Aladdin's Many Fathers

2/9/2017 Aladdin’s Many Fathers - WSJ This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. To order presentationready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com. http://www.wsj.com/articles/aladdinsmanyfathers1484339578 BOOKSHELF The first translator of the “Arabian Nights” censored the explicit sexual content that future translators would champion. Charles Shafaieh reviews “Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights” by Paulo Lemos Horta. By CHARLES SHAFAIEH Updated Jan. 13, 2017 7:54 p.m. ET The first European translator of the “Arabian Nights,” Antoine Galland (1646–1715), did not enjoy fantastical stories. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that “I was no doubt not born for these unusual things, and my personality inclines me even less to fictions.” Instead, his passion for Greek translation and numismatics fill the pages of his journals during the two decades he worked on his translation. Yet his 12-volume edition, bursting with supernatural elements, would become a seminal work of literature, one that has consumed imaginations worldwide, occasioned countless translations, imitations, adaptations and plagiarized editions, and inspired writers as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Yukio Mishima and Jorge Luis Borges. Despite his distaste for the content of his work, Galland knew his readership and took great care in crafting his “Arabian Nights” to its tastes. This included censoring the explicit sexual content that future translators, like the 19th-century explorer Richard Burton, would champion and adding to each story a moral in the style of the French fairy tales that Charles Perrault’s studies had recently popularized. As with every compilation of these authorless folktales—from a ninth-century Persian manuscript titled “Hazar Afsanah” (“Thousand Tales”) to Edward William Lane’s Victorian-era edition, which eliminates the many strong and intelligent women of earlier versions—Galland’s selection reflects the culture in which it was produced. His may not have been the only contemporary hand shaping the stories, as Paulo Lemos Horta discusses in his detailed study “Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights,” which aims to uncover the often unrecognized “cross-cultural exchanges” embedded in European editions of the story collection. In 1709, Galland met a dozen times with a Maronite Christian traveler from Aleppo named Hanna Diyab, whom King Louis XIV’s antiquarian Paul Lucas had recruited to accompany him on expeditions throughout western Asia and north Africa. Diyab shared 16 stories that Galland had not read in the 14th-century Syrian manuscript he used as his primary source text or in any other Arabic material. Despite their unknown origins, 10 of these “orphan tales” found their way into his translation, and two of them have become among the most popular: “The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/aladdins-many-fathers-1484339578 1/3 2/9/2017 Aladdin’s Many Fathers - WSJ PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCEPRESSE/GETTY IMAGES Diyab has long been credited only with MARVELLOUS THIEVES offering skeletal outlines of these stories, By Paulo Lemos Horta with Galland elevating them to the richly detailed versions bearing his name. Mr. Harvard, 363 pages, $29.95 Horta, in comparing Diyab’s recently discovered memoir, whose complex structure bears similarities to the “Arabian Nights,” with Galland’s much drier personal writing, suggests, however, that the Syrian’s voice may be more present than previously believed. In “Aladdin,” for example, the description of the young boy’s magical floating palace echoes Diyab’s description of a theatrical trick he witnessed at the Paris opera house in which a replica of the palace would repeatedly vanish and reappear. Like the orators from the Aleppine coffeehouses of his youth who each night would tell new variations of tales culled from the vast trade network that converged in the Levant, Diyab may have infused this old story with details that he suspected would appeal to Galland—just as he had with stories he recounted to Lucas on their journey to France. While it may be tempting to believe that the basis of fiction must lie in factual experiences, this position underrates the power of an author’s imagination and ability to empathize with strangers. (Consider the Shakespeare authorship debate, in which skeptics claim that no one with only a grammar-school education who had never traveled abroad could write those plays.) While not explicitly acknowledging this danger, Mr. Horta considers additional interpretations of Diyab’s memoir—such as the inverse theory that his writings about France may contain the same “stock phrases with which he had described fictional characters of ravishing beauty and wealth” to Galland decades prior—which emphasizes that this and every version of the “Arabian Nights” has a complex, polyphonic and ultimately unknowable history. Unacknowledged co-authors haunt Lane’s and Burton’s editions to even greater degrees. The two Orientalists carried out to the extreme the philosophy advocated by their fellow translator Henry Torrens that, in order to understand a group of people, “you must live https://www.wsj.com/articles/aladdins-many-fathers-1484339578 2/3 2/9/2017 Aladdin’s Many Fathers - WSJ among them and speak, whatever it may be, their tongue.” Lane and Burton transformed themselves into foreign personae—the Turkish elite al-Fackeer Mansoor and the Persian merchant Mirza Abdullah (among others), respectively—with the help of local men and women who were then left out of or even intentionally erased from their writing. A Scot living in Cairo who had changed his name from William Taylor to Osman Effendi facilitated Lane’s immersion in Egyptian society, and the Arab scholar Sheikh Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi (whom he called “my Sheikh”) provided copious notes that assisted with his translation. But because Lane advertised his translation on the strength of his supposed expertise in Arab culture, he systematically removed evidence of their and others’ assistance even from his private journals. Burton’s ego and compulsion toward self-hagiography were more pronounced: He would never acknowledge the extent to which he plagiarized large sections of Torrens’s edition and even more so John Payne’s poetic, Pre-Raphaelite-inspired translation (for which Burton provided notes and sold subscriptions). Those in the Arab world who must have helped him or, like Diyab, shared their stories are treated with similar disregard. Despite drawing our attention to these forgotten men and women, Mr. Horta focuses mostly on the less-secret authors of the “Arabian Nights.” A lack of available evidence may account for this imbalance, but he would have done well to correct it by discussing the positive impact that the European obsession with the tales has had in the Arab world. Scholars of Arabic literature no longer disdain them as mere popular literature, as they did until the 19th century. Naguib Mahfouz’s “Arabian Nights and Days” (1979) features its own Aladdin and Ali Baba, and other contemporary Arabic writers often engage with the many translations available to them. This fine book nevertheless cogently probes an influential period in the knotted and at times sordid history of the “Arabian Nights,” serving as a fine example to those unraveling this promiscuous and forever malleable set of stories. —Mr. Shafaieh is a writer and editor living in New York City. Copyright ©2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. To order presentationready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com. https://www.wsj.com/articles/aladdins-many-fathers-1484339578 3/3.

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