In Our Time - The Arabian Nights

Episode Date: October 18, 2007

Melvyn Bragg discusses the myths, tales and legends of the Arabian Nights.Once upon a time a wealthy merchant grew hot in the sun and sat down under a tree. Having eaten a date, he threw aside the stone, and immediately there appeared before him a Genie of enormous height who, holding a drawn sword in his hand, approached him, and said, “rise that I may kill thee”. This is from The Arabian Nights, a collection of miraculous tales including Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor. Forged in the medieval Arab world, it became so popular in Europe that the 18th century Gothic writer Horace Walpole declared “Read Sinbad the Sailor’s Voyages and you will grow sick of Aeneas”.Its origins are Indian and Persian but it was championed initially by an 18th century Frenchman, Antoine Galland. Celebrated for its fabulous stories, it is a patchwork of sex, violence, magic, adventure, and cruelty – a far cry from the children’s book that it has become. With Robert Irwin, Senior Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex; Gerard van Gelder, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, once upon a time a wealthy merchant grew hot in the sun and sat down under a tree. Having eaten a date, he threw aside the stone

and immediately there appeared before him a genie of enormous height who, holding a drawn sword in his hand, approached him and said, Rise that I may kill thee. This is from the Arabian Nights, a collection of wonderful tales, including Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, Aladdin, and Sinbad the Sailor.

Forged in the medieval Arab world, it became so popular in Europe that the 18th century Gothic writer Horace Walpole declared, read Sinbad the Sailor's voyages, and you will grow sick of anise. We need to unpick the complex and ancient tapestry of stories

that is the Arabian Knights, Robert Irwin, senior research associate at the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London. Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and Gerard van Helder, Lordian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford.

Robert Owen, the heroine of the Arabian nights is a young woman called to Herazard, who is to keep telling stories to save her life. Can you explain how she comes to be in this perilous situation? Yes, a sort of backstory is necessary here. Two kings called Shazaman and Shariar discover almost simultaneous. that they're being betrayed by their wives who are sleeping with the servants. They resolve to set out on a journey to find out if there can be anybody more miserable and more betrayed than they are. They find themselves on the shores of the sea, and a vast figure begins to emerge from the sea.

Terrified, they hide in a tree. This figure turns out to be a gin. The genie, as we say. Genie or gin or demon, and he has with him a casket with four locks on it. In this glass casket, there is a beautiful woman. He unlocks the casket, gets the woman out, and has a sit down so that he can rest his head on her lap and have a sleep. While the genie is sleeping, the woman gets herself out from under the gin, summons the two kings who are hiding in the tree and says,

come on, let's have sex. The kings, understandably, are a bit nervous and try to refuse, but she says, if you don't, I'll wake the jinny. So they go down and successively they have sex with her and she insists on taking their signet rings and she adds them to the 98 signet rings she already has from people she has betrayed the gin with. The kings go back and hide.

Once the gin has gone they realised well there is somebody even more coquhilded than they are. But Sharia goes back to his kingdom. He kills his previous wife who has betrayed him and from then on he decides he will only sleep with a virgin and that virgin will be executed the following day. The slaughter goes on for some time. Finally, Scheherazard, who is daughter of the king's vizier, says,

I insist on being the next virgin to sleep with Shariah. And the vizier tries to talk her out of it with all sorts of silly stories. So if you do this, bad things will happen. Sherazard's insistent, and rather oddly, she insists that her sister Dunyazard should accompany her into the king's bedroom. And after sex, I can't imagine what Dunyazard is doing at this time, after sex, Dunyazard asks Sherazard, Sister, if you're not too sleepy, could you tell us a story?

And Shariah has sensed to this too. He's keen on a story. Sherazard starts telling a story, but she doesn't finish it that night. Therefore, Shariah says, all right, you can stay alive one more night. And so Sherazard continues, telling story after story which never quite finish at the right time, and then there are stories within the stories. Well, that wets our appetite.

Good. Can you give us a flavour of these stories? Because a whole range of stories come in this. Without insult, called a ragbag in one way. Absolutely. It's an omnium gathering with Popuri. There are tales of magic and mystery. That's what I'm particularly fond of. There are sagas of high adventure and derring do. There are bawdy tales.

They're extremely romantic stories. There are wisdom tales, there are Sufi mystical tales. Some stories run for hundreds and hundreds of pages, some last only a paragraph. What am I leaving out here? There are low-life stories. There are tales of witty, wise men. There's everything down. It's a great mistake to think of the Arabian Nights as just a collection of fairy tales.

And they're patristic stories as well, so we're talking about religion inside this. Yes, I mean, you've got sort of orthodox party, and you've also got mystical stories. And the conceit is that this woman has brought together, and the author of this, brought together this, for this particular purpose, to save her life. Yes. And I think the thing here is that some people have tended to present Sherazard as a creative genius, a sort of authoress. She isn't. She's a person with a phenomenal memory.

She's remembering a huge amount of Arabic, Persian, Indian, and Greek culture, and transmitting it to the king. Marina, it sometimes miscalled a thousand and one stories, which of course it couldn't be, because if it's a, a thousand one stories and a thousand one night, she wouldn't have made it through the first night. It's a thousand and one nights. Can you tell us how eventually in this,

she escapes execution? Yes, well, she tells stories to save her life, but also to save the lives of other women. I mean, she has a kind of heroic role. She's trying to give an entire picture of human multiplicity. Every kind of vice is in these stories that Robert, evoked so vividly. But also underneath

that every kind of virtue too. So gradually there's a cumulative effect of her, as she memorizes all these stories and tells him, she begins to change him and he begins to see that his very dark vision that he had from the wicked prisoner of the genie, the first dangerous woman, that that is actually not the whole picture.

And so he begins to be enchanted by her. At the very end of the book, She prostrates herself. There's a lot of kissing of feet and prostration in the Arabian nights. She prostrates herself and says, Mercy, I have born you three children in the time that I have been telling you these stories. Sharia has never noticed. One of the children is actually at the breast.

Sharia's never noticed. And she produces these three boys. And he says, my darling, you were my beloved. Long before I knew about these wonderful children, I had decided that my vision of womankind was wrong because you are so virtuous and so wise and you have such a phenomenal memory and I want to hear your stories for the rest of my life

so I will spare you and bravo you too because it means that I will spare all other women and we need no longer think about women in this way. Then Burton adds a little bit the translator Richard Burton adds a bit about the sister because of course this is a fairy tale and it's a fairy tale ending.

So the sister of course marries Sharia's wronged brother. So we have the double wedding and a tremendous feast and lots of dresses and perfume and silks of Arabi and so forth. The way you've put it down, Marina, suggest that there's a coherence. I used the word ragback earlier on and suggesting that these things had come together from right, left and centre, which we'll explore in a few minutes.

You're suggesting that this is coherently thought through that this young woman is putting over a range of stories as a form of massive... Therapies are easy, ridiculous. And they all slot into one idea of how to tame, to change, to put a different view of life to this man. Well, it is a gallimorphrey, but it's a galymourri with a purpose.

And definitely that has been crafted by the redactors of many, many people who have been involved in weaving this tapestry. It has definitely got a narrative drive of this kind to do with this frame story because within the frame story are many, many similar stories which are called ransom stories, in which stories are told precisely to achieve a purpose of mercy to change

someone's mind, to show that the tyrannies and cruelties and arbitrary actions of powerful people need to be thought through again. I mean, there's a, there's a, This is the constant theme. It's called a ring composition. You have one story nested inside another story, like a series of rings going one down into the other. So that each one resonates very often with the theme of the one above.

And of course it's about the vital part that storytelling has, isn't it? Yes. It's about the power of language. I mean, it's very deep and very profoundly political book as well on the power of language. I mean, the Vizier and the Sultan, these two, main characters, male characters in power, are themselves the

wielders of language, but the stories show them that language must be wielded with care and can be wielded in a different way, to a different purpose. Jared van Helder, they, as Marina has said, that we're talking about stories and stories, and she used the image

of the ring, people have used the image of the Russian dolls with them. Why do you think it takes on this structure? You know, so first of a term, nesting is nice word. I have recently seen the term embossing, but I think in the context of the knights it should be embedding of course, it's very appropriate.

Incidentally, if I may react to what Marina said, I think we should not overestimate or exaggerate a unity of the book because it's not a book, it's a collection of versions and there are also versions which, in fact, the main version, is not really a unity, I think. In fact, there's an interesting ending

and an alternative ending where the king, after all, says, I'm bored with stories, I will kill you, And then Seharazade is only saved because she produces one or two or three children. I think that's nice because undermines the idea that storytelling is life-gaving, life-giving, life-saving, life-saving. And there are many stories which do not really add up because there's many stories about unfaithful women. Well, that's not the kind of story you would tell in the situation to placate a king. So talking about the embossing or embedding, many reasons for doing this and many effects it have.

of course it's a linking device you can actually combine lots of tales into a large collection it's a means to explain or justify acts of personalities who just appear on the scene it's by way of illustration to point to moral for instance

of course it provides suspense and that's important if you want to your listeners or your readers who come back to the story and the suspense is actually drawn out I mean stories interrupted and the denou ma may take place several nights, many nights afterwards. And then, of course, very important, as Marina said, it's a ransom.

You gain time, you gain time. You save your life by telling stories. And these are several of the functions and devices that are related to them. Well, let's go for the origins of the story in the Arabian nights. There seems to be general agreement that they come from several places. Someone did not sit down. We don't know who wrote any of them. Certainly, as it seems, no one person

sat down and wrote all of them. So can you give us your view of the origins because this is open to discussion. Well, the origins are very obscure. It's often said that the old strasn may come from India because from India we know several of these tales which are using a frame tail like the Panchatantra, which also appeared in Arabic,

Tales within tails, is an Indian device. But there is no Indian version, which is the prototype of the Arabian Nights. It certainly came through Persia. You can see it from the name, Shahriar, Shahrazad, and several others, Dunyazad. They all are old Persian names. And, of course, there are stories set in Persia. But again, we don't have a Persian prototype. The oldest references are the oldest texts we have are all in Arabic.

and in fact all the scrap we have is a piece of paper very early, it's actually dated 879 I believe but that's the date of a little agreement written on it and by that time this page was already old so perhaps it goes back to the early 9th century

and just beginning of the story very briefly so it must have been around and we've got we've had India and Persia and then we come to Egypt and then we come to Egypt? First Iraq, I would say. First Iraq, so there's a series of stories

centered around Harun, Rashid, you know, the golden prime of Harun, he became very famous. So we're in Baghdad now. In Baghdad, so I'll say around 800. And then stories kept being added, and the text isn't being mentioned, but we don't have any texts. Manuscripts only appear

in late medieval times. And by that time, many more stories have been added. Robert, would you like to cover in this, Robert, on, well... You take the story up from where Jared Stakeman. Sure. A lot of the stories are actually

or notionally set in Abbasid Baghdad in the 9th century, say, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries. But some of them are notionally set there. They're fantasies. They're like fantasies about Robin Hood. Haruna Rashid is no longer a real historical figure. He's just a legendary

figure to whom you attach stories. It's fairly clear that quite a large bulk of the Arabian nights as we have them today were put together, put in a decent draft in the Mamluk period, in the late 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. The oldest substantially surviving manuscript today in the Bibliac National Paris

seems to date from the late 15th century. And that's the one that Gallon translated. That seems to be rather late, doesn't it, given the reaching back to this and reach? So do we infer from that that until then it was largely oral? These stories are Roger you? Wouldn't necessarily infer, that. I think one thing is that

the story's got heavy usage and we could perhaps come to that later. I think the manuscripts fall to pieces from so many people reading them. So we don't have any manuscripts because they wore them out? Yes. Heavy readers. Indeed.

We come to that, I hope. And having said that, this oldest substantially surviving manuscript only contains something like 35 and a half stories, whereas every story you can classify as Arabian nights in, for example, the recent incitopedia

of the Arabianites, there are over 500 stories discussed. It's clear that quite a lot of stories were added after the 15th century, because they used things, they have things like gunpowder and coffee in them, and Ottoman terminology. So, stories are being added in 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

And what you then also get, from the 18th century onwards, is that copies of the manuscript have been manufactured for intellectual tourists from Europe who've come to look for the same stories. What are we talking about, if we talk in the 14th century,

we're coming out or we're still in in some way, period of very, very high, brilliant Arab culture. How are these regarded inside the culture? As a whole, the story collection has always been looked down upon by the high-brow elite, you could say. Although many parts of it

are part of high-brow elite literature. I think there has been reciprocity stories going from low to high and vice versa. It's not that 1,001.9th is not wholly an oral popular affair, but

there are all kinds of interactions. But the earliest mention, for instance in the 10th century, there's someone who discusses all kinds of books he knows about, a wonderful book, and he says, well, there's also a genre which is even in talk, stories, and fable. Incidentally,

I think it's wrong to speak about the nights in the morning, early in the morning here, and also in our time, it's the wrong kind of program for a text that starts with in the times of your, but this is, by the way. And we can take that on board. We have no problem with that.

And none at all. So this man in the 10th century, he describes the tale, and he says, well, it's really full of city tales. I want to get at this point, though, because we're going around it. The fact is it seemed to me, from my reading, is that the high Arab culture and Arabic literature thought that these were popular, vulgar stories for the marketplace, and they did not accept them.

They were even written in a language, which were considered to be a dialect compared with the high language. highly worked. That's what I've got from the notes of you three. Now, am I right? Well, somewhere in between. I think, yes. I'm up to your point.

I think we're leaving out too much of the sort of circulation and reception of these stories beyond the Arab medieval world. Because already in Ariosto or in Chaucer, you're getting traces of the stories. The ports, the merchants, the pilgrims.

They're all talking to one another and exchanging. This is human currency of the imagination. It is an ocean of stories. And there's much more in common between the Arabian nights and Western literature than perhaps, if you concentrate on this medieval history, we'll give you to understand. There was a receptive brand here in the West because we had people like Chaucer. This idea of the mixture of something that is very romantic and very Bordian course at the same time that is tragic and also redemptively comic. That kind of mixture was a familiar idea to us. So we're only one idea.

swirling across, aren't we? From what we now call the Middle East right across the Mediterranean, even reaching the cold shores of our island. And so when Antoine Gallant, this pivotal figure, this orientalist, and I get to him in a minute's room, can you, these stories

people will know about the sale, Aladdin and so. Did they, we'll come back to, I know, we can't come back to everything, wrong. We'll come back to what we can come back to when we get time to come back to it. But these stories are guided as entertaining, but you, they do, deal with matters which when you spice them out, when you write them down, seem to be quite

serious. They're talking about race, slavery, power struggles between men and women. Yes, and in fact, though I would defer to Gerard and everything, I actually slightly pick him up on this point that you wouldn't tell misogynist stories if you were trying to persuade a king otherwise. It's much more crafty than that. Because if you're just, in a sort of boring Victorian nursery way, hammer the point that you want to make, you don't open up a space for discussion. This is a space of contradictions and conflicts and desires, but it gradually

in the myriad sort of scintillation of all these stories, you get a different picture. It enriches your understanding of psychology and human nature. It isn't just sort of elementary fairy tales. And it would be very dull if it, I mean this wonderful panoply of

wicked sorceresses and dreadful old bell dames with sort of dreadful powers and very vicious scenes of marriage. You know, everything is spoken of in the nights. That's the other thing that's very sort of exciting about it. You know, there are scenes which you don't even get in some, you know, for instance, men who are very badly treated by their wives,

very, very physically maltreated by their wives. That's very well dealt with in nights, very open-eyed. Homosexuality is dealt with very frankly. And so all these kinds, all these sorts of issues are rehearsed, thought about, and added into the rich interweaving of it. You wanted to get in several times, though, Robert, so just... I can't remember.

I think Marina is being over-optimistic about the potential compilers of the Arabian Nights. They'd have to be geniuses of a scale greater than Proust to create this overarching thing which the whole panoply of life a kind of fantastamagorical multiple middle-arch, middle-march. No, I don't think so. I think the sort of compilers in the 14th, 15th, 16th,

they grabbed stories from everywhere to increase the bulk of the thing because that was the economics of it, the more stories you had. So why does it happen where they grab stories from? Well, I agree, Gerard, that although there's a lot of folk stuff in there, and there's a lot of ancient Indian and Greek stuff in it, there's also a lot of stuff that's being told by courtiers at the Abbasid Caliph's Court. It's quite sophisticated stuff. It's taught these are stories

Part of the repertoire of Nodemar Professional table companions Their job was to keep the caliph For other princes entertained With mathematical problems, riddles or stories Every one of these Nudemar would have a repertoire of stories And it's quite clear some of these stories Are very sophisticated

And they're related to poetry or to music or whatever Why medieval and even quite modern Arabs Have rather despised the knights It's not necessarily the content it's the language of the knights. The grammar is poor and so on. Can we come back to that then, Gerard, because I sort of rather interrupted you earlier.

Can you give us some idea of Arab literature at the time, let's say the 14th and such as you know, how they fit it in or what place they have there? It's difficult to define literature in any literature, but certainly in Arabic. I think literary text, literariness, if you can use that word, depends very much, as Robert already hinted at, has to do with the language, polished language, rhetorical language,

and preferably inserting some poetry. And indeed, yes, most of the Galang manuscript, for instance, is written in what we call poor Arabic. It does not use the correct grammar, spelling, orthography. And that's one reason why the Arabs did. The high-browled elite Arabs did not really value the text. Another reason is I think the thing as a whole is anonymous, and that's looked down upon.

Any poem, any text, any doubt has to be attributed to someone to an author, to a source. And of course we don't have a source for the 1st,000 knights. The third thing I would like to highlight is the length. It's often thought that Arabs are prolics and verbose, whatever. actually classical Arabic literature the highbrow literature is very concise and sometimes in three sentences

something is described that in a modern novel would take a whole chapter I mean they were together a long time he fell in love with her she fell in love with him that's taken for granted and then the story goes on whereas this would be spun out in a modern text well falling enough can be spun out for quite a long time

indeed great effect yes it can but they don't and of course in the thought of all night you have these interminable stories and there are some sort of romances, epics, which go on for night, night after night, and I think they're pretty tedious. That's one of the reasons why it was not, of course, I hear, Robert.

Did you think that it was partly also the kind of morality? No, no. No, no, the morality, you find that in all kinds of stories, you find all kinds of ideas about society, about relationship between the sexes, about sex itself, homosexuality, slavery, you find everything in high-row literature. So I don't think the Southamonites is per se different in that respect.

So you're almost talking yourself out of a programme here, Ajai. How do you account for its popularity? Because it had an enormous popularity. These stories had enormous popularity where they were before we have switchover into Europe. But what do you think that they were so popular? No, we didn't. They were not particularly popular. And by the time Edward William Lane gets to Egypt in the early 19th century,

there's almost nobody telling these stories. But why would anybody go to them? were much more popular. Sorry. Why would anybody gather them to such an extent that there will be all these stories to be translated if they weren't popular enough to be gathered

and they were so below the salt in language? So you're so saying emphatically they're not popular and yet they'd survived, they'd gathered over centuries. I don't quite get that. Well, there is not as many manuscripts as there are of other pieces of popular literature. The number of manuscripts isn't necessarily

indication of popularity. But we know that the storytellers, in Cairo and Damascus preferred other stories, epics about Antar and other Arab heroes. So it's really Gallant. Well, it's about how we got to Gallant. You'll be itchy to get to Galant. So here you are with Galant.

It was 1704. Frenchman Antoine Gallant translates the manuscript that he gets of the Arabian Nights. And how did he come across that version? Well, he first came across a manuscript of quite a separate saga and that's the Seven Voyages of Sinbad. He translated that as an exercise, found that people rather liked it. Somebody told him that Sinbad was part of an anthology called The Thousand-on-Nights,

and he thought, oh-ho, must get a copy of that. Actually, that was misinformation. Sinbad was never historically part of the Thousand-O-N-Wa-Nats. But anyway, Gallaud gets hold of a copy, translates it in successive volumes between 174 and 1717, and it's a successful. It is the literary bestseller of the period, and it's aimed really at, I mean, he dedicates it to one of the ladies at court,

and it's the courtiers and the top intellectuals who first give it its extremely warm reception. Why, Marina, do you think it had this great success which we can prove, compared with the lack of success which cannot be proved, as it appears, in the several hundred years while it accumulated the force to give it the great success in Europe? Well, of course, it's best elegantly written, so it doesn't fall, it doesn't sort of fall by the wayside on the grounds of being coarse or bad, in poor grammar, but that's not the reason. It had a sort of

instantly had a double effect. One was that it was accepted as romantic and purely entertaining and the flights of fancy were in themselves just deliriously exciting and pleasant to listen to. And that's possibly the effect at court. But almost immediately,

there was the desire to parody and burlesquette. It was received to some extent ironically, and it opened up a marvellous field of invention in Western fictions. People like Swift, Voltaire, very, very significantly, read knights, read some of the night stories and began to adapt this method of garrulous storytelling with exaggerated and fantastical scenes of cruelty and sexuality and so forth in order to pursue their own picture of what was

happening. And Voltaire in particular in the 1730s begins to orientalize. He begins to write in the style of Gallant's short he writes short tales of course but they are in the style of what he'd found in Gallant. Robert, can I beg, look, can I beg, look, can you say I totally agree with what Marina's just been saying but I'd say there's a third element as well and that Gallant had intended these stories. He'd previously worked on the

Bibliatech Oriental and an encyclopedia of all things Oriental. So he had a very didactic mentality and he was convinced that Middle Eastern culture was marvellous and one of his reasons for translating the Arabianites was to give people an idea of the authentic Middle East and and how Islam worked. And so there's this third element in the success. And in the 18th and 19th centuries,

you find people visiting the Middle East or writing about Middle East and things saying there is no better guide to how things actually are in the Middle East than the Arabian Knights. Gerard. Yeah, I think it's true that it fits in with that idea. I suppose the chinoiserie and all the Oriental stuff also has to do with that.

I think the Thousa Knight or the Arabian Knight, which, by the way, is a misnomer, is very much a Western book and perhaps more part of Western literature than Arabic literature. Again, I'm talking myself out of the programme. You're talking yourself into the programme this time. Can you explain that a bit more? Well, the collection of stories, as we know it now, is a Western invention, mostly by Galant.

You mean invention in a sense of the old-fashioned idea, like making it up, instead of a translation? Are you opposing innovation to translation? I think what we're getting through, are our stories that we get in French, because they're translated in English, from the French, were not the stories that were in these unread stuff in Demotic Arab. I'm mainly talking about the composition of the Knights as a whole, and, I mean, you introduced us wonderfully, and you mentioned three stories, I think, and precisely these three stories are not part of the original, well, original, the ancient core of the 1000-1 Knights. Sinbad Aladdin and Alibaba. Exactly. And there are some doubts about whether Aladdin is really an oriental tale even, I think.

Galin is thought even to have written it in the style of... No, Prince Armaged and Fitt di Banu. Those four could all have been written by him. It's just the tricky thing that he describes in his diary, how he had them dictated by an Arab who'd visited Paris. And would he lie in his diary about it? Possibly. There was a Syrian monk involved, wasn't it?

It was a Syrian. I can't remember if it was a monk. It was a maronite, certainly. So, get, let's just peg away a bit of this idea that this is a European book. It emerges. It sounds as if we, I mean, people would accuse this programme being colonialist in this sense, and taking over all these tales and turning them into European literature. Well, that's nothing.

Unless we extrapolate this a little more. There's nothing wrong with that. Of course, it took the Arabs a while to appreciate the quality, because undoubtedly there are many qualities of these texts. And it's only in the actually in the 20th century that the Arabs themselves studied at Leila the 1,000 knights and a knight into, they treated it as a literary text

and they wrote interesting books about it and so it took a while so I don't think it's bad, it's a colonialist or anything, but we have to realise that its fame is mostly a result of Western doings and in the Arab world themselves there are other popular stories like Robert said

the Antar the interminable heroic epics written in truly popular Arabic, or I should not say written, composed and recited in proper colloquial vernacular Arabic. These were far more popular and perhaps are still popular in some circles. I think one of the ways that it becomes a very strongly westernised book is through our tradition of entertainment. And of course it was also probably in some respects connected to entertainment in its original homelands. But It certainly becomes very early on the subject matter of pantomimes and fantasias on the stage. It circulates in that way.

Aladdin, for example, this possibly invention but interpolated into the knights, is one of the staple 18th century pantomimes. I mean, the people absolutely loved the, and they could do transformations and the genie coming out of the lamp with their candles and their burning glasses. I mean, it was extraordinary what they could achieve on the 18th century stage, Drew Lane. And then later, of course, it becomes incredibly enmeshed into popular entertainment in the cinema. This is, and ballet and all that.

I mean, it's very, in our imagination, is saturated with these Arabian devices. But we come back to Antoine Galland here, Robert. I like to stay with him from him. Did he, and take up what Jared said about it becoming a European book in a way, and Aladdin was maybe invented and so on, how much therefore could be said to be original and how much was put in from other sources which made themselves be dubious. Did he license himself to write a book which conformed his ideas of the Orient and his mission to bring the Orient to the West,

more than saying, I will get hold of these stories and make sure that they are authentic? He wasn't too concerned with authenticity. I think there are about half a dozen stories where we don't have an Arabic original and these may be genuine Arab stories, but there are sort of indications that, yes, he may well have invented them. He then goes to search for other manuscripts, and he finds other sort of stories to tell, and we don't know what those sources are, but mostly it's authentic.

But what you get immediately after Galland is a whole series of bogus oriental stories by other hands, people like the Comtecalus, Cazot and Chávez, all sorts of people start producing stories and some people even start producing fake Arabic originals of Aladdin and Alibaba So in our right, almost really The

Chairad It came into English through Edward Lane and Richard Burton among us Can you tell us about their translations And what they brought to this country? Who was earlier? It was Lane and Payne and Burton Yes, that's what I said, Lane and Burton Yes

Lane was a great scholar he lived in Egypt when he was fairly young in the early 19th century and wrote a wonderful description of what he called the modern, the customs and manners of the modern Egyptians, in which, as Robert said, he actually mentioned that Arabianites were known, but not easy to get. He also produced a dictionary, and he made a translation of the knights with notes,

but it was written for, say, a Victorian middle-class public, so they're barbarized, expurgated, no-sex, And so then we have Richard Burton, who is the complete opposite who was extremely interested in and also very knowledgeable about sex and he sort of exaggerated the sex

and lots of notes, very interesting notes but sometimes digressions that are not really to the point. He also used the vocabulary which I find very odd. It's a pity that in a recent encyclopedia that appeared about the night in the titles of the stories are Burton's title and he used it like the Shroff

who futtered his cadet I'll tell you later what it means I don't know I don't mind I was unintelligible to kick off with what did you mean Shroff seems to be a corrupt of Sairaf which is a money changer Futtered is a verb to futter

he must have taken it from French or I think from Latin, Futur you can guess what it means and cadet is something like a younger sister or younger brother well I mean it's full of that sort of thing and I think it's rather ridiculous. But it's a good translation in a sense. And

unfortunately there are not, there are no modern translations. There's one being had there, it's not too bad, I think. But firstly, the first English translation was being done while Galland was still in progress before you'd even finished the Grub Street translation came out.

And that's quite readable, whereas once you get Lanes, awful pseudo-biblical's pre-tulki in grandiose prose and Burton's raging, mad vocabulary, the book becomes unreadable. And I'd rather think that killed the cult of the Arabian Nights in English literature.

Previously, Addison, Johnson, Dickens, you name it. They'd all worked with the Arabian Knights and been inspired with it. They actually brought it directly into their works. More for English translations. It rather does for the Arabian Nights as literature. It survives best as pantomime and film,

and people know it better visually. The other thing to say, yes, there will be a complete translation of the Arabian Nights, a new one, first since Burton next year. You begin to talk, Marina, about Voltaire taking up the Arabian Nights, but then it did, I've mentioned, Roberts mentioned Dickens, and he starts what his novels, and so on, it goes through, and it pulses through for the next, until now.

Absolutely. The way people write, the way people look at writing, the way they think about writing we can think of, of a great number of people, Borges, perhaps being the most eminent. significantly. I mean, I think the thing is that it's a kind of genre. I mean, it's less

the specific tales than a form of telling and a way of conceiving of reality in order through fantasy in order to sharpen the consciousness of reality. I mean, it's quite different from fairy tales

in that respect, or many fairy tales in that respect. It is very firmly planted in the conditions of material life, even even while it has, you know, dizzying palaces conjured out of air. I mean, there's poverty grinding away there. And I think that this is another point. It continues to have an existence as this genre of storytelling

through fictions that are not at all in the nights. I mean, they are pure, independent works. I mean, a very significant one is Vathic, which is by the great orientalist crazy character, William Beckford, who was one of the richest men in England because of his sugar plantations in Jamaica. And he had

a very strong sense of corruption and violence and voluptuousness. And you wrote this extraordinary Arabian knight about Haroun al-Rashid's grandson, Vathek, which is a metaphysical study of how you lose your soul, but so lurid and melodramatic

that for years people thought it was too salacious even to read, but it's now a classic. In French, of course. It's a French book. And he originally wrote in French as an example of this translation theory that's theme. Well, Gilles was on to that too. Yes, absolutely. And more interested in the translations on the inverted commas originals, which you want think this programme must tell us is to keep away from originals because there don't seem to be in it.

Yes, so that's how it's sort of, yes, it's a kind of aure form or virtual reality form of narrative. And then it continues, and as you're absolutely right, Borges invented some of the most brilliant Arabian nights and their tiny miniatures, of course, you read with great brevity. Can I just ask her something about Borgas? I read somewhere, I just remember, he says that on the 600th and second night, Shearer tells her own story, but that's not true,

surely, it's a fiction by himself. It's a fiction, yes. Well, it's one of his wonderful Arabian nights, because then you would get infinite recession. If Shrethard... You mentioned earlier that it was in, let's say the 20th century, that the Arab scholars and writers themselves

began to take the Arabian nights more seriously and brought it into the acknowledgement despite that. Can you develop that a little? Oh, I'm hardly an expert in modern literature, but I know that they wrote interesting books about it in articles, and also it's very obvious that they used it in modern novels, and they wrote plays and novels and stories about the one thousand a second night, for instance, and they used it famous writers such as Naguib Mahfuz,

who died a few years ago when it was it, and he is not the only one. He said that he was inspired as a boy, and later too, by the night. So they were known, yes, and he used them in his storytelling. Yes, I think the Arab intelligentsia, very broadly, has been hostile to the Arabian nights, except for the creative section of the intelligents here. The poets and the novelists have gone for it. But whereas, in it's say, 18th century England, we took moral tales from the Arabian nights

about virtue, and whereas more modern times, Borges and Dom Bath have played with circularity in the intertextuality and what have you. The tendency among modern Arab writers, such as Mahfus and Jabbrah Brahim Jabra, is to treat the Arabian Nights as a source book of allegories about politics and about liberation of the spirit and liberation of women. It's

a very politicised reading. Would you say, I mean, coming towards there now, that this is now become a balanced book between Europe and the Arab world. I think it's a great bridge. I think it's a bridge and a bridgehead and should be seen as that. It's a

It's a colloquium that has been going on for centuries between Islam and Western Europe. And it has not been seen quite in that light, and I think should be, because I think it's a common ground. Do you agree with that, George? Oh, yes. Of course, the people that we call the fundamentalists or the Islamists very often are against the knights. And in fact, it wasn't in the 80s. The book has been banned in Egypt itself because of the sex, mostly, and slightly irreverent dealing with religion. So, yes, it would be very nice.

If it were a bridge, I hope it will become so. Oh, I agree with that. I agree with that. So we have a bridge. And which stories should we start by reading, finally, Marina. My favourite is the physician Duban, who heals a king, and the king is then turned against him by the vizier, the wicked vizier. And so Duban plots a revenge. And what he does is tells the king that he will have all knowledge if he goes to this book.

that the king cuts off his head and he licks the pages of the book to find the knowledge and the book has been poisoned before his head was cut off. Well, that's a good one. Thank you very much. Marina Warner. Thank you, Jared Van Halder. Thank you, Robert Irwin. And next week we'll be talking about the idea of taste in the 18th century. Thank you for listening.

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