Conference: The Syrian-French Connection: Antoine Galland’s and Hanna Diyab’s Arabian Nights Sources

Here's a call for papers for this upcoming conference in Copenhagen, if you are interested in attending contact the organizers below, I'm sure they will try and fit you in even though the deadline has passed. Unfortunately my funds as a grad student are limited otherwise I'd be very excited to try to present something.

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Call for Papers / Appel à communication


Copenhagen 2012: May 31 – June 2

International Conference
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Organization : University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA, Paris)
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris)
Agence Nationale de la Recherche, MSFIMA project
Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (CERMOM, EA 4091– INALCO)
with the support of The Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK)

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The Syrian-French Connection: Antoine Galland’s and Hanna Diyab’s Arabian Nights
Sources, Transmissions and Influences of the First Occidental Corpus of the
Nights


What are the Arabian Nights today? There are several possible answers to this
question. There is no doubt that this piece of literature is the outcome of
medieval Islamic civilization, the richest and most influential in the literary
sphere, in cinema and the arts. It is also in the field of the imaginary a
symbol at an international level. It is perhaps first of all a fruitful
cooperation between several languages, several cultures and several geographic
areas encompassing the Occident as well as the Orient…
The idea of this colloquium is to take as a point of departure the creation that
involved several cultures and to follow how the result was transformed and in
various ways had its impact in several fields of the arts. In the 8th century,
when the book was adapted from middle Persian into Arabic, the result was a new
work that involved both cultures, Persian and Arabic. The focus of the
colloquium is another transformation, when, many centuries later, Arabic and
European cultures interacted in a highly significant manner, i.e. at the
beginning of the 18th century, when a manuscript of the Arabian Nights was
brought from Aleppo to Paris, and a dozen new tales were told by a learned
Syrian, Hanna Diyab, to a French oriental scholar, Antoine Galland, who chose
eight of them and added them to his translation of the Nights. The manuscript
from Aleppo is one of the oldest and most important of the Nights. It was edited
in 1984 (Mahdi, Leiden). The eight new tales have been called the ‘orphan tales’
(Gerhardt, 1963), since they were not included in any of the manuscript versions
of the Nights - a somewhat curious denomination, since there were actually two
fathers, Hanna Diyab, who knew the stories by heart and in his own manner told
them to Galland, who then created his own French adaptations. The volumes
published by Galland thus include tales from the Nights as well as new tales.
These volumes turned out to be a major cultural and literary event that would
have a profound impact on European literature at the time and lasting effects
all the way into contemporary culture. Some of the eight new tales have had a
particularly remarkable fate, Ali Baba has, e.g., after several dozens of
cinematic adaptations (25 versions in Urdu between 1930 and 1980, just to quote
one example), also recently been turned into a movie (Pierre Aknine, 2007). A
similar success does obviously raise a number of questions. Yet Ali Baba is not
the only French-Syrian tale that has been remarkably successful. Aladdin has
similarly sparked a number of adaptations, of particular importance is the
Danish case, where Oehlenschlaeger’s drama-version, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp
(1805), not only is a major classic, the Aladdin-character has moreover been a
point of reference all the way through the 19th century for numerous literary
texts as well as important cultural controversies. Another example: one of the
outstanding works of silent cinema, The Thief of Bagdad (1926), is also based on
one of the Diyab-Galland-tales, i.e. Prince Ahmed, but also on the story about
Aladdin. All of this invites us to ask two essential questions:
1) What was the role of the Syrian community in Paris at the beginning of the
18th century in the transfer of culture from the Orient to the Occident? What
did the orally transferred tales and the manuscripts of the Nights that were
brought from Aleppo to Paris (in particular the so called Galland-manuscript -
number 3609-3611 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) represent?
2) What are the characteristic features of the new tales that were brought to
Antoine Galland by Hanna Diyab? What is their ‘history’, their narrative
organization, their function? What was the cultural influence of the ‘mixed’ or
’hybrid’ tales, like Aladdin or Ali Baba? What is in general the afterlife of
this new material in literature, cinema, and the arts? How can we grasp the
reasons for the immense success of these tales?


This colloquium will also contribute to the preparation of the exhibition on the
Arabian Nights that will take place at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in
November 2012, some of the contributions will be published in the exhibition
catalogue.



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Participation : Those who wish to participate are kindly requested to send an
abstract of no more than 500 words or one A4 page (double-spaced) to Peter
Madsen (pmadsen@hum.ku.dk ) and Aboubakr Chraïbi (aboubakr.chraibi@inalco.fr )
before 2011 December 15.




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Appel à communication


Copenhague 31 mai – 2 juin 2012

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Organisation : University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA, Paris)
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris)
Agence Nationale de la Recherche, projet MSFIMA
Centre de Recherche Moyen-Orient et Méditerranée (CERMOM, EA 4091– INALCO)
avec le soutien du Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK)

Colloque international

La composante franco-syrienne : Les Mille et une nuits d’Antoine Galland et de
Hanna Diyab.
Sources, transmissions et influences du premier corpus occidental des Nuits


Qu’est-ce que les Mille et une nuits aujourd’hui ? Plusieurs réponses sont
possibles. C’est sans doute l’ouvrage de l’islam médiéval, comme civilisation,
le plus riche et le plus influent sur la littérature, le cinéma et les arts.
C’est aussi un symbole, dans l’imaginaire, à l’échelle internationale. C’est
peut-être surtout l’histoire d’une coopération réussie entre plusieurs langues,
plusieurs cultures et plusieurs espaces géographiques, qui englobent Orient et
Occident …

L’objectif de ce colloque est précisément de prendre comme point de départ la
perspective d’une création commune, et de continuer ensuite vers les
transformations successives de l’ouvrage, jusqu’aux modalités de sa diffusion et
de son influence sur les différents arts. Au VIIIe siècle, lorsque le livre a
été adapté du moyen persan en arabe, il en a résulté une création nouvelle,
partagée par les deux cultures, arabe et persane. Pour nous, il s’agit de nous
situer au moment d’un autre passage, lorsque, bien plus tard, les cultures arabe
et européenne vont jouer ensemble un rôle significatif, c’est-à-dire au début du
XVIIIe siècle, avec le transfert d’un manuscrit des Mille et une nuits d’Alep à
Paris, et la transmission d’une douzaine de contes nouveaux par un lettré
syrien, Hanna Diyab, à un orientaliste français, Antoine Galland, qui en
choisira huit et les ajoutera à sa traduction des Mille et une nuits. Le
manuscrit importé d’Alep est l’un des plus anciens et des plus importants des
Nuits. Il a été édité en 1984 (Mahdi, Leyde). Et ces huit contes nouveaux ont
souvent été appelés orphan stories (Gerhardt, 1963), car ils ne se trouvaient
naturellement dans aucune version manuscrite des Nuits, ce qui est en soi assez
plaisant, lorsqu’on sait qu’ils avaient en réalité non pas un mais deux pères :
Hanna Diyab qui les connaissait par cœur et les a racontés à sa manière à
Galland, et celui-ci qui les a adaptés en français. Au total, la traduction de
Galland, qui mêle donc contes des Nuits et contes nouveaux, représente un
événement majeur qui va affecter profondément la littérature européenne de
l’époque et dont les effets se poursuivront jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Parmi les huit
contes ajoutés, certains ont eu en effet un destin particulièrement remarquable.
Par exemple, Ali Baba, après avoir été adapté au cinéma des dizaines de fois (25
versions différentes tournées par exemple en ourdou entre 1930 et 1980), a
encore fait l’objet récemment d’un nouveau film (Pierre Aknine, 2007). Un tel
succès suscite bien entendu de nombreuses questions. Mais Ali Baba n’est pas le
seul conte franco-syrien à être devenu aussi célèbre, Aladdin est une création
du même genre, en particulier au Danemark où la pièce d’Oehlenschlaeger Aladdin
ou la lampe merveilleuse (1805) est un grand classique et où ce personnage a été
tout au long du 19e s. une référence récurrente dans de nombreux textes
littéraires et de nombreux débats savants. L'une des œuvres majeures du cinéma
muet, Le voleur de Bagdad (1926), est basée sur Le prince Ahmed et la Fée Péri
Banou (autre conte de Galland-Diyab), mais aussi sur Aladdin. En somme, ces
observations induisent deux questions essentielles :

1 – Quel était le rôle de la communauté syrienne présente à Paris au début du
XVIIIe siècle dans le passage du savoir d’Orient en Occident ? Que
représentaient alors les contes oraux et les manuscrits des Mille et une nuits
transférés d’Alep à Paris (en particulier le manuscrit de la BnF n° 3609-3611
dit de Galland) ?
2 – Comment peut-on identifier ces contes nouveaux rapportés par Hanna Diyab à
Antoine Galland ? Quelle est leur « histoire », leur composition, leur
fonction ? Comment ces contes « mixtes » ou « hybrides », comme Aladdin et Ali
Baba, ont-ils influencé d’autres ouvrages ? Qu’elle est plus généralement la
postérité dans la littérature, le cinéma et les arts de cette matière nouvelle ?
Comment doit-on comprendre son immense succès ?

Ce colloque servira notamment à préparer l'exposition Mille et une nuits qui
aura lieu à l'Institut du Monde Arabe en novembre 2012 à Paris et certaines
communications seront intégrées au catalogue de l'exposition.

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Participation : Les personnes désireuses de participer sont priées d'envoyer le
titre de leur communication, accompagné d'un abstract (maximum 500 mots ou une
feuille A 4, interligne double), à Aboubakr Chraïbi (aboubakr.chraibi@inalco.fr
) et à Peter Madsen (pmadsen@hum.ku.dk ) avant le 15 décembre 2011.

The Galland Manuscript

The Galland Manuscript

This image is allegedly of the Galland manuscript from the wikipedia page for the Nights.  There is no attribution though so who knows.  It's the most often used image online of the manuscript though.

The often-called “Galland manuscript” is an Arabic language manuscript of the Nights in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris France.  Its call numbers at the library are MSS arabes 3609, 3610 and 3611.  It is the oldest manuscript of the Nights in any language that contains any stories and people have dated it to somewhere around the 15th century AD.  This date is disputed however and some think it is written earlier in the 14th century.

It’s not clear who the author or scribe is (yet! maybe you can find out) or exactly where or when or how this manuscript came into being (besides allegedly being sent from Syria to Galland in 1701).

There are three volumes.

There are 282 “nights” and around 35 stories. 

I've never read about a certain title on this manuscript nor are the stories individually titled (can someone verify or refute this?) yet they are segmented into numbered “nights.” On the picture above however each section clearly says "Alf Layla wa Layla" in Arabic.

These volumes were in Antoine Galland’s personal library and he appeared to use them as the primary (but far from only) source for the beginning volumes of his French translation of the Nights which were titled Mille et une Nuits (1704-1717). (Thanks to JC for the dates of publication).

Galland received the Arabic manuscript volumes in 1701 while in France.  A friend seems to have brought from Syria, but was in France with them when Galland acquired them.

Galland had requested that his colleagues look for the complete or original Nights after he translated a stand-alone version of “Sindbad” (aka “Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad the Porter” or several other related sounding/spelled titles) from Arabic into French that someone told him was a part of a larger body of work (the Nights).

The last story is known generally (though has several different spelling and other title variants) as “The Tale of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur” and does not have an ending.

In 1984 Muhsin Mahdi, a professor at Harvard, published an edited and collated version of this Arabic manuscript (along with a completed version of “Qamar al-Zaman”) in which he attempts to portray the oldest and most authentic Nights as anyone knew them.  His out of print three volume set from Brill consists of the manuscript, several essays in English, several indexes in Arabic including an intensive comparative index and a descriptive chapter of old manuscripts of the Nights and an introduction in Arabic of his theories regarding the various origins of the Nights.  This set is expensive when found but many major university libraries have a copy or have access to one.

In 1990 WW Norton published an English translation by Husain Haddawy of Mahdi’s recension titled The Arabian Nights consisting only of these oldest stories. 

In 2004 Claudia Ott translated this manuscript (using Mahdi’s edition) into German.  It was published in Europe under the title Tausendundeine Nacht.

Muhsin Mahdi writes about the acquisition of the G-Manuscript:

"He must have come across the information about the Nights some time between 25 February and 13 October 1701.  On the first date, he wrote a letter to Pierre-Daniel Huet referring to 'Sindbad':  'I also have another little translation from Arabic, stories just as good as the fairy tales published these last years in such profusion.'  On the second date, he wrote another letter to Huet where he mentions the Nights:  'Three of four days ago,' he says, 'a friend from Aleppo residing in Paris informed me by letter that he has received from his country a book in Arabic I had asked him to get for me.  It is in three volumes, entitled . . . The Thousand Nights.'  Even before seeing the manuscript, he describes the acquisition as 'a collection of stories people recite in the evening in that country [Syria]. . . . I asked this friend to keep it for me until I come to Paris, the cost of purchase and shipping being ten écus.  It will be something with which to amuse myself during the long [winter] nights.'

He traveled from Caen to Paris in December 1701 and took possession of the three-volume Syrian manuscript of the Nights (A) that would be named after him.  He seems to have started almost immediately to translate the work; for, in August 1702, he wrote to Gisbert Cuper:  'I have finished a clean copy of a six-hundred page work. . . . I had started it this year [1702] upon my return to Paris [in December 1701], working on it only after dinner. . . . This other work . . . is entitled The Thousand and One Nights, Arab Tales, Translated into French. . . . A thousand and one Nights!, and I have only finished seventy; this can give you an idea of the length of the entire work.'  By the end of the summer of 1702, therefore, he had finished a clean copy of the first two volumes of his Nuits, covering the first sixty-nine Nights or slightly more than the first volume of his Arabic manuscript.  These were published early in 1704, followed by the next four volumes in 1705.  The first volume contained the dedication to the Marquise d'O and an Avertissement exposing his appreciation of the Nights."

(19-20, Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, Leiden:  EJ Brill, 1995).

Feel free to add related bibliographic info (a short bibliography is listed below) and or other info or corrections in the comments section (or just email me too).  I’ve put only English and one Arabic resource below but I’m certain there are many more I’ve missed in all languages.

Table of Contents

Here is the table of contents as rendered in English by Husain Haddawy:

Prologue:  The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Vizier's Daughter

     The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey

     The Tale of the Merchant and His Wife

The Story of the Merchant and the Demon

     The First Old Man's Tale

     The Second Old Man's Tale

The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon

     The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban

     The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot

     The Tale of the King's Son and the She-Ghoul

     The Tale of the Enchanted King

The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies

     The First Dervish's Tale

     The Second Dervish's Tale

          The Tale of the Envious and the Envied

     The Third Dervish's Tale

     The Tale of the First Lady, the Flogged One

The Story of the Three Apples

     The Story of the Two Viziers, Nur al-Din Ali al-Misri and Badr al-Din Hasan al-Basri

The Story of the Hunchback

     The Christian Broker's Tale:  The Young Man with the Severed Hand and the Girl

     The Steward's Tale:  The Young Man from Baghdad and Lady Zubaida's Maid

     The Jewish Physician's Tale:  The Young Man from Mosul and the Murdered Girl

     The Tailor's Tale:  The Lame Young Man from Baghdad and the Barber

          The Barber's Tale

               The Tale of the First Brother, the Hunchbacked Tailor

               The Tale of the Second Brother, Baqbaqa the Paraplegic

               The Tale of the Third Brother, Faqfaq the Blind

               The Tale of the Fourth Brother, the One-Eyed Butcher

               The Tale of the Fifth Brother, the Cropped of Ears

               The Tale of the Sixth Brother, the Cropped of Lips

The Story of Nur al-Din Ali ibn Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar

The Story of the Slave-Girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Khaqan

The Story of Jullanar of the Sea

The Story of Qamar al-Zaman (missing an ending in the G-manuscript)

Bibliography Specific to the Galland Manuscript:
 

English

Wollamshram's Blog Post on the breakdown of the volumes and contents of Galland's (French) Nights:

http://wollamshram.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/galland%E2%80%99s-mille-et-une-nuit/


See also the relevant sections from the following books:

The Arabian Nights Handbook by Robert Irwin

Eastern Dreams by Paul McMichael Nurse

And the entries “Manuscripts,” “Galland, Antoine,” and “Sindbad the Seaman” in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (volumes one and two) edited by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen.

Reynolds, Dwight F. "A Thousand and One Nights: a history of the text and its reception." Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. Eds. Roger Allen and D. S. Richards. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Grotzfeld, Heinz.  “The Age of the Galland Manuscript of the Nights:  Numismatic Evidence for Dating a Manuscript.”  Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies I:  50-64.  1996-7.

And the following oldies but goodies from Duncan MacDonald:

“The Story of the Fisherman and the Jinni:  Transcribed from Galland’s MS of ‘The Thousand and One Nights.’”  Orientalische Studien:  Th.  Noldeke zum 70.  Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Carl Bezold.  Giessen:  Toepelmann, 357-383.  1906.

“Lost Manuscripts of the ‘Arabian Nights’ and a Projected Edition of that of Galland.”  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society:  219-221.

“A Preliminary Classification of Some Mss. of the Arabian Nights.”  A Volume of Oriental Studies:  Presented to Edward G. Browne on his 60th Birthday.  Eds. Thomas W. Arnold and Reynold A. Nicholson.  Cambridge:  Cambridge UP, 304-321.  1922.

“The Earlier History of the Arabian Nights.”  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 353-397.

“A Bibliographical and Literary Study of the First Appearance of the Arabian Nights in Europe.”  Library Quarterly 2:  387-420.  1932.

In Arabic Muhsin Mahdi has a collection of manuscript descriptions including the Galland manuscript in volume II of The Thousand and One Nights from the Earliest Known Sources.  Leiden:  Brill.  1984.

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).

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Arabian Nights

Here's a great audio interview/synopsis of the history of the Nights from the BBC with Interviewer Melvyn Bragg, Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion and Professors Marina Warner and Gerard van Gelder.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0081kdb

Some text from the page:

"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."

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.

Salman Rushdie on "Fictionality"

Here's a brief lecture/interview with Salman Rushdie from Emory University. Rushdie has used the Nights motif and stories in many of his own works and often speaks about the Nights in his many lectures and readings.

In this case, while he backgrounds the Nights in their fictional/story-in-a-story genre, he also makes a point to reference the Nights' origins. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons but namely because of the number of people who "claim" the Nights as "their" own. Here he draws a definitive line from India to Persia (and then to Arabic, he suggests minorly).

I've heard arguments from all three sides (India, Persia/Iran, "Arabic") and they are typically so nationalistic (these stories are from x, y or z). Not sure what to make of it all but it is an interesting and marked topic when the history of the Nights is brought up.

Here Rushdie is clearly marking his territory and his authority by situating the Nights in his own personal "ethnic" background.

The Meadows of Gold

I just finished doing a prelim research project on Masudi's Meadows of Gold, though I never found where it mentions the 1001 Nights or its predecessors. Does anyone know where that is mentioned?

I wrote a wikipedia page on Meadows also. You can view it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meadows_of_Gold

Just finished reading The Matter of Araby in Medieval England by Dorothee Metlizki. In it she ties together several medieval stories written in Latin or English by Englishmen to several tales found in the 1001 Nights.

The book, (wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_of_Araby_in_Medieval_England), does a good job at tackling some of the issues of story transmission but is also somewhat delinquent because the "truth" of the history of these stories is far too complex to figure out just by saying both of them have flying horses or something.

Arabian Nights Encyclopedia Sale

The two volume Arabian Nights: An Encyclopedia is now on sale half off from the publisher:

>http://www.abc-clio.com/products/overview.aspx?productid=108633

At $92 USD it's a good deal for anyone interested in the Nights.

The entire encyclopedia is also available online for free but only through university library services so you have to either be physically in a University to view it (UC of California works but I'm not sure of others) or you have to be a student with remote access.

Think I'll get the print version to have around the house though.