New Yorker Review of Disney's Live Action Aladdin

 Here's a great and hilarious review of Disney's live action car wreck Aladdin (2019). 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/a-live-action-aladdin-falls-short-of-its-animated-predecessor

And some clips: 

"The director of the latest “Aladdin” is a middle-aged white Brit, Guy Ritchie, but the diversity of his cast is quite in keeping with the tangled roots of the tale. We have an African-American, Will Smith, as the Genie, and a Cairo-born Coptic Canadian, Mena Massoud, as Aladdin. Princess Jasmine, whom he woos, is played by Naomi Scott, whose Ugandan mother is of Gujarati Indian descent. Marwan Kenzari, a Dutch-Tunisian actor, takes the part of the dastardly vizier, Jafar. The show is deftly stolen, like a bracelet slipped from a wrist, by the Iranian-American Nasim Pedrad, famed for her impersonations on “Saturday Night Live,” which run all the way—and it’s a hell of a way—from Kim Kardashian to Christiane Amanpour. Here, Pedrad plays Jasmine’s handmaiden, Dalia, who, in an unprecedented twist, has a crush on the Genie. Good luck with that."

"Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and—abracadabra!—made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush, which is a grave drawback amid the alleys of the bazaar. And Jafar is about as frightening as the rug, though the fault, I’d suggest, lies less with the actor than with Disney, which is busy rebooting its cartoons with human performers and hoping that we won’t notice the difference. But the Jafar of 1992 derived his power from the ease with which he swelled and stretched, like a sort of evil taffy. Animation, in other words, became him. Ritchie tries to repeat the trick with C.G.I., to graceless and cumbersome effect."

THE WRATH AND THE DAWN - Renée Ahdieh

November brings yet another new version of The 1001 Nights. This one is a Young Adult Fantasy retelling called The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh.

It is set to be a two volume series to be released in May of 2015, published by Putnam.

You can read the first chapter at Bustle - http://www.bustle.com/articles/47450-the-wrath-and-the-dawn-by-rene-ahdieh-an-arabian-nights-retelling-is-coming-in-may

From their website - "In Ahdieh’s 2015 novel, the evil ruler is the Caliph, a murderous 18-year-old king, and his tale-spinning wife is 16-year-old Shahrzad, or Shazi. Every night, as Shazi knows, the Caliph takes a new teenage bride, and every dawn he kills her in favor of another. But like her namesake, Shazi uses her wits and cunning to try to outsmart the Caliph and exact revenge."

From Publisher's Weekly - "Stacey Barney at Putnam has also pre-empted Renee Ahdieh's YA novel, The Wrath and the Dawn. The book, the first of a duet, is a reimagining of The Arabian Nights, where the wits of one girl are the only thing standing between a vulnerable kingdom and its ruthless boy-king. The acquisition was a six-figure, three-book deal for world English rights, brokered by Barbara Poelle at the Irene Goodman Agency."

Link - http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/59662-rights-report-week-of-october-21-2013.html

Author's site - http://reneeahdieh.com/

Paul Nurse reviews Marina Warner

The Globe and Mail has recently published a new review of Marina Warner's Nights book Stranger Magic.  The review is written by Paul Nurse, author of Eastern Dreams:  How the Arabian Nights Came to the World, a fine history of the Nights.

Here is the link to the review, excerpts are pasted below: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/why-has-the-arabian-nights-proved-so-enduring/article4480676/

"Review: Non-fiction

Why has The Arabian Nights proved so enduring?

Reviewed by Paul McMichael Nurse

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Aug. 14 2012, 2:59 PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Aug. 14 2012, 3:04 PM EDT

Like a literary phoenix, the One Thousand and One Nights – first printed in English, in 1706, as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment – has surpassed time, culture, changing fashion and even controversy to maintain a position among the world’s premier imaginative works. A compendium of stories from India, Persia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and possibly even Greece and Rome, some tales date back at least 1,100 years, others are of relatively recent vintage, but all are tied together by a simple framing device in which a young woman recites stories to ransom her life and the lives of other women from the misogyny of a disturbed eastern king. In the end, she restores the king’s sanity, saving herself and her countrywomen.

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But what is it about the Nights that has proved so enduring when other popular works have come and gone? Even given the famous Enlightenment preoccupation with oriental modes and themes, the Nights continues to project the image of a mythical medieval world well into the third millennium. British writer and mythographer Marina Warner believes that the presence of magic in many of these tales is key to understanding the collection’s appeal. Of course, not every story in the Nights has an element of the supernatural about it, but enough tales revolve around magical elements that The Arabian Nights’ world has become synonymous with an alternative reality; in Warner’s words, a place “packed with wonders, elastic in handling time and space, and plotted according to the different laws of fate and magic.”

Certainly there is hardly an aspect of western culture that hasn’t been affected by the Nights. With so much material to work from, Warner is obliged to pick and choose her discussion areas. She retells 15 stories in 20 chapters as springboards for an examination of the myriad aspects of the work – considerations of the One Thousand and One Nights in history, pastiche, theatre, dance, film or what-have-you. Throw in bits of personal biography, a nod to the two Gulf Wars and the Arab Spring, and the result is a text that is largely comprehensive, even if it sometimes careens from subject to subject like a runaway magic carpet.

My chief complaint is that, despite Warner’s wide-ranging perspective, there remains a lopsided approach to Stranger Magic that means some significant expressions of the Arabian Nights receive short shrift. Since her chief concern is with cultural history via magical representations, the reader cannot be too critical of her choices, but some omissions remain curious. German animator Lotte Reiniger’s admittedly charming silhouette film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) receives an entire chapter, and the possibly bogus pastiche story Aladdin almost as many pages, but the Nights’ thorny history in the Arab world – many would like it banned – receives little attention.

Likewise, the symbolic meaning of the beautiful eastern carpet draped on Sigmund Freud’s couch (yes, that couch) is discussed at length, but not enough consideration beyond “name” writers like William Beckford and Voltaire is given to the celebrated “Oriental Tale” genre of the 18th and early 19th centuries – hundreds upon hundreds of works that suffused western literature with faux-eastern stories, influencing European letters for more than 150 years.

In such a terrifically expansive subject, however, this might be considered nitpicking. Poised midway between a dense academic text and a broadly selective overview of a timeless literary treasure, Warner’s massive work remains a powerful testimony to the enduring appeal of the 1,001 Nights. Complex, frequently subtle and sometimes unwieldy, her book will reward readers with sophisticated insights into the cultural exchange between West and East – a bit like The Arabian Nights itself.

Paul McMichael Nurse is the author of Eastern Dreams, a popular history of One Thousand and One Nights."
 

review of Marina Warner's Stranger Magic

Thanks so much to everyone who has passed this link along. It's a review of Marina Warner's Nights book Stranger Magic.

The review is by Wendy Doniger (http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/doniger.shtml) and is one of the best book reviews I've read in a long time. You can read it here at the TLS - http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1069412.ece and excerpted below:

The magic of the Arabian Nights Wendy Doniger Published: 27 June 2012

"The original, authentic, real Ur-text of the Arabian Nights (aka Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, or just the Nights) is a mythical beast. There are far more than a thousand and one nights, for the thirty-four-and-a-half stories in the fourteenth or fifteenth century “core” body of the Nights were soon supplemented by other tales in Arabic and Persian, from the culture of medieval Baghdad and Cairo, and then in Hindi and Urdu and Turkish, tales carried by pilgrims and crusaders, merchants and raiders, back and forth by land and sea. And then came the narratives added by European translators, as well as the adaptations (in paintings and films) and retellings by modern novelists and poets. There is no agreed-upon table of contents. As Marina Warner points out, at the start of this enchanting book, “the stories themselves are shape-shifters”, and the Arabian Nights, like “one of the genies who stream out of a jar in a pillar of smoke”, took on new forms under new masters. The corpus lacks not only parents but a birthplace; Persia, Iraq, India, Syria and Egypt all claim to have spawned it.

So the Thousand and One Arabian Nights are not only not a thousand and one but not (just) Arabian. The chronological and cultural strata of the Nights are like the layers of a nested Russian doll: you pull off the twentieth century (Salman Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Walt Disney, Errol Flynn) and then the nineteenth and eighteenth century (Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Jean Antoine Galland, Richard Francis Burton, Edward W. Lane); and finally you get to the Arabic sources, and you think you’ve hit pay dirt. But then you sense, behind the Arabic, Homer and the Mahabharata, and the Bible, and you see that there is no there there. It’s not an artichoke – peel away the leaves of the later, accreted, interpolated layers until you find the original centre – but an onion: peel away the leaves and at the centre you find – nothing.

Or, perhaps, everything; lacking a birthplace, the Nights also lack a grave: “The book cannot ever be read to its conclusion”, says Warner: “it is still being written”. Scholars who could not cure themselves of the nineteenth-century obsession of searching for the source (of the Nights, of the Nile, of the human race . . .) were soon disappointed to discover that many of the most popular tales – including “Sinbad”, “Aladdin and his lamp”, and “Ali Baba and the forty thieves” – were arrivistes, with no legitimate Arab parents. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay on “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights”, credits Hanna Diab, the Christian Arab colleague of Galland, with the invention of several of these “orphan tales”. Aditya Behl (in Love’s Subtle Magic, 2012) traces Sinbad back to Sanskrit tales of Sanudasa the merchant. Like the beast fables and mirrors for princes that travelled from India to Europe, so too these sailors’ yarns about the marvels of the Indies circulated in the Islamic and pre-Islamic world of the Indian Ocean. (There is also a thirteenth-century Hebrew text of the Sinbad story). But for many people, the Arabian Nights without “Sinbad” or “Aladdin” is like Hamlet without Hamlet, and purists who produced “authentic” editions without these tales met with such backlash from the reading public that they quickly published supplementary volumes including the beloved bastards.

Warner’s subtle unravelling of the rich history of this tradition, from the earliest Arabic traces to present-day interpretations, demonstrates that each of the many versions has a claim to its own authenticity." Yet, within the Arabic tradition, the tales of the Nights were discounted as popular trash, pulp fiction; despite numerous allusions to the Prophet, and quotations and echoes of the Qur’an, they were “too much fun, often transgressive or amoral fun, to be orthodox or respectable . . .”. Galland cleaned out the homosexual episodes, but Burton (whom Warner calls “the Frank Harris of the desert and the bazaar”) footnoted them and generally made the tales more salacious, stealing most of them from Richard Payne and adding many of his own, thumbing his nose at the prevailing prudery of Victorian Britain, “with glee and a fair deal of invention, projection, and transference”.

 One reviewer epitomized the European translators as “Galland for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study, and Burton for the sewers.” Stranger Magic: Charmed states and the “Arabian Nights” explodes two myths about the Nights: that only the Arabic stories are the “real ones” and that you need to know Arabic to understand the Arabian Nights. The two ideas are mutually reinforcing: if there were a single ancient Arabic text, one might well want to read it in the original language; but since there is no such text, the stories in all languages and translations are fair game for all of us to respond to (a creative process in which, as Borges put it, “the translator is being translated”).

The full spectrum of stories certainly yields spectacular insights in the hands of Warner, Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, who knows more than anyone alive about the uses of myth and folklore in literature, fine arts, and film. She has written eye-opening books about fairy tales about women (From the Beast to the Blonde: On fairy tales and their tellers, 1996) and men (No Go the Bogeyman: On scaring, lulling, and making mock, 2000) and spirits (Phantasmagoria, 2006) and much else.

She is fluent in a number of European and classical languages. But she does not know Arabic. Though she grew up in Cairo and spoke Arabic as a child, “unfortunately nobody encouraged me to keep it up, and besides, I never could read it”. I must confess that, as a card-carrying Sanskrit snob myself, I first regarded Warner’s lack of Arabic as a potential barrier to her understanding of the stories; after all, as she herself remarks, of William Beckford (1760–1844), “Beckford paid attention to these inconsistencies and weaknesses in the fabric of the narrative, possibly because he was working from an Arabic manuscript, and the discipline of translation sharpens one’s wits”. Of course, Warner makes good use of the work of scholars of Arabic, pointing out, for instance, contrasts between the Arabic texts in which a huge female jinn (or genie) takes a trophy ring from 570 men, and the translations, in which she gets only ninety-eight. Moreover, the linguistic subtleties that can be achieved only by “working from an Arabic manuscript” are not essential to the hunt for the larger game that Warner is after, which is a literary archaeology and analysis of what the Nights have meant to people in diverse cultures and epochs, not merely as amusing Oriental artefacts but as profound sources of human understanding."

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"Warner chooses just fifteen stories to retell briefly, from both the oldest and later layers (though she does not include “Sinbad” or “Aladdin and his lamp”: there is an Aladdin, but instead of a lamp he has a flying bed). Each story inspires an essay on several themes central to that story: jinns, carpets, witches, magicians, dervishes, dream knowledge, Orientalism, King Solomon, talismans, Voltaire and his crowd, Goethe, flying, toys, money, shadows, films, machines, couches, and much, much more. The essays form a coherent chain. This is not, however, a book to read straight through but one to wander in, forward and back, night after night. Most of the stories involve magic.

Warner’s argument about the importance of magical thinking in modernity is not particularly surprising, but she documents it in highly original ways. Her analysis of the exoticization of magic through the use of Oriental material, since the eighteenth century, enhances her discussion of the way that early films of stories from the Nights superimpose Arabic magic on the magic of filmmaking, so that the magic flying horse becomes an objective correlative of the projector, with the peg between the ears of the magic steed, and the brake on the tail, echoing the mechanism that controls the passage of the film through the projector. There is also the magic of speech acts, not just, “With this ring I thee wed” but “Hoc est corpus meum”, which inspired the phrase “hocus pocus” in mockery of the “trick of transubstantiation”.

 Warner discusses the magic of things (such as rings and carpets) as fetishes, and cites Lorraine Daston’s insight (in Things That Talk, 2004) into idols (from the Greek eidolon), illusions that are misleading and fraudulent. Daston contrasts idols with evidence, but notes that the two often blend together; forensic exhibits may be fabricated or, on the other hand, become powerful fetishes and take on the idol’s ability to haunt. Warner compares these “objects with uncanny life” to Winnicott’s transitional objects and to the quasi-magical functioning of her BlackBerry, Satnav, and iPod.

And then there is the magic of Freud. Warner suggests that when Freud called his couch an ottoman and covered it with a Persian carpet, he may have been, “consciously or unconsciously”, creating an Oriental setting for the first psychoanalytical talking cures, “a form of storytelling, with the roles reversed (it is the narrator who needs to be healed, not the listener-Sultan)”. Freud, who kept a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu on his desk, was very much an Orientalist.

 Orientalism looms large in Stranger Magic. “The Orient in the Arabian Nights has its own Orient”, says Warner, also quoting Amit Chaudhuri: “The Orient, in modernity, is not only a European invention but also an Oriental one”. Fairy tales had always had what Warner calls “a structural impulse” to imagine that dangerous magic came from far away, but the “gradual orientalisation of magicians” exacerbated the tendency to have the dirty work done by strangers, “so that the home team keeps its hands clean and its smile all innocence”.

Warner writes in the shadow of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), but she is also sympathetic to Said’s later, more balanced, more generous self (in Culture and Imperialism, 1993), and she acknowledges some of the positive uses of Orientalism. Through the dynamics of “reverse colonization”, eighteenth-century Europeans used images of Orientalist despotism and sexual and religious depravity to parody their own culture; Voltaire’s satirical Oriental contes were “an obvious instance of the West putting on Eastern dress in order to examine itself more clearly”. Western feminists could write of “emancipation in the Oriental mode”, calling up the image of Eastern men, castigated for tyranny and sexual abuses; while the effeminate East reflected Western women’s condition back to them.

Performances of plays about Aladdin, in Britain, were used to address, covertly, arguments about the slave trade in America. The film The Thief of Bagdad (1924, directed by Raoul Walsh, and starring Douglas Fairbanks) is, as Warner points out, “flagrantly Orientalist”. It ends with the Thief “acclaimed by the adoring grateful multitude as he enters the city at the head of an army bent on rescuing Baghdad from the tyrant emperor”. For us, the city is no longer Hollywood’s “Bagdad”, but CNN’s Baghdad. As I read Stranger Magic, the city of Bagdad/Baghdad shimmered before my eyes in a double image: the magical place of flying carpets and the scene of a devastating war. I was stunned by the relevance of phrases from the old stories, such as, “He falls into such a rage he declares war on Iraq: he will lay the country to waste”."

Robert Irwin - Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights

From 1001 Nights

Gerard Genette’s term “paratext” is an interesting one when thinking about all of the elements that constitute a book/text/object.

A paratext is any associated part of that text that is not directly its narrative but instead works to present the text in a certain way.

Paratexts include titles, covers, font, introductions, attached essays, pictures and illustrations, even interviews by the author or publisher about the book – a kind of marketing of the text, for some reason, by its paratext.

A text like the Nights certainly seems like a book embedded in several paratextual layers.  Richard Burton’s paratextual addtions, for example, especially his incredibly numerous footnotes and essays, presented the Nights as a "true" picture of the people of the “Middle East,” even though they largely were not a true picture of anywhere.

An important paratextual amendment to many versions of the Nights are its pictures - accompanying illustrations - and Robert Irwin’s book Visions of the Jinn sheds some light on the illustrators responsible for visually representing what the Nights seemed to be about.

Like the translators of the Nights, everywhere and anywhere, these illustrators had vastly different conceptions of their object of study.  And like any writing or historical document these pictures also seemed to say something about the time period and place they were borne out of.

Robert Irwin is the author of several contemporary works on or about the Nights including the well known Nights-history book The Arabian Nights: A Companion.  His latest book, Visions of the Jinn:  Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (2010)  provides both a great overview academically of the subject and also a great introduction to a general audience to the splendor of the visual Nights.

From 1001 Nights

Irwin gives an overview of many of the illustrators of the many different variants of the Nights over the years.  Some interesting stand-outs include:

William Harvey (1796-1866) who made over 500 illustrations for Edward William Lane’s English translation, and, according to Irwin, it was “Harvey’s illustrations, rather than Lane’s text, that attracted the most attention and praise” (65). 

Also, according to Irwin, Harvey’s illustrations were the first serious attempt at rendering a truthful anthropological/architectural visions of the Middle East in the Nights, something which certainly changed the character of the Nights forever in its 19^th century European variants.

Much attention is given, as well, to Edmund Dulac, early 20^th century illustrator who incorporated a great deal of color and expressionism in his renderings, and a ton of information about the many different illustrators it can feel a bit overwhelming.  In addition there isn’t much information about the various countries represented and how much of an international work the Nights is.

From 1001 Nights

In the book movements from print to engraving to color are all covered.  Different artistic styles based either in classical visual arts or popular culture depictions such as comic books are also given some attention.  There are scores of artists, many relatively still unknown, and the book as a whole can feel a little scattered due to the amount of content and the breadth of its topic.  Given that it appears to be one of the first studies to address the illustrators of the Nights, however, this is to some extent forgivable.  Each artist of the Nights could easily have their own book, just as each version of the Nights has its own incredible biography as well.

It is also forgivable given what is the book’s incredible strength – its visual reproductions of the illustrations of the Nights, from full-page pictures to reproductions of actual Nights’ volumes, the plates are visually stunning and done at a level of reproductive clarity that I have not really seen in a book of visual arts, particularly regarding reproductions of books.

I’ve seen other reviews of this book that feature digital pictures but I don’t think the pictures these reviews have are from Irwin’s book itself, if they were they would have looked much better.

From 1001 Nights

The book is a part of a series based around the collection at the Arcadian Library, a private library in the UK holding one of the world’s best collections of the Nights.

I think this book is a must-have for any serious library at any research institution, any researcher or fan of the Nights, and it would make a good gift as well for anyone interested in art or literature.  It is a large coffee-table sized book with 240 pages.

Its price, at over $200 new, however, will undoubtedly limit its reach, however most comparable visual arts books are priced typically over $100 if not more, so it’s not completely out of the ballpark.

It's currently on sale on Oxford University Press' website (in the US) for $180, which is $40 less than listing - http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/28778/subject/ArtHistory/ModernContemporary/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780199590353

Marvels & Tales Vol 26

The latest issue of the academic Journal Marvels & Tales has several interesting Nights-related things including the article "Nabokov's Ada and The 1001 Nights" by Seyed Gholamreza Shafiee-Sabet and Farideh Pourgiv, and reviews of Malcolm Lyon's 2008 English translation of the Nights and Paul Nurse's literary history of the Nights, Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World.

You can find the journal here at their website via Wayne State University Press: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/ 

If you have access via a university, or at a nearby university library, you can read the journal for free.

Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic - rev. by Daily Beast

Here is a review of Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, a new Nights book I recently mentioned. This review is from The Daily Beast and is written by English Professor Brad Gooch, well written for the most part (though is "Palestinian-Arab" really a necessary, if correct, adjective for Edward Said? Maybe the author meant "Palestinian-American," which Said was? Arab-American?), if a bit of a cursory overview of Warner's book.

I've excerpted some passages below, the entire review is here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/25/marina-warner-s-stranger-magic-reconsiders-the-arabian-nights.html

"Long before meta-fiction, blog fiction, expropriation, or hypertext, there was Shahrazad, the slinkiest, sexiest, most ineradicable trickster in global literature, telling stories every night towards the event horizon of 1001 Nights to distract her abusive husband, the Sultan, from his resolve to behead each of his wives for infidelity—while her sister curled beside them on the divan, like a kinky teleprompter, or laugh-sigh-gasp track. The result, Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as it became known after its first English translation, in 1706, kicked off a craze of Orientalism that morphed across supposedly rational Enlightenment Europe in spoofs, follies, turqueries, pantomimes, and lots of camping it up in djellaba, or lounging on “ottomans.” Some of its signature tales—Aladdin’s lamp, Sinbad’s voyage, or Ali Baba’s thieves—were likely only smuggled into the text later by French translator Antoine Galland, spun by him from mere parentheses of plot in the 14th-century Syrian manuscript he was busily mining."

"The jinni (Arabic for “genie” or “demon”) in the bottle of Warner’s book, both menacing and inspiring, is Palestinian-Arab Edward Said and his paradigm-shifting study Orientalism. When I was a student at Columbia in the late 1970s, I audited Said’s course. He was an academic rock star of the moment, wore elegant dark-blue suits to class; as a snarky student exercise I kept note of the number of times he used the word “power” in every lecture. Orientalism was the equivalent of an academic beach book during in the summer of 1979—a “cult bible,” says Warner. While Said didn’t take on the popularization of Arabian Nights directly, especially as triggered by the “lurid and archaizing” Victorian-era version of Sir Richard Burton, he did take on his ilk, exposing orientalist scholars, adventurers, and explorers as trading in stereotypes of Eastern lassitude, femininity, and deception that helped stoke a colonialist, imperialist agenda.

Enough decades have passed for these ideas to be run through the word processor again, and reconsidered. While Said did not deconstruct Arabian Nights directly, he did indict one of its translators, the English Arabist Edward W. Lane, for fostering prejudice. “Said’s furious polemic against Orientalism,” Warner writes, “has dominated perception of the Nights and related Orientalist literature until now.” She stops along her way to absolve this or that orientalist figure of heavy-handed motives, restoring the impulses of sheer infatuation and curiosity that motivated so many of these Arabophiles from Goethe to T.E. Lawrence to Sigmund Freud, with his divan of a psychoanalytic couch covered with oriental rugs and cushions for Shahrazadian talking cures. Warner trots out Edward Lane as Exhibit A of a “charmed encounter” with the Middle East. A sort of method scholar, Lane lived in Cairo, admittedly dressing in Mameluke robes, while translating the Koran, producing a monumental Arabic-English lexicon, as well as his annotated Nights (1839-41) in three illustrated volumes."

Visions of the Jinn - Reviews

 Aladdin's Picture Book Arabian Nights, Illustration by Walter Crane, 1878

There are a bunch of great reviews out on Visions of the Jinn, here are excerpts of and links for two:

Many thanks to Ghada for passing along this review of Robert Irwin's new book on the illustrations/illustrators of the Nights from brainpickings.org.

Irwin's book is currently only in hardcover format and costs almost $200.

Here's part of the review, it has great pictures from the book so do visit their site, this review was reprinted in the Atlantic Monthly too, but don't know the connection between brainpickings and the Atlantic.

Link: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/20/visions-of-the-jinn-arabian-nights-illustrations/

From the review:  "Even though the editions since Lane’s scholarly translation had progressed in the realm of visual imagination, the content had remained rather sterilized and prudish. It wasn’t until the 1885-1888 publication of Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume translation that themes of sexuality emerged, complete with extensive notes on topics like homosexuality, bestiality, and castration. Though Burton’s original edition featured no pictures in order to avoid prosecution for obscenity, shortly after his death in 1890 a young friend and admirer of his by the name of Albert Letchford, who had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter, created 70 paintings, which eventually became the basis for the next edition of Burton’s translation. With a keen sensibility for fantasy and a shared interest in the erotic to complement Burton’s own, Letchford’s artwork featured many nudes and were infused with sensuality. Ironically, Letchford contracted an exotic disease in Egypt and died at a young age."

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Here is a more extensive review from the TLS, many thanks to Moti for passing this along, I've excerpted bits of it below, for the entire review see:  http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article858481.ece

Visions of the Arabian Nights

Elizabeth Lowry

Robert Irwin
VISIONS OF THE JINN
Illustrators of the Arabian Nights
240pp. The Arcadian Library. £120 (US $225).
978 0 19 959035 3

Published: 18 January 2012

"Nowhere is the fascination felt in Western culture for the East more evident than in its avid consumption of The Arabian Nights. Ever since Antoine Galland issued the first translation in French in the early eighteenth century, the stories have become a permanent part of the Western literary and visual landscape, spawning numerous adaptations, tributes and imitations. Princess Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba have acquired the status of cultural icons; genies, flying carpets and magic lamps, once curiosities of medieval Arab and Persian mythology, are now the stock-in-trade of modern occidental fantasy. There have been musical interpretations of the tales by Rimsky-Korsakov and Weber; cartoon versions by Disney, and lavish Hollywood incarnations. The influence of the Nights extends from the poetry of Goethe to Wordsworth to Rilke, to modern fiction from Fielding through Proust to Borges. In fact, so much of European and American literature has been influenced by the tales that it would be far easier, as Robert Irwin suggests in his The Arabian Nights: A companion (1994), simply to list the handful of writers who were not influenced by them.

Irwin returns to the theme in this sumptuous history of the illustrated Western editions of The Arabian Nights. Visions of the Jinn is part bibliographical exposition, part dazzling magic lantern show: its 164 colour-saturated facsimiles, photographs and black-and-white images and their accompanying analysis offer a visually stunning and sensitive account of the European response to this important text.

How Arabian are these nights? Although we have come to associate them with Arab culture, the tales are properly speaking a composite work deriving from the oral traditions of India, Persia, Iraq and medieval Egypt. The first written version is a Persian collection translated into Arabic some time in the early eighth century as Alf Layla, or “The Thousand Nights”, although the number of tales included fell well short of that (in Arabic, alf simply denotes a large quantity). The title The Thousand and One Nights (probably from the Turkish expression bin-bir, “a thousand and one”, which is again suggestive rather than exact) became attached to the text in the twelfth century. To this core stories were later added, until the work delivered on the promise in its title. The European translations that followed after Galland produced his courtly twelve-volume Les Mille et Une Nuits in 1704 differed in quality and in their unspoken agendas. The best known are by Edward Lane, Richard Burton and Joseph Charles Victor Mardrus. Lane’s translation (1839–41) is scholarly but prudish, and heavily bowdlerized to eliminate any sexual references that might offend its Victorian readers; Burton’s (1885) takes the opposite approach, ramping up the raunch; while reading Mardrus (1902) is rather like spending an afternoon with a slightly louche uncle who manages to combine whimsy with constant suggestiveness."

"The stories told by Shahrazad draw on a seemingly inexhaustible range of subjects. They are heroic, fantastical, comic, pious, obscene, tragic, didactic, brutal and sentimental in turn – quite a challenge to an illustrator. Some crack along at a tremendous pace and others fall prey to longueurs as Shahrazad meditates on knotty problems of philosophy or abstruse ethical questions (there is an intriguing insight here into what counts as a page-turner in medieval Persia: Shahrazad thinks nothing of including, say, asides on law and human physiology, confident that Shahriyar won’t summarily reach for the axe). The way in which the illustrators of the Nights chose to represent their subject matter, however, inevitably says as much about them as about it. In the eighteenth century, Western artists imagining the East had limited visual resources to draw on: prints of the costumes and peoples of the Orient by those who had actually been there were scarce, and the same sets tended to do the rounds – sixty Turkish drawings by Nicolas de Nicolay were a particularly popular source, and were still being used by Ingres early in the nineteenth century. In the frontispieces of this period, as Irwin points out, Shahriyar and Shahrazad often appeared in bed – but “invariably a nice, solid European bed”. It was not that the illustrators of the Enlightenment weren’t alive to the sexual and seductive overtones of the stories, but the emphasis was firmly on decorum. David Coster’s frontispiece for Galland’s edition shows the royal couple tucked up under a baldachin beneath a neo-classical ceiling. The demure-looking Shahrazad, in a French gown of fashionable eighteenth-century cut, is clearly in the middle of one of her more earnest disquisitions on faith and morals, although her breasts are incongruously bare. Just as the beds were European, so “the landscapes were commonly western and pastoral”. Sinbad and Ali Baba may wear turbans but they are dressed in togas, posing in front of classical ruins, or strolling in breeches through English woods.

It was only towards the middle of the nineteenth century that a broader and more reliable range of visual material about Arab and Turkish life was made available, and the illustrated editions of the Nights from this time begin to have pretensions to visual scholarship. Edward Lane’s three-volume, heavily annotated translation had a self-consciously didactic purpose, aiming to introduce readers to the Middle Eastern way of life. The pictures by William Harvey were intended to have an educative function, serving as the visual flourish to Lane’s learning, and their accuracy was vouched for by the translator himself. In fact, they were supposed to be even more accurate than the source material – as Lane assures the reader in his preface, thanks to his vigilance in standing over the artist and hectoring him with tips, the latter “has been enabled to make his designs agree more nearly with the costumes &c. of the times which [the] tales generally illustrate than they would if he trusted alone to the imperfect descriptions which I have found in Arabic works”. Unsurprisingly, Harvey’s boxwood engravings, though delicate and replete with authentic detail, are rather insipid."

Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights By Marina Warner Chatto

A new book has emerged from the UK, written by Marina Warner (http://www.marinawarner.com), a Professor at The University of Essex and noted author.

Below is a review from the Guardian. Here is a link to it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/11/stranger-magic-marina-warner-review.

It's a big (400+ page) book, I'm looking forward to taking a look at it.

--------------------------------------

"Stranger Magic by Marina Warner – review
Marina Warner has written a scholarly dissection of the Arabian Nights

• Robin Yassin-Kassab
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 17.55 EST
•

The Arabian Nights constitute, in Marina Warner's words, "a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales". The antecedents of these Arab-Islamic texts (also known as The Thousand and One Nights and the Arabian Nights Entertainments) are Qur'anic, Biblical, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Turkish and Egyptian. In them, oral and written traditions, poetry and prose, demotic folk tales and courtly high culture mutate and interpenetrate. In their long lifetime the Nights have influenced, among many others, Flaubert, Wilde, Márquez, Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Douglas Fairbanks and the Ballets Russes.

The framing story, in which Shahrazad saves her life by telling King Shahryar tall tales, is only one such ransom recounted in the tales. More than simple entertainment, then: throughout these stories within stories, and stories about stories, narrative even claims for itself the power to defer death. Although oral versions of the Nights long percolated through Europe (elements turning up in Chaucer, Ariosto, Dante and Shakespeare), the tales were established in the mainstream of European popular and literary culture with Galland's early 18th-century French translation. Galland purged the eroticism and homosexuality, added tales from the dictation of a Lebanese friend, and perhaps invented the two best-known and seemingly most "Arabian" tales of all: "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".

Warner quotes Jorge Luis Borges (a guiding spirit in her book) approving this belle infidèle approach to translation. "I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else." It's this changing aspect of the Nights as a time-travelling, trans-civilisational cooperation that fascinates Warner. She sees in it "a unique key to the imaginary processes that govern the symbolism of magic, foreignness and mysterious power in modern culture".

Stranger Magic, influenced by the work of Edward Said, is an endeavour to uncover "a neglected story of reciprocity and exchange". One of Warner's central intentions is to show that while Christendom and Islam were politically and religiously in a state of hot or cold war, science, philosophy and art recognised no frontiers. Yet this openness closed somewhat from the Enlightenment on, when Europe sealed magic off from science, imagination from reason, and also east from west. The Enlightenment, of course, was the point at which the Nights was translated to such rapturous European reception, and not by accident. The "home-grown practice of, and belief in, magic was set aside to be replaced by foreign magic – stranger magic, much easier to disown, or otherwise hold in intellectual or political quarantine".

So to the orientalisms of Edward Lane and Richard Burton's English translations, which not only presented the medieval fantastic as a documentary resource for understanding the "unchanging" and now colonially subjected Arab culture of the 19th century, but also projected on to the exotic foreign screen fantasies and fears that would have been taboo in a domestic context. Burton famously re-sexualised the tales with his own copious notes on the east's supposed perversions.

Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, it's reminiscent of Christopher Booker's brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner's chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold.

Part one focuses on the jinn (or genies) – who behave, like the Greek gods, badly, capriciously, illogically – and also on the figure of Solomon, a master of the jinn in his Islamic version, here located in the white wizard tradition somewhere between Gilgamesh, Merlin, Prospero and Gandalf. It includes one of the book's many delightful discoveries: a 14th-century Syrian treatise on the legal status of jinn-human marriages.

The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from "nigromancy".
Warner also examines how the stories "test the border between persons and things" and how severed heads that speak, books that kill and carpets which fly can be linked to the objects of our modern world – not only cinema's animations but also the prosthetic goods of everyday life, the designer labels, gadgets and vehicles by which we project and define our personalities.

Warner moves from considering the derivations and meanings of the word "talisman" to reflect on her own attachment to talismans in her Catholic girlhood (her personal appearances in the book are apt, easing the academic tone) before launching into a fascinating discussion of the talismanic properties of paper money.

There is much on writerly responses to the Nights, including Voltaire's contes, Goethe's "East-West Divan", and (a great chapter) the neglected Gothic novelist and Islamophile William Beckford. The book ends with an examination of flight, cinema, shadow play and Freud. Warner describes the Hampstead cave of wonders that was Freud's final consulting room, "a darkling mirror of the furnishings of his mind", and the iconic analytical couch draped in oriental cushions and rugs. Specifically a Ghashgha'i tribal rug, which leads by glorious digression to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's rug-themed Iranian film Gabbeh, and to a reminder that oriental rugs, the Nights and psychoanalysis are all narrative forms.

Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It's encyclopediac, a book to be savoured in slices, yet (inevitably) it's easy to think of further potential topics – giants, for instance, or dervishes, or magical realism from the Arabs via La Mancha to the Latin American boom. But Warner's conclusion reminds us of her organising principle: the uses of enchantment to open new possibilities of thought and sympathy – the necessity of magic, especially in a self-consciously "rational", secular world.

•Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin."

new review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams

Here is an excerpt of a new review of Paul McMichael Nurse's Nights book Eastern Dreams:  How the Arabian Nights Came to the World (2010).

The review is by Maria Tatar of Harvard.  She writes a lot about the history of the Nights as well as mentioning the book.

Here is the link:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/eastern-dreams-by-paul-mcmichael-nurse/article2123216/

Excerpt:

"The daily review, Tues., Aug. 9

A cross-cultural classic by committee

Maria Tatar

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Aug. 09, 2011 12:01AM EDT

"Voltaire dismissed the Arabian Nights as “senseless stories that mean nothing,” but many other writers have found in the collection a golden well of inspiration. 

Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth read the tales when they were young and treasured them into adulthood. Edgar Allan Poe was so intoxicated by their sorcery that he wrote The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade. O. Henry alluded to them repeatedly in such tales as A Night in New Arabia and A Bird of Bagdad. And Stephen King created in his novel Misery a latter-day Scheherazade in the person of Paul Sheldon, who (re)writes a story to save his life.

In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, the Arabian Nights has become a work so vast that “it is not necessary to have read it.”"

-----------------------------------

"Eastern Dreams brilliantly maps the massively complex, culturally fraught and highly contested history of a collection that exists only in versions of itself. What is referred to collectively as Arabian Nights’ Entertainments has at its core a lost Persian storybook called Hazar Afsanah, which consisted mainly of tales imported from India. Once translated into Arabic, in the eighth or ninth centuries, it received the title Alf Khurafa (A Thousand Stories) but was later referred to as Alf Laila (A Thousand Nights). By the late 12th century, with the addition of stories from Middle Eastern countries, the collection flourished as Alf Laila wa Laila (A Thousand Nights and One Night), becoming the source material for the first Western translation."

--------------------------------

"Eastern Dreams reminds us of the racing energy of story. The collection may be contained by a frame story, but it knows no boundaries. Ameba-like, it moves across cultures and centuries, absorbing new material as it is translated and transculturated. In the West, it has become a repository not only of Eastern tales but also of what Nurse calls “Western thought, perception and popular fiction concerning the Muslim East.” Oxygenated rather than depleted by each new cultural contact, The Thousand and One Nights reminds us that stories are infinitely expansive.

To be sure, there are many elements of imperial appropriation, cultural misunderstanding and racial stereotyping in the story of the collection and its international fortunes. But that is a story different from the one Nurse tells. In his reading, the stories have become a “co-operative product of both East and West – practically the only classic of world literature that has developed through the efforts of two cultures that are sometimes at violent odds with one another.”

Maria Tatar is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University."

 

Review of Andrei Codrescu’s _whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments_ (2011)

From 1001 Nights

Review of Andrei Codrescu’s whatever gets you through the night:  a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments (2011).

Princeton University Press:   http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9392.html

On the first day of class each quarter I tend to tell the students a little about myself.  Most of the students in Revelle (I currently teach at UCSD’s Revelle College Humanities Writing Program) are science majors, from solid academic backgrounds, and many of them are beginning, what I foresee to be, successful and long careers as scientists, engineers and doctors.

As such, and being freshman undergrads for the most part, they often have little understanding of what a humanities graduate student is, or even what the humanities is, or why it might be important to their lives.  So I set myself up against this task each quarter, for both them and to try to answer these questions for myself, and begin by declaring their sections with me to be the most important class they will ever take in their lives…

It’s a kind of cheesy and high and mighty statement to be sure, but it’s one, beneath the self-deprecatory remarks, that I really believe, not because of myself or my personal role in their class, but because of the importance of the material, the importance in its role in understanding their selves. 

I also tell them that I am a Literature major and that the reason I am most interested in Literature, and the (also kind of cheesy and high and mighty) reason why I think it’s the most important thing in the world to study, or read, or write or talk about, is that it is the study of life at its most true, via stories.

Stories are the things that drive us along each day, ping ponging through it all, they are the first things that wake us up, the last things that put us to sleep, and the things that confuse us as dreams during the night.  Without stories you can’t have life, you can’t have any of the secondary, lesser units of humanity: engineering, politics, science, dna, robotics, nuclear physics, mathematics, economics, astrobiology or whatever. 

It’s why I’m drawn to the Nights.

It’s also a very long, but related, introduction to this post, my review of/reflections on Andrei Codrescu’s whatever gets you through the night:  a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments, and why I find it so interesting. 

On page 153 Codrescu writes:

“The fold was the manner in which words were hinged to time in order to make one story attach to one another; we could also call this a drive, the mechanism that propelled words to gain dimensions, first as a story, then as an oft-repeated story traveling the world through storytellers, then as a three-dimensional object performed for an audience, and finally, after having gained sufficient circulation and weight, as flesh.  Flesh was story in all its dimensions.  Yes, Sheherezade discovered that words could be made flesh; storied characters became alive through telling and then stayed alive as long as they were told by others, dying only when they stopped traveling, when their seed dried up and their bodies shrank to nothing.”

Codrescu, incredibly prolific poet, writer, fictionist, professor, thinker, one of the voices on the cool PBS documentary on Coney Island I just happened to view last week & etc., (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Codrescu), gets to the meat of the Nights, and to storytelling itself, in his book. 

I have to admit I wasn’t expecting what this book was when I got it, I was expecting another vaguely Nights based riff on something or other to do with the Middle East, Ali Baba, or some romantic this or that.

What Codrescu does, however, is reinvents the Nights for the 21^st century in a very exciting way.  His book is a “new” “translation” of the Nights, or at least some of its beginning stories, but is also a compendium of Nights related lore, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Greek mythology, Plato’s Symposium, Saddam Hussein, Deleuze & Guatteri, Edward Said, Richard F. Burton, Edward Lane, Andrew Lang, Husain Haddawy, feminism, circumcision, underage brides, the contemporary Middle East, Wikipedia, DNA science, the past, the future, and present, among other things….

At its best the book is a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for the Nights.  It gets into the corners of previously unrevealed, yet nagging, things, and presents them:  What was the sex like for Shahriyar every night with a new bride?  What was it about Scheherazade’s stories that made Shahriyar not kill her?  What was Dinarzad doing in their bed and why wasn’t that weird, or was it??  Who was Scheherazade exactly, and perhaps most importantly, what did she do all day while waiting for her king to return in the evening?  What are those people doing with those pearls (read the book!)??!  How do you spell “Scheherazade” exactly?

All of these questions, and some possible answers, are suggestively brought up throughout the book in an at times playful, at times brutal, at times academic, at times popular, at times digressive, at times self-reflexive, at times factually incorrect, at times suggestively right-on, prose.

His book dives into the center of the Nights, and, like a family therapist, tries to get everyone together at the table to talk about things.  We finally get to see Haddawy and Burton and Galland together, talking to one another, as indeed they truly are, and have been, for decades:

“Richard F. Burton, or Clotho, the “spinner,” began to spin the story of what happened before Sheherezade assumed her storytelling destiny, with another invocation to Allah.  He said, ‘Praise be to Allah, the Compassionating, Lord of Three Worlds…,’ and so on, through all of Allah’s ninety-nine official names plus ones he set himself to inventing, such as ‘Who set up the Firmament without Pillars in its Stead and Who stretched out the Earth even as a Bed…’ until Husain Haddawy, Lachesis, the allotter, interrupted him angrily, exclaiming, ‘Why can’t you just say, ‘God knows and sees best’?’  Galland laughed.  This was not his duel.” (76)

The stories, as they are told here, and really, as they exist in the Nights and its textual identities, come second for the most part.  Codrescu finally, however, situates its storyteller, the fecund Scheherazade (or “Sheherezade”) as the focal point of the point of the Nights, as the Eve character of life, as indeed she should be, and manages somehow to overcome all of the seriousness that so many approach the Nights with, and find a kernel of its true essence within the net that he works in.

His book is peppered with “facts” that don’t seem to add up, just like most of the “facts” surrounding the history of the Nights, and his extensive footnotes rival Burton’s, both in length and in attempts at providing a Burtonesque shock value where footnotes and other appendages overshadow the actual text itself:

At one point, in footnote 46 (pages 78-9), he delves into artistic representations of Christ throughout history, “The wound in the side is sometimes depicted so that its meaty edges allow for a view to the interior of Christ’s body:  the bleeding carnal edges resemble a menstruating vagina or bleeding mouth.”...

The book opens with a quote from the Wikipedia page on the Nights, and a more appropriate form to suggestively have define something as nebulous as the Nights probably doesn’t exist.  The wiki page is rife with errors, political fighting, cultural battles, misunderstood conclusions, and a lot of crazy junk.  A lot like the stories in the Nights.  A lot like life itself.  And it can be changed by anyone willing to edit it, and battled over by hordes of wiki editors and other experts armed with this book or that to quote from. 

I wonder if people who are unfamiliar with the Nights - my own cursory conversational research suggests there are quite a lot - will appreciate the insider’s view of the Nights that Codrescu provides, or that they will find the stories and their constant sidetracked highways particularly compelling or pleasant reading, or that they will know what’s going on with this guy Burton, or Haddawy, or Galland, but that’s not the point of the book, and a reader insisting on a romantic or Middle Eastern infused Nights, or a clear definition of the Nights, will surely be confused, if not provoked.

whatever gets you through the night is a remarkable addition to the unstoppable history of the 1001 Nights, and it ends unfinished in the future, with the still living Scheherazade, and her endless stories, piled on top of each other forward over time by humankind, waiting to be told, to be revealed, to be laughed at, so that we, and Shahriyar, want to live one more day, to hear another story, to never see the end, to understand ourselves and others, to see ourselves stripped onstage, in the spotlight, and living forever.

And here is John Lennon, too:

Visions of the Jinn - Robert Irwin

From 1001 Nights

Robert Irwin has a new Nights book out called Visions of the Jinn that looks to shed some promising light on an under-covered topic.  The book is a bit pricey, 120 pounds, but looks to be a hardback oversized coffee table type book, making its price a bit more reasonable. 

Many thanks to Paul and Professor Z for passing this along.

Here is the Guardian's review, well more like a press release since it's also written by Irwin, with an excerpt pasted below.  It's well worth the read for its overview of the general history of illustrators of the Nights.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/12/arabian-nights-illustration


"Things changed with the publication in 1839-41 of Edward William Lane's The Thousand and One Nights in three volumes. Unlike earlier English translators, Lane, who had spent years in Egypt, translated not from Galland's French, but directly from the Arabic. Lane intended his translation to have an improving, didactic purpose and he seems to have thought of it as a kind of supplement to his pioneering work of ethnography, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He thought that the stories of the Nights could serve as an introduction to everyday life in the Middle East. (Never mind about the flying horse, the jinn, the Roc, the magic lamp and the Old Man of the Sea.) His copious endnotes furthered his didactic aim and so did the illustrations. William Harvey, a pupil of Thomas Bewick and one of Britain's leading engravers, did the boxwood engravings, but Lane stood at his shoulder, checking the look of things and providing previously published engravings of Egyptian and Moorish architecture for him to copy. In general, the purpose of the pictures was not to stimulate the imagination or supplement the storyline, but to introduce the British reader to the authentic look of the Arab world. Just occasionally Harvey was licensed to use his imagination, as with his marvellous depiction of the giant jinni in "The Story of the City of Brass", or the battle of magical transformations in "The Story of the Second Dervish".

Dalziel's Illustrated Arabian Nights Entertainments, published in 1865, was the most spectacular illustrated edition to be published in the Victorian age. A number of famous artists were commissioned to produce pictures for it, including John Tenniel, John Everett Millais and George Pinwell. But Arthur Boyd Houghton, a less well-known illustrator, produced the most compelling and atmospheric images – masterpieces of Victorian book illustration. Although his pictures have an authentic oriental look, the orient they conjure up owes more to India than the Arab world, for Houghton had spent his childhood in India and had relatives in the Indian army.

Though selections of the Nights whose texts were designed to be read by children had been published from the late 18th century onwards, little thought had been given to what sort of illustrations might appeal to children. Walter Crane (1845-1915) was one of the first to illustrate stories from the Nights in colour and also one of the first to consider the visual tastes of children: "Children, like ancient Egyptians, appear to see things in profile, and like definite statements in design. They prefer well-designed forms and bright frank colour. They don't want to bother with three dimensions. They can accept symbolic representations. They themselves employ drawing . . . as a kind of picture writing and eagerly follow a pictured story." Crane did not merely illustrate books; he designed them in such a way that there would be a perfect match between text and image. His Aladdin's Picture Book (1876) is ravishing and, since Aladdin's story is, however notionally, set in China, he drew on Chinese and Japanese imagery.

Lane's translation of the Nights, while certainly scholarly, had been excessively prudish, as Lane excised stories and incidents with erotic content. When Richard Burton produced his translation from the Arabic in 10 volumes with six supplementary volumes (1885-8), he went to the opposite extreme and not only kept the sex scenes in but exaggerated them, and he produced extensive notes on such matters as homosexuality, bestiality and castration. The first edition of Burton's translation, which was published for subscribers only so as to lessen the danger of being prosecuted for obscenity, had no pictures, but soon after his death in 1890, a young friend and devoted admirer of Burton, Albert Letchford, produced 70 paintings which served as the basis for the illustrations in a new edition of Burton's translation that was published in 1897. Letchford had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter and he had spent time in Egypt. While hardly a great artist, he did share Burton's taste for the erotic and so nudes feature frequently in the illustrations. Moreover, he had a taste for the fantastic and some of his demons and temples are very weird indeed. He was shy and no businessman and consequently he was usually poorly paid. While still a young man, he contracted a disease in Egypt from which he later died in England.

These days adult fiction is rarely illustrated, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it was normal, and novels by Trollope, Surtees, Dickens and other much less well-known writers carried pictures. But towards the end of the 19th century, for reasons which are not clear, adult novels were no longer illustrated as a matter of course and illustrators found themselves restricted to working mostly on children's books. In the opening decade of the 20th century, gift books aimed at children became fashionable. They were expensively illustrated (and referred to by the historian of children's literature, Brian Alderson, as "cocoa-table books"). The colour plates on shiny paper were usually covered by protective sheets of tissue paper."

"This is not your Disney's Aladdin."

Thanks to Paul for passing along this article on the upcoming stage production of the Nights at the Toronto arts festival "Luminato" this summer.

The article outlines the project, spearheaded by UK based director Tim Supple, which presents a cast of 25 culled from Supple's travels throughout the Middle East.  The play promises "adult" versions of the Nights.

Here's the link to the article in its entirety, a clip has been pasted below:  http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/This+Disney+Aladdin/4123245/story.html

Here's the Luminato website:  http://www.luminato.com/

"We're talking about a work that has been multiply abused and misunderstood, adapted and changed to become the thing that we think of as The Arabian Nights," said Tim Supple, the British director who has been commissioned to bring the story to the stage. He joined Price on Monday to unveil Luminato's 2011 theatre and dance program.

"The true thing is something completely different. ... [The stories] are far more brutal, erotic, frank and adult. Somehow in their history they became flipped into versions that were child-friendly."

Supple, the artistic director of the London-based company Dash Arts, is working with Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh to adapt the text. The main story begins with King Shahryar. Burned by an unfaithful wife, he marries a virgin every night and kills her in the morning. His newest queen, Shahrazad, delays her execution by telling the king incredible tales that never end.

Since the spring of 2009, Supple has travelled to Arabicspeaking countries including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen to work with performers.

"We'd work for four, five, six hours at a time with groups of performers, actors, dancers and musicians to deeply understand who they are as artists and so they could understand who I am and trust me," he said.

Supple met hundreds of artists but chose a cast of 25. The production will be performed in two parts in English, Arabic and French with subtitles."

Review of The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights

The Journal of Folklore Research has a new book review up on Muhsin J. al-Musawi's 2009 book The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights.

The review is vast and lengthy and is written by Hasan El-Shamy, Professor at Indiana University and author of the 2006 book A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights, a specialized academic resource of tale types found in the Nights.

I haven't read the entirety of al-Musawi's book but I have it at home from the library.  It seems to be one of the few lengthy treatments of the topic (Islam & the Nights) though it also suffers, I think, from some of the generalizations of most Nights scholarship (ie does not necessarily treat individual variants of the Nights as idiosyncratic pieces of a much larger and looser literature instead relying on the Nights in a very broad sense).

El-Shamy's review can be read in its entirety here:  http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=975

Here is an excerpt:

"The chapters are logically arranged to present a sequence of historical and sociocultural developments as depicted in or inferred from the Nights as literature rather than folklore, written or oral. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 7 address the Islamic Factor: in "Global Times" (25), as "the Unifying [...] Factor" (52), its role in "the Age of Muslim Empire and the Burgeoning of a Text" (106), and in "Scheherazade's Nonverbal Narratives in Religious Contexts" (250), respectively. In this context, "Global Times" signifies fraternity beyond ethnic and similar social distinctions (21). Meanwhile, chapter 5 discusses "Nonreligious Displacements in Popular Tradition," emphasizing the dichotomous patterning between the court and street or the rich and the poor (197), and between the secular and the religious (214, 231, cf. 224 where the fantastic partakes of the religious). Two chapters (4 and 6) are dedicated to the influence the population exerted on the formation of this narrative anthology; they bear the titles "the Role of the Public in The Thousand and One Nights," where the "readers" and their preferences are discussed (145), and "The Public Role in Islamic Narrative Theorizations" (228), respectively. Al-Musawi labels this cultural phenomenon associated with a readership the "urban mind," and points out that it distinguished Baghdad from the eighth to twelfth centuries C.E., and Mamluk Cairo later (6, 8, 22).

It is that "urban mind" and its desire to read 'asmâr (nightly entertainments) and hikâyât (tales) that motivated the movement among some elite to gather and re-write oral traditional folktales that came to be attributed to Sheherazade's oral tale-telling skills. Al-Musawi explains: "The effort to address a reading public is central to the [narrative] art, however, for it manifests both the damage done to the oral tradition... and the desire among some of the literati to dig into the marginalized culture or to refine it through acceptable embeddings and translated framing narratives" (230-231)."

Eastern Dreams review in thestar.com

Here is an excerpt from a recent review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams in The Toronto Star newspaper and website.  It's an ok review, some critique of the academic nature of the language but overall a positive one.  A link to the review follows the snippet and the artwork is linked from the Star as well.

Published On Fri Nov 26 2010

Susan Goldenberg

"Among the interesting points:

 • Why is a book with nowhere near 1,001 stories (less than a third, actually) widely known as The Thousand and One Nights? Nurse explains that in ancient Arabic society, 1,000 “denoted the highest number attainable.” Thus, 1,000 denoted infinity or a never-ending story. As for why 1,001, Muslims considered odd numbers “to be intrinsically worthier” than even figures. “From the classical Muslim perspective, Scheherazade, to make her stories worthy, to imbue them with luck, required an extra night,” Nurse writes.

 • The world’s most famous Arabic storybook, Nurse points out, is actually “a compendium of tales culled from India, Persia, Arabia, Ottoman Turkey and Egypt, probably infused as well with stories from Hebrew, Greek and Roman sources.” For example: The striking similarity between Sinbad’s fight with a carnivorous, one-eyed giant and Odysseus’s battle with the Cyclops Polyphemus in The Odyssey.

 • The popular stories of Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves were not part of the original but picked up from various Arabic sources by Frenchman Antoine Galland, “the man who brought Nights to the West” with his translations in the early 1700s. Galland is responsible for the often used shorthand title Arabian Nights because, as a shrewd marketer, he capitalized on the West’s fascination with the “East,” particularly Arabia.

 • Nights influenced Western literary greats Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. In “The Christmas Tree,” Dickens enthused about the impact on children: “All common things become uncommon and enchanted. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans.” Edgar Allan Poe concocted “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” in which she tells her husband about a land resembling the 19th-century Western world. He goes along with her talking about such inventions as the telegraph and steam power, but is enraged when she describes a woman’s bustle. Regarding it as beyond acceptable boundaries, he orders her execution after all.

 • There are marked similarities between Nights’ Sinbad and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

 • The Arab world is ambivalent about Nights because of its often violent and sexual content, feeling that it gives a bad impression. Still, Nights is popular reading among the inmates at Guantanamo along with another set of fanciful books, Harry Potter.

Susan Goldenberg is a Toronto author and freelance writer."

link to article: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/article/897590--eastern-dreams-how-the-arabian-nights-came-to-the-world

Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse, review

My review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World (2010) published by Penguin/Viking Canada is now online at the Journal of Folklore Research.

You can read the review here: http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=545

Paul Nurse's book has been out for several months now but is limited in its release to primarily Canada, which, given the book's scope and applicability, is too bad. Perhaps future editions will be given a wider distribution. You can, however, buy it from Amazon Canada with your Amazon user ID from the US or anywhere (http://www.amazon.ca/Eastern-Dreams-Paul-Nurse/dp/0670063606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288216198&sr=8-1).

Paul McMichael Nurse's Eastern Dreams - Early Release

From 1001 Nights

Paul McMichael Nurse's excellent and accessible history of the 1001 Nights (Eastern Dreams: How The Arabian Nights Came to the World) is set to be released earlier than expected by its publisher Penguin Canada. The new date is this August 1.

Here is the book's Penguin page:

http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670063604,00.html?EASTERN_DREAMS_Paul_McMichael_Nurse

Looking forward to it!

- M

Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams

From 1001 Nights

I'm honored to be the first to be able to show the upcoming (Penguin Canada/International) book cover for Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World. The cover looks great. Congratulations to Paul and can't wait until the book release. The book will be a historical overview of all of the major events in the history of the 1001 Nights (Galland to Mahdi and beyond) and will be an important addition to the serious academic inquiry on the 1001 Nights.

Scheherazade in England by Muhsin Jassim Ali

Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (1981). By Muhsin Jassim Ali, a mini review.

This book attempts to capture the reception of the Nights in England throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and despite its breadth does a good suggestive job at getting the ball rolling on critical studies surrounding the Nights. It is one of the few books about the influence of the Nights in European literature on a general level and one of the few focusing primarily on the critical reception of the Nights particularly.

The book’s (forgivable) failings include a sort of patchwork design that never seems to congeal underneath one clear and specific thesis. This is due, I suspect, to the book’s attempts at such a broad topic but what needs to be better stated is what the main argument is beyond the general notion that the Nights and their versions had individualistic influences on England and Europe. Also despite stating that his goal was to differentiate between the versions of the Nights and how the various critics responded to them at times it seems like it’s uncertain which version is being talked about.

One of the many positive things about the book its insistence that the different versions of the Nights were both reflective of different historical periods and also had different impacts as well. This is a main feature of my own study, just in its beginning stages really, but I’d like to insist that each manifestation of the Nights, from Mahdi to Disney and beyond, has its own unique set or sets of varying elements that are both suggestive of some notion of the past versions of the Nights but also carry with them their own unique sets of influences which have varied throughout history quite dramatically.

Another good point is that most of the focus of the book is on what critics say about the Nights in the pages of the periodicals and books of the time, a focus on evidence like this certainly points to some revealing and more general understandings of what the Nights was seen as at the time. This should though be done with caution as many studies I’ve seen (and even done!) have glossed over the journals themselves, several journals of the 19th century for example were decidedly pro-Burton because of Burton’s affiliation with those journals (or anti-Burton if it were the case), and of course the critics and editors all had their own agendas as well, which needs to be accounted for in any serious study.

Here are some quotes and points I found interesting:

“Excepting Sheila Shaw’s remarks on the value of Galland’s version for eighteenth-century fiction (Muslim World, XLIX [1959], 232-38; PMLA, XC [Jan. 1975], 62-68), there is virtually nothing written on the necessity of classifying and interpreting the impact of and responses to such various editions as those of Galland, Edward William Lane (1838-1841), John Payne (1882-1884), and Richard Burton (1885-1888). Central to my argument is the premise that these translations or redactions reveal much about contemporary predilections, and must be seen as significant signs of the prevailing literary concerns of the times” (6-7).

“Beyond the emphasis on the Nights as a useful repository of information, there was a growing concern to verify this information by a study of the original manuscripts. Perhaps it was no longer entirely safe to trust the Galland version. Accordingly, by the end of the [18th] century, critics and scholars were insisting that fully accurate translations of the tales be undertaken. No sooner was the authenticity of Galland’s version vindicated than Richard Hole and others called for an erudite, well-annotated and scholarly edition of the Nights” (27) - with note 45: “For a discussion of the authenticity of Galland’s version, see Gentleman’s Magazine, LX-VIII (Sept. 1798), 757; LXIV (1794), 784; and Monthly Review, XXIX (1799), 475” (35).

“Rather than revealing a uniform and consistent appreciation of Scheherazade’s aesthetics, a careful reading of nineteenth-century literary responses will indicate diverse and varying estimates and evaluations that form integral parts of the raging literary controversies of the day. Whereas the reading public as well as romantic critics saw in the very enjoyment of these recognizable beauties the sole pupose [sic] of reading, others, especially mid-Victorian critics, devoted a great deal of their time and energy to the study and analysis of the tales from contemporary perspectives” (74).