A thousand and one delights

From the domesticated drawings of the 18th century to Disney animation, the story of illustrated versions of the Arabian Nights is one of the slow triumph of the imagination A lady on a divan telling stories to a turbaned sultan; men with scimitars running down a dark and narrow street; a jinni issuing like a vast dark cloud from a flask; a prince in a pavilion guarded by lions; a veiled lady at the entrance to a shop; a young man on a flying carpet circling over a domed palace; a man clinging to driftwood in a stormy sea . . . These days, thanks to illustrated children’s books, comics, films and video games, people are much more likely to have a sense of what the world of The Arabian Nights should look like than to have actual knowledge of the stories themselves. It was not always so. The first edition of The Arabian Nights had no pictures, and even when, in the late 18th century, fully illustrated editions began to be published, their illustrations gave little sense of the exotic medieval Arab environment in which the stories were set. Only from the 19th century onwards did some illustrators try to get Arab buildings and costumes right. In 1701 the orientalist and antiquarian Antoine Galland published a translation from Arabic into French of “The Voyages of Sindbad”. The translation was well received and since Galland had been told that “The Voyages of Sindbad” were part of a much larger collection of stories known as Alf Layla wa Layla , or “The Thousand and One Nights”, he located a three or four-volume manuscript of this work and set about translating it. His translation, published in 12 volumes in the years 1704-17 was a raging success. His Les mille et une nuit was not received as a collection of children’s stories (nor should it be). On the contrary, it was read and enthused over by courtiers and intellectuals in Versailles and Paris, and Versailles and Paris set the fashions for the rest of Europe. So translations of Galland into English, Italian, Russian and other languages soon followed. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Addison, Johnson and Goethe were among the 18th-century writers whose work was heavily influenced by the Nights . The Nights had a crucial role in shaping the origins and evolution not just of fantasy literature, but also of the realistic novel. Copyright was not policed in the 18th century and books that were successful were almost invariably reissued in pirate editions. Between 1714 and 1730 a series of pirate editions of Galland’s translation were printed in the Hague. Each of the 12 volumes had a frontispiece by David Coster, a Dutch artist. Since Coster had no notion of the medieval Islamic world as something alien and strange, his engravings depicted the characters in the stories in European dress. King Shahriyar looks very comfortable in his western-style four-poster bed as he sits up listening to stories told by Sheherazade. The only concession to the exotic is that he has a loosely tied turban as an item of nightwear. The relatives of Gulanar the Mermaid are welcomed into what looks like a French palace and the genie summoned up by Aladdin is merely a very large man in a tattered robe. Artists who came after Coster in the 18th century shared his vagueness about the exotic. The preferred strategy was to dress the men in vaguely classical togas and plonk turbans on their heads, while the women were given dresses that would not have been out of place in Versailles. In Charles-Joseph de Mayer’s collection of fairy tales, the engraver Pierre-Clément Marillier portrayed King Shahriyar and his brother Shahzaman in bosky French countryside, while his version of the encounter of the third dervish with the 40 young women looks like nothing so much as a scene from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress . Robert Smirke’s histrionic scenes from the Nights have the appearance of being based on pantomime performances. 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

Posted by on March 11, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.