinion of it, and Caussin de Perceval (père, vol. viii., p.
40-46) declared the version éloignée du goût Orientale; yet he
re-translated the tales from the original Arabic (Continués,
Paris, 1806), and in this he was followed by Gauttier, while
Southey borrowed the idea of his beautiful romance, "Thalaba the
Destroyer," now in Lethe from the "History of Maughraby." Mr. A.
G. Ellis considers these tales as good as the old "Arabian
Nights," and my friend Mr. W. F. Kirby (Appendix to The Nights,
vol. x. p. 418), quite agrees with him that Chavis and Cazotte's
Continuation is well worthy of republication in its entirety. It
remained for the Edinburgh Review, in one of those ignorant and
scurrilous articles with which it periodically outrages truth and
good taste (No. 535, July, 1886), to state, "Cazotte published
his Suite des Mille et une Nuits, a barefaced forgery, in 1785."
A barefaced forgery! when the original of twenty eight tales out
of thirty four are perfectly well known, and when sundry of these
appear in MSS. of "The Thousand Nights and a Night."
The following is a list of the Tales (widely differing from those
of Chavis and Cazotte) which appeared in the version of Caussin
de Perceval.
VOLUME VIII.
Les | Mille et une Nuits | Contes Arabes, | Traduits en Francais
| Par M. Galland, | Membre de l'Académie des Inscriptions et |
Belles-Lettres, Professeur de Langue Arabe | au Collége Royal, |
Continués | Par M. Caussin de Perceval, | Professeur de Langue
Arabe au Collége Impérial. | Tome huitiéme. | à Paris, | chez Le
Normant, Imp.-Libraire, | Rue des Prêtres Saint-Germain-l
Auxerrois. | 1806.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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