The “One Thousand and One Nights,” the classic folk tales that date from the Golden Age of Islam and still stand among the masterpieces of Middle Eastern literature, were reborn in English with a brand new translation in late 2008.
The paperback version of the three-volume “The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights,” translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, was published earlier this year by Penguin Books. Lyons’ work is the first direct translation into English since Richard Burton’s 19th century version.
Author-editor Robert Irwin, who wrote the introductions to all three volumes in the new version, speaks about “The Arabian Nights” in an interview with Today’s Zaman.
In his note on the text, the translator Malcolm C. Lyons thanks you and defines you as “the protagonist of this project.” What is the story behind this massive translation project?
Originally, about 15 years ago, another publisher sought my advice about which translation of the Arabian Nights they should publish. They came to me because I had already published “The Arabian Nights: A Companion.” I pointed out the inadequacies of all previous translations of the Nights and suggested that they commission a complete new translation of the main corpus of the Nights. However, after some initial excitement, the project lapsed. Some years passed. Then I was contacted again by the same editor, Hilary Laurie, but this time she was working for Penguin Classics. This time the project went ahead. I found an outstanding translator, Malcolm Lyons, the retired Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. We agreed that the translation should be based on Calcutta II, an Arabic text printed in India in the early 19th century, for it was the most compendious version. Lyons, who reads Arabic faster than I read English, translated this enormous text with astonishing speed and fluency in the odd moments when he was not playing golf. It has been a long haul, but immensely worthwhile.
What is the significance of this new and complete translation?
The previous translations are utterly unsatisfactory. Edward William Lane’s 1838-41 was highly selective, bowdlerized and written in a mock biblical prose, as well as being overladen with notes. Sir Richard Burton’s, 1885-8, was error-strewn, sexist, racist, imperialist and, above all, composed in a bizarre English, which drew on medieval, Tudor and Jacobean vocabulary, as well as Victorian slang. Also he liked to invert the word order to make the text look archaic. It verges on the unreadable. Indeed it is sometimes worse than verging on the unreadable. Because these translations were so bad, the popularity of the Nights actually declined in the course of the 19th century. A scholarly translation into good English was a stark necessity. I am very proud of having engineered such a thing.
Why did English readers have to wait for more than a century after Richard Burton’s translation for a new one?
A retranslation is a very big job. It needed to be done by a first-rate academic, but one with no teaching or organizational commitments. Burton had believed that it was his duty to make the text seem strange and barbarous. This was both mistaken and patronizing. The Arabs were capable of writing better prose and poetry than Burton was.
Your work “For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies” has been translated into Turkish, and Turkish readers are acquainted with your criticism of Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” Do you agree with scholars who argue that “The Arabian Nights” has mostly been used for constructing a negative image of the East?
What would be the evidence for this? Who would be the guilty writers? When one reads Addison, or Dickens or Stendhal, it is evident that they loved The Arabian Nights, but it is also evident that they were not much interested in the real Middle East, still less in stereotyping it or insulting it. It is not easy to see how exactly “Aladdin” or “Sinbad” can be used to construct a negative image of the East. By the way, there is hardly any mysticism at all in the “Nights.”
In the Introduction to Volume 3 you mention the names of Western writers who are influenced by “The Arabian Nights,” from Chaucer to Borges and Calvino. Do you think this influence is underrated?
I have written at greater length on the literary influence of the Nights in my Companion, mentioned above. I am certain that from the early 18th century onwards, the Nights exercised a greater influence on Western literature than any other book, the Bible excepted. Its influence on fantasy is obvious. What is less obvious is that in the 18th century the “Nights” exercised a crucial influence on the origins and development of the realistic novel in Britain and France.
Can this new translation provide a fresh look into Middle Eastern or Islamic literature for common readers?
I hope that most readers will read the stories for pleasure, for their literary and imaginative qualities. These stories should not be used as a primer on Middle Eastern realities.
You describe “The Nights” as “one of the most inspiring sourcebooks of literature ever created.” What is its “most inspiring” feature?
There is no single answer to this. In the 18th century moralists and satirists were inspired by the morals and satires of the stories. In the 19th century, adventure, mystery and opulence became more important. In the 20th century writers like Borges and Calvino have rediscovered the Nights as a modernist text or a box full of literary tricks.
You are an expert on the history of Orientalist studies. Can we consider the recent works, like this translation, as a sign of a new period in Orientalist studies?
Certainly “Arabian Nights” studies now thrives. There is now an “Arabian Nights Encyclopedia” and there are several conferences every year on the subject. You recently had one in Turkey. More generally, publishers in the West are hungry for expert books on almost all aspects of Islam and the Middle East. There are other big translation projects in hand -- for example, the translation of Evliya Çelebi.