Great Myths and Legends: The Arabian Nights: Medieval Fantasy and Modern Forgery

well you are all very well-trained we were going to start at 6:05 but there was this sudden hush a minute ago and I've been given the authorization from the back to start a minute early so here's the real stat good evening my name is Steve tinny and I'm deputy director of the Penn Museum as always many thanks to all of you for coming to this evening great wonders lecture and for your support of the museum tonight is the last great lecture of the season but I have some consolation offerings for you so never fear firstly we have our summer nights program starting two weeks tonight when the West Philadelphia Orchestra comes to the museum these weekly events start at five pm and the full list can be found on our website also please note that the summer nights offers free admission to Penn Museum member so there's another reason to become a member if you haven't already and tickets will go on sale in August sorry I'm dumping ahead tickets on sale now I'm anticipating so much next year's that I'm already telling you when tickets are on sale some of you will remember that we did a survey of some possible topics for next year's great series and the two winners were great cities and great beasts of legend now after some careful thought we have decided to hold great cities over to the following year so that we can present that series along with the opening of our new Middle East galleries where cities are key so look forward to that in the meantime next year's greats will be great beasts of legend which is something to console yourselves with I hope over the long summer months and for that tickets will be on sale in August so now I'm back on my own page and finally as always as many of you already know after our speakers presentation there's time for some QA and if you'd like to ask a question we would just request that you please come to the microphone that's in this aisle on my left and your right well your your right and your left so that everybody can hear and now it is my very great pleasure to introduce our speaker dr. Paul Cobb professor of Islamic history in the Department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations or nelq nelq happens to be my own home department and Paul is currently department chair which means I'm especially happy to be able to welcome him to speak to us tonight he's a great chair dr. Cobb is a social and cultural historian of the pre-modern Islamic world whose areas of interest include the history of memory historiography Islamic relations with the West and travel and exploration he is in particular a recognized authority on the history of the medieval Levant and the Crusades in the Islamic context and is the author of numerous books and articles including most recently the extremely well received the race for paradise an Islamic history of the Crusades now you can pick that up on Amazon and it's intended to be accessible to non specialists so maybe for some of you that would be a great piece of summer reading continuing on this theme paul is well known at Penn as an outstanding teacher whose reputation rests in part on the highly successful undergraduate class getting crusaded one of the best titles for a class I've ever come across finally Paul is a great friend and supporter of the Penn Museum who consults periodically on our Islamic collections and is always gracious and enthusiastic when invited to speak on occasion such as this one so I'd like to give him a special thanks for that so then without any further ado and for the last time this season please welcome our speaker for his provocatively entitled talk on the Arabian Nights medieval fantasy and modern forgery how are we thanks very much Steve for that introduction I'm a big fan of the museum so it's a great pleasure to be able to address you all tonight I'd like to begin with a tale once upon a time there was a bar in Central City Philadelphia called the happy rooster one night on a night very like this a local merchant went into the happy rooster and sat at the bar next to a man who seemed both exhausted yet happy a fortunate man enjoying his drink the man's happiness intrigued the merchants because these were days when happiness was in short supply and so she turned to the man and asked him tell me friend how is it that a man such as you comes to be both so happy and yet so weary and so the man turned to her smiled and put down his drink and said you might well ask that my friend even here at the happy rooster where everyone's secrets are known to one another but to answer that question properly it can't be done quickly so it might be best if I tell you a story I would be delighted to hear it she said I'm a scholar by trade he began a historian here in this city and the Penn Museum an institution of international renown and great generosity had invited me to speak on the subject of the 1001 Arabian Nights a request that I readily accepted for who has not heard of this meandering collection of myths and legends of Shahrazad the princessin told stories every night to enthrall the king who had vowed to kill her the moat when morning came of Sinbad the sailor of Aladdin issen Ben of Aladdin of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves but surely the merchant interrupted this book is so well known that really anybody could perform such a service ah yes the historian responded ordering a round of drinks from the bartender at the happy rooster but it happens that I am a scholar of the medieval Islamic world the very context out of which the Knights emerged so I felt it necessary to provide a lecture that was somehow special like the many other lectures my audience will have heard on every first Wednesday throughout the year and so I consulted the works of the ages of the sages ancient manuscripts as well as modern ones over the course of the year I took notes I read I wrote and I swore I would not rest nor take one drink until that lecture was written I wrote and I edited and I started yet again but in the end I wrote some more and I finished I presented the lecture on a night very like this one to an audience of Philadelphia's finest citizens from near and far no one fell asleep as I talked they silenced their telephones and at the end of my lecture they applauded and applauded and applauded they asked intelligent questions and I tried my best to answer them and here my new friend is the lecture that I gave ladies and gentlemen distinguished citizens of this fair city from near and far my task tonight is to tell you something you might not know already about the book of 1,001 nights or the Arabian Nights or the Arabian Nights entertainment as it is sometimes known and I do so as the last installment of a year-long lecture series here at the pen Museum on great myths and legends that has evoked among other things the flood myth Native American hero twins King Midas and the Queen of Sheba that's going to be a tough act to follow but I'll give it my best shot what I'll be doing tonight is taking you on a little tour through a very big book we will in brief be exploring how a collection of medieval Arabic stories became the multi-volume tones we now know as the 1001 nights we will start with medieval ideas and up and end up with modern books and in the middle of it all is philology the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure historical development and relationships of languages and litter precisely the sort of thing to send an audience like you running for the exits and so there ladies and gentlemen is my challenge to make philology sexy and interesting fortunately in this case with this book that is an easy task when we consider the sorts of odd people who are involved in the history of 1001 nights only some of whom you'll meet tonight they include scholars geniuses frauds pornographers necromancer's mystics and fundamentalists your average academic cocktail party really but on to the Knights themselves the Knights comprise 468 taels depending on how you count them stretched over obviously a thousand one Knights first point to remember it's there's not a one-to-one correspondence between tails and Knights for a very important plot point this sprawling collection begins with a framing story a horror story into which all the other knights are subsumed it seems that a certain imaginary Eastern king named Shahriyar discovered that his wife whom he thought faithful was having regular orgies with her slaves in his heartbreak in his jealousy he had them all killed and made a monstrous Val against womankind to us to assuage his pain every day he would marry a virgin from his subject populace deflower her at night and then kill her at dawn as the years passed there were no victims left as they had either fled or had already been killed he demanded that his Vizier the chief minister who had been obliged to serve him in these years of horror solved the problem for him now this Vizier it happens had two daughters one shot as ad had quote read books and histories accounts of past kings and stories of earlier people's in short precisely the sort of stories that appear in the thousand one nights when she learned of her father's predicament she volunteered for the job to save the populace her lands and and from any any further wrath from the King her father eventually gave in and Chavez ad and the King were Wed but not before Shahrazad asked her sister dunia Zed to wait upon her in the Kings bedchamber and to do the following when the king was done having his way with Chavez ad-dunya Zod was instructed to ask her sister if she would recount a story to pass the time since everyone was awake when the time came and dunia Zed asked for a story the king was delighted since seats since he himself was Restless so they all listened to shot azad as she told her tale I have heard a fortunate King dot-dot-dot when Dawn came so captivated was the king by the tail that she told that he kept shuttles out alive so that she could continue the story the next night and so night after night the imaginative and enthralling shot Azad aided by her loving sister spun masterful tales as if her life depended on it as indeed it did 1001 nights later the king was so in love that he had forgotten all about his former woes and retained chef as odd as his queen and so they lived to borrow a phrase from another book happily ever after now chef Azad was also aided in this endeavor by the way she told her stories the single most distinctive quality of the thousand One Nights is that they are famously nested stories tales within tales like Russian dolls in which characters in the tales themselves stop to tell tales and so on and so on thus shot azad attempting to save her life tells the tale of the Hunchback and that includes the story of the tailor and the tailor tells the tale of the barber and the barber has his own story to tell within which are the individual stories of his various unlucky brothers story within story within story a technique the French described as meson a beam the thrust into the abyss Russian dolls Chinese boxes I prefer waves or Eddie's one rarely knows where one begins and ends and all you do is get carried along happy to be afloat and what wonderful things we see when we cascade our way through the thousand one nights the nights are populated by kings and queens Sultan's caliphs princes princesses and visitors but also barbers hunchbacks merchants peasants tinker's tailors soldiers and sailors maybe even historians and barflies there are heroes and villains genies ghouls demons Giants bandits dwarves and fish who can talk even as you fry them up it's true there are comics stories and and tragedies stories about death stories about romance there are heroic epics pieces of wisdom literature devotional tales fables parables and tons of poetry and there is a lot of sex many of the characters in the Knights seem to exist in a permanent state of emotional agitation wasting away from unrequited love aching from forbidden lust boiling over with passion seething with envy or just collapsing together in tumults of delightful laughter there are tales that are entertainment and tales meant to instruct there are tales of virtuous deeds and acts of faith tales of social justice and divine intervention there are reflections on the pettiness of human existence and on the fates of fallen civilizations and there are tales of warning against tricksters and thieves and con men and adulterers and there are celebrations of just rulers wise merchants cunning women and eloquent peasants and finally there are tales of mystery whose meaning we can only shrug at as we float along like this one one of my favorites one night the caliph harun al-rashid of Baghdad ventures out in disguise as he often did to serve tissue serve dishes Lee gage his popularity amongst his subjects he hires a boat to take him on the Tigris River which runs through Baghdad only a little time passes before a torch lit barge approaches and on it Harun sees a man enthroned and dressed like the Caliph himself and waited upon by servants and courtiers what are we to make of this a Calif disguised as one of his subjects discovers that one of his subjects has been disguising himself as the Caliph who is whom are we all really just wearing disguises to what end we don't know we continue floating along now most of us are at least vaguely aware of how books get made usually it is some variant to the following process an author writes a book say on the Crusades sends what is usually called the manuscript even if these days it is technically a typescript to the publishers they usually at least in my experience send it back to the author asking for Corrections and then the author resubmits the revised manuscript and it's and it is printed and bound into what we call a book in the case of medieval books that we read today let's say the travels of Marco Polo there is usually a manuscript written by the medieval author or more usually many copies of that work produced by medieval copyists who might be anonymous they usually are a modern scholar then assembles all these copies together and judges what makes the best and most complete version of the text since there might be slight or sometimes not so slight variation from one medieval manuscript to the next once you get more than one copyist involved this modern scholar is best reading of these medieval manuscripts is then printed up and made available for purchase these days usually only by libraries because they're expensive and that is what we call a scholarly edition which may or may not even ever get around to being translated for the general public that dear audience is decidedly not how a book of the 1001 nights that you might find in a shop today came to be the making of the thousand one nights is in fact a much more murky tale one in which the very notion of a book is thrown into question to say nothing of author or writing or even literature come with me then back into the kitchen to see how the sausages are made to begin with it is important to note here that the central character in this story is one Antoine Gadahn who died in 1715 Galan was a French scholar and Whig enthusiast employed by the King of France to obtain antiquities and manuscripts from the Near East for the royal collections he was also a linguist traveler diplomat and what used to be called an Orientalist and passed himself off as an expert on Near Eastern affairs these days in the english-speaking world one usually still comes across the thousand One Nights through the translations of lane or Burton about who much more in a minute but it is really gallo who can be said to have introduced western audiences to the nights so remember his name will come back to him I'm also happy to talk about what the best current day translations that you might find in a shop today are if you're still interested in this topic by the time we get done but before gaol all the Knights have an equally interesting if patchy history me medieval Arab authors of course knew about the Knights though they did not particularly celebrate the work a 10th century historian and literary man named on the story for example denigrates the currency of silly stories about the kings of old and mentions that they come from tales originally written in ancient Persian Sanskrit and Greek specifically naming a Persian collection called huzzah Afsana which he says was translated into Arabic and which the common people call a thousand nights notice not yet a thousand one he then describes the frame story of Chavez add her sister and the murderous King Shaka yar just as I have to you banana deem a contemporary of Mercedes who was a bibliography and book seller says much the same thing in a remarkable catalog of books he compiled saying that although the Persian has our asana was spread over a thousand nights it only contained less than two hundred stories he says I've seen it in complete form a number of times statement the statement which implies that doing so is a rare thing a unique thing to boast without and adds and it is a truly course book and has no warmth in the telling so we have medieval authors describing something like the thousand one nights we know today but so far no actual copies of the work no manuscripts as the process I described demands now in 1949 nabi abbot a scholar at my alma mater the university of chicago we specialized in early arabic manuscripts and documents discovered that amidst the collection of papyri from egypt that she was working on there were six paper documents and one of these dating from the early ninth century was a special interest since it is a fragment tribe in teri title page of a book called you guessed it a thousand nights and begins as you can no doubt tell and with the frames' story of shot azad and her sister as expected and although it is a rather pitiful scrap it nevertheless provides the earl the clearest and earliest documentary record we have for the existence of the ancestor of the thousand nights that Massoud II and even in a deem those two authors appear to be talking about a hundred years later finally in the early 11th century in the vast treasure trove of documents from Egypt known as the Cairo Genizah we have a notebook entry from a medieval Jewish bookseller of the books he had lent out to various customers and among them was a book called for the first time the book of a thousand and one nights now it's nice that with all this medieval documentary and literary evidence we can string together kind of a pretty clear idea of the works origin a collection of ancient Persian fables and popular tales complete with frame story translated into Arabic by around 800 at the lead at the latest acquiring its new title of a thousand One Nights by let's say the Year 1100 at the latest but all this evidence is mere fluff fragments where does the book we know today is the 1001 nights in all that's marvelous tales come from the answer to that central question is what brings us back finally - Antoine kennel gala as I've mentioned was a scholar and diplomat who spent a good bit of time in the Middle East in the 1670s and 80s where he gained his knowledge of Arabic Persian and Turkish around 1698 Galan translated the stories of Sinbad of the sea the stories we know today usually under the title the seven voyages of Sinbad the sailor which someone had told him were part of a much larger collection of stories which he assumed with a thousand one nights that he had heard about from various medieval and early modern authors now this is where the story jumps the rails for as it happens no early manuscript of the Knights contains the story of Sinbad at all though they are known to belong to a larger cycle of Sinbad stories entirely independent of the Knights a totally separate book but gala included them in his translation of his knights anyway the Sinbad stories only appear in later Arabic manuscripts of the Knights that were in fact influenced by Galan's French translation they came much after and appear to be read translations into Arabic of gallons French it seems them that it was Gallo not Shahrazad or whoever who put Sinbad in the Knights at any rate Galan dutifully who sent out feelers to obtain a manuscript of the Knights said he so that he might translate the work in full what he got was a Syrian manuscript of the Knights now survives in three volumes that may originally have had for when Galan received it now housed in the bibliothèque nationale in Paris the manuscript dates from the late 15th century and is it turns out the oldest substantial manuscript of the Knights in existence but it is in no way complete the current manuscript includes only 35 tales spread over 271 Knights false advertising and here is where Galan faced a dilemma on the one hand everyone would expect a work of a thousand and one nights just like the title promised on the other hand everyone on the other hand ever since the publication of Charl Tahoes tales of Mother Goose in the 1690s which included such staples as Sleeping Beauty Cinderella and Bluebeard European fairy stories and tales of fantasy were all the rage in the vogue --is-- aristocratic Cemil of Paris particularly among the ladies gala is short decided to cash in on this trend with his collection of exotic fantasy tales from the east by any means possible Gallants translation of the 1001 nights was finally published in pieces from 1704 to 1717 to pad out the 271 authentic original nights he had from his Syrian manuscript he added his Sinbad material as I said moreover other manuscripts of the Knights much much later ones contemporary with gala in fact had come into the market in Egypt since he had begun his project and he added many stories from these modern editions modern manuscripts excuse me finally and most controversially he requested stories from a Syrian informant he had met in France not a Muslim storyteller as you might expect but a Maronite Christian interpreter and secretary from Aleppo named Hanna idea of the dozen or so stories gallon gut from the abbé he included seven in his final translation of the Knights based on notes that he had taken during his interview he also took great liberties with what scraps even d.add had told him for example Ganon expanded one story with material from an Arabic diplomatic account India from an entirely different source that he had in his library and generally rewrote the stories diab told him according to his own tastes or rather the tastes of the Parisian elite of his day commenting for example on French manners and customs disguised as comments on the Caleb's court in Baghdad and taking motifs and plot points from genuine tales to make his own confections seem more authentic Galils translation and by this time in my paper I'm using quotes around that word gets even more complicated as some stories for example the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or the tale of Aladdin do not appear in any Arabic source before gallo which raises the very likely possibility that these tales which thanks to Disney are perhaps the most emblematic of all the tales of the Knights were invented by the Frenchman gallo out of whole cloth and to make matters worse Galan's publisher was even more eager to cash in than he was and and so in the down times when Galan was distracted working up a new volume of the translations his publisher inserted new tales in new volumes from an entirely different collection of stories translated from the Turkish by an entirely separate French translator and didn't tell Gunn all about it the final book that resulted was about as far from that original 15th century Syrian manuscript of the Knights as you could come gallons translation then is not a straight rendition of the earliest known manuscript but a sort of Frankenstein monster of borrowed parts from medieval Syrian and Egyptian sources from the Sinbad cycle from the Christian hannity ABS memory and from gallons own feverish imagination but what an influential monster it was it was a sensation almost immediately upon publication gallons French translation was translated into English by London pamphleteers and some subsequently into most major European languages even today many versions of the Knights claim to be independent translations made directly from the Arabic but most are in fact translations of Gamal or at best reworkings from gong-gong with an eye on the original Arabic and some additional material from other sources globally speaking the shadow of Ganon's monster looms large that said I don't want to give the impression that Galan was the only student of the Knights who was involved in some shady business the whole nature of the enterprise and the perceived profits that can be made those were the days encouraged a number of other scholars after Galan's time to make similarly sketchy decisions but first some background about a new development in the world after a gallon gallon as we've seen was was restricted to starting from his Syrian manuscript which you've seen by the 19th century however there existed printed Arabic editions of the nights that scholars could refer to based upon a broader array of newly discovered manuscript sources then Galan ever had for example there were two different editions with some different stories produced in Calcutta over the course of the 19th century generally referred to by scholars as calcutta 1 and calcutta - and although none of these editions could be said to be scholarly in the sense that academics like the de calcutta - is usually considered the more reliable of the two welcome back to Calcutta - a little later another edition was produced in the Cairo suburb of bhulok then there's the Breslau edition produced by the German Arabist Maximilian habit according to habit he received a complete manuscript of the Knights finally sent to him by a Tunisian Jew named Mordecai and the JA havoc habit began translating it into German in 1824 and then in 1825 began publishing a printed edition of the Tunisian manuscript he claimed to have been using this was not the usual order of things translation followed by the addition and perhaps it should have raised some red flags Habash died in 1839 and a student of has completed the addition improving the Arabic he says as he went subsequent scholarship however has shown that guess what the Tunisian manuscript and for that matter more to the Tunisian Jew Mordechai banana jock never really existed what Habash seems to have done is like gonna put together a patchwork collection drawn from all over the place in an attempt to produce a new and improved collection of a thousand one Knights similarly a few manuscripts that were discovered in the 1800's that contained for example the orphan tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba were once thought to have solved the mystery where these tales came from until it was revealed later that they were just elaborate fakes amounting to read translations into Arabic of gallons French as I've said it's as if gallon was this immense black hole was pull no translator could escape this changed thanks to the two best known English translations of the Knights and the liveliest those of Edward Lane published from 1838 to 1841 and Sir Richard Francis Burton published from 1885 to 1887 in the interest of time I'll skip over lanes contribution to this he'll come up in my comments about Burton and we could talk about him in the Q&A if you like he's an interesting fellow but in many ways his successor Burton was the exact opposite of Lane whereas Lane was concise Burton was at 16 volumes a tad verbose this is a photograph I took this morning of a top shelf in my study at home it shows on the left a Ford Duvall Yuma dition of Lane a one-volume bull Erised edition of lane in very small typeface and the first edition in 16 volumes of of Burton which doesn't quite fit the frame and whereas Lane laboured hard to make his work family-friendly and those palatable to the widest possible audience Burton accentuated the erotic elements of nights to such a degree that the work was available at first only to a small society of discrete and what imagines slightly creepy gentleman subscribers Burton is one of the most colorful and rather appalling characters in the history of the study the middle east he was a soldier and a British Imperial civil servant with a gift for languages he fancied himself a scholar and archaeologist and was one of the Victorian ages great explorers he traveled throughout the Middle East South Asia and East Africa he is best known for two exploits one being one of the co-directors covers of the source of the Nile River and two for disguising himself as a Muslim and going on pilgrimage to Mecca after each of his travels he never failed to write thrilling and self Angra a grand izing memoirs Burton knew his terrain well and had a gift for languages but he was also a racist a misogynist and an imperialist at a time when racists and imperialists were striving to outdo one another and he was one of the loudest voices in the english-speaking world to spread the vicious idea that the Middle East was part of some exotic erotic and easily exploitable East he is also a mystic a spy a diplomat and an infamous pornographer almost everything he translated the Sanskrit Kama Sutra for example was intended as a vehicle to expose his Victorian audiences to the kinky sexual practices of other cultures and above all to flash about is their addition I've mentioned some of the printed editions of the Arabic text of the nights that were in circulation in the 19th century Calcutta one Calcutta two block and that is another point of difference between Lane and Burton Lane who was an Egypt a file was quite happy to use the latest edition of his day in the 1830s since it was published in the Cairo suburb of bhulok and he was resident in Cairo at the time and anyway for him the nights were quintessentially an Egyptian text he mind the rate the thousand one nights for evidence two weeks to explain the manners and customs of the Egyptians in the famous book despite the fact that they were not contemporary with the 19th century in any way for Burton um however later in the Victorian period the latest addition for him was the Calcutta 2 Edition which also had a vague stamp of academic approval as it had been prepared by a group of scholars and the final text had been vaguely looked over and approved by the Asiatic Society of Bengal it was also the most expansive of all the versions out there drawing as it did upon material from nearly every previous collection of the tales known for Burton then translating the Calcutta 2 edition of the Knights would allow him to prove his peers to his peers that he was not simply an explorer with an immoral interest in eastern erotica but a genuine scholar and it also provided the widest campus possible to display his ego when finally published in 1888 it was by any standard and achievement the hardly adored it didn't help that Burton laced his Victorian English translation with a blisteringly global vocabulary that made it sound as one critic put it by turns pompous slangy and tortured moreover the thing weighed in at sixteen volumes as we've seen much of it consisting not a chef Jacques adds tales but rather his own extensive annotations some of them small monographs in their own right such as his infamous terminal essay on sodomy or what I would like to call his micro digressions on etymology Muslim ritual purity laws and historical typography of Baghdad were utterly random and irrelevant to sides such as a sudden digression on his experience being bitten by a dog in Alexandria on the shape of women's breasts or on seances he attended it was also Burton who put forth the idea which he probably made up that it was traditionally believed that no one can read the entirety of the Arabian Nights without dying with Burton's 1001 night and I know that you happy with read one read it all the way through so glad to see you here tonight hey looking very well keep it up with Burton's 1001 night sometimes then it's hard to tell where the storytelling begins and the annotations end but maybe that is the key for NSN always has been storytelling that has defined the 1001 nights so immense and popular has this collection been to modern western audiences since get all that is easy to it as easy to forget that there were many more such collections and many more such stories being told in the ancient and medieval Middle East never fear I won't go into the details of the genre of entertaining tales in the ancient medieval Middle East here but it's important to understand that if the thousand one Knights represent an impressive number of popular stories from the pre-modern Middle East it is nonetheless just a drop in the bucket of such tales that were told and retold in greek latin sanskrit persian Syriac ancient egyptian sumerian and so on we only have to remember you subs fables with their instructive morals and talking animals to remember that the thousand one nights is just one out of many such collections and some of these tales even make their way into the night there are a couple of hints of Homer and Ovid in the nights but by large it is the story cycles of ancient Persia and India that informed the already considerable originality of the people who added to the 1001 nights 1001 nights over the centuries indeed we mustn't forget the Arabic neighbors of close and close cousins of the Nights since they tend to get lost in the shuffle works like the early Islamic animal fables known in Arabic as kalila and dim na a work of great popularity with pre-modern Arab audiences probably more so than the Knights itself though it was a ultimately Sanskrit origin it quickly became a favorite of translators and made its debut in Europe by 1100 at the latest so it's an early the cellar under the title the fables of bid pie suspiciously one of Europe's many translators of this text was our old friend Antoine get on or take the early anonymous collection known as heck ayatul ijebu well akbar ala riba tales of the marvelous and accounts of the strange which i'm happy to say has recently been translated and published by penguin you can pick it up in a book store or the countless stories which like Sherlock Holmes has lost cases we only know by their title dropped casually by authors that do nothing for us now except tantalize us like the foot bone of the giant lizard the lover of the cow and so on I'm happy to say that the pen museum even has a piece of a collection of a few such tales from the 11th century they are humorous and funny tales down in storage but some are so dirty that the very proper italian scholar who cataloged them and referred to them as facetious stories thought it best to render them into latin the work remains unedited and unidentified and what I need is a student studying further they'll they'll you know I have to have the right kind of vocabulary I've only scratched the surface here but I think you might be able to see where I'm headed the fact is there is no real book of 1,001 nights there is of course no one author no one authentic version of the book just various snapshots usually capturing the nights development at some given point in time which can all claim to be the nights and that is perhaps as it should be for that is how good storytelling historically anyway works nowadays when storytelling happens it usually involves one person reading aloud to another from a book but then the medieval Middle East and elsewhere in the world storytelling was more akin to stand-up or giving a museum lecture it's hard to tell them apart sometimes storytellers might have a core of tales and notes to read from such as the ones I've described tonight but on to this they might add any number of tales known to them from other sources or simply improvise from their own magnificent imaginations or riff off of well-worn story patterns and motifs storytelling these days is increasingly like playing back recorded music the nights though were like live jazz storytelling it is often pointed out as a fundamentally and exclusively human ability and the 1,001 nights are as fine a representative of this most human of endeavors as you could wish not all the tales are great either in style or in their message and this can account for why many of its modern readers Arab and non-arab are sometimes a little embarrassed by it and frustrated by what seems like a prudent obsession over the book on the part of Western audiences given the rich literary heritage of the Arab world outside the Nights and the vibrant contemporary literary scene in the Arab world today but I still think it is worth risking death and reading through all of the thousand one nights there you'll find lessons to take home with you magic to dazzle you ethical models to follow an evil human and monstrous to frighten you you'll find relatable male and female characters good rewarded meanness punished and many many mysteries to ponder at that the historian told his friend at the bar of the happy mister I stood back from the podium and addressing Mahdi and said I thank you all for your kind attention there are many more things to say about the thousand one Knights but I'm afraid I have to end it now bori tis late and dawn is coming and someone is waiting to join me for a drink at this the merchant smiled and understood why the historian was so tired after preparing such a lecture and yet so happy after having delivered it before such a wonderful and forgiving audience and so she took her turn to buy a round of drinks and began to tell the historian her story but that's for another I'm very happy to take questions as Steve said earlier there's a standing microphone here in the your right hand side aisle and some lights great if you have a particularly you know voice that carries I'm eager to I'm happy to take it unmagnified - yes okay okay for the sake of the reporting that's happening all all paraphrase the question so that you we can all hear it the question was a return to a point a suggestion I made in my talk which is what are some good translations that are out there now in English so there are two really good ones I mean if you have you know if you're adventurous and you want to you know you like archaic English have a look at Burton it's hilarious but um the Calcutta to the manuscript excuse me the Edition that he that Burton translated the most complete and extensive collection of the of the Nights has been retranslated by a very great artist named Malcolm Lyons and it's been published and his wife Ursula who helped it's been published by Penguin Classics in three stout volumes and I highly recommend that that and there are three very nice essays at the beginning of each volume and so that's that's that's going to be our new Burton I think we'll have that for many generations so Burton was the version of the Knights that every gentleman you know creepy or otherwise had in their ad in their private library and I think this penguin three volume one would be he'll be the one there is however more interesting Lee you remember get the gallons manuscript the original Syrian one the authentic core the oldest surviving manuscript that was never that never made it into a scholarly edition no one ever bothered to actually produce a printed edition that you could check out of the library until 1980 when a very great Arab scholar named Martin Mackay of Harvard University produced a scholarly edition and that was finally translated into English by a rather wonderful literary figure named Hussein head dohui and that's available from norton press the last name there is hadd awy for those of you taking notes that's so he's produced a complete translation of those 35-ish stories in one volume and there's even a follow G that excerpts bits of that into an even smaller and more compact form that Norton put out which is good for teaching you can take it to the beach take it down to shore any other questions all righty great may I recommend may I recommend the pen book center located on Sansom and 34th thank you or failing not the happy rooster see you there

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Keywords: magic, fantasy, arabia, middle east, myths, legends

Id: Hz0VviPR07U

Length: 48min 38sec (2918 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

From/r/LDQ

The Arabian Nights is probably the medieval Arabic book best known in the west, full of ripping yarns and vivid characters that have influenced film, music, and literature for centuries. But did you know that some of its most cherished tales, such as those of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Sindbad, and even Aladdin, were added by modern European translators? Dr. Cobb offers a walkthrough of the fascinating history of this rambling book from its origins in ancient Middle Eastern myths to its status as European bestseller during the Enlightenment.