Studies on the Arabian Nights

The following is a description of my studies on the Arabian Nightsproject.

"I now have the absolutely best translations of the Arabian Nights, in two volumes. And voluminous they are! This is a lot of material. What I am reading in English is the result of the life's work of two translators, Muhsin Mahdi (Syria) painstakingly translated the most 'original' text (there is, in fact, no original, but this 14 th c. manuscript is the oldest intact one, kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris) and Hussain Haddawy (Lebanon, now in USA) worked from this material. This is exciting! All of the other translations have in fact, been 'versions', adulterated heavily to make money for the authors, some took the lewd bits out, others added raunch...

A book by John Irwin called the Arabian Nights Companion has been fascinating, his detailed research (another life-work) uncovers the winding path of these ancient stories, and compares the various versions. This subject is satisfying to me in many ways, the storyteller's material that has 'no origin', that has changed form according to it's purpose over 6 centuries, as it was carried between Europe and the Arab world, in WRITTEN form. And it supposed to have some threads reaching back to the Panchatantra stories of India, another of my favourites! The stories themselves are certainly bizarre enough to interest me, and I am finding them archetypal in a particular way; they are NOT moral tales, really, they are entertainments. This gives us characters who suffer needlessly through bad luck, others who irrationally succeed, much unfair power-play, and unfortunately women are generally beautiful and deceitful liars. But that's how it is. I like the ribald 'un-correctness' going on, messengers being executed for bad news, good men falling into fatal circumstances, half-wits coming in for treasure and fabulously beautiful babes. Sometimes there is a bit of a moral - stay out of trouble!

This morning, just after reading about the fisherman who narrowly escaped being killed by the Jinn of the sea, twice, because the monster pleaded so sincerely to be freed (and he lied, twice, to escape his bottle) the poor fisherman was given a third pledge, and tricked yet again. Don't trust him!! ...anyway, I went into the kitchen and the news on the radio was about the Japanese using GPS devices to track whale migrations, which information they claim is not to be used for hunting.....No! Don't trust them...!! There are just so many connecting layers of this project that interest me, the threads of human nature that run from there-then to here-now. I think that painting the cards might be just the beginning. I can't imagine how far this subject is going to lead me, but it is somewhere between mythology, storytelling and painting. Probably combination of all three."

Haddawy, Husain, The Arabian Nights I, based on the text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian manuscript, edited by Muhsin Mahdi (W.W. Norton & Company 1990)

Haddawy, Husain, The Arabian Nights II, translated by Husain Haddawy W.W. Norton & Company 1995)

Mahdi, Muhsim, Alf Layla wa-Layla ( Leiden, 1984) 2 vols.

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