The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition)
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Muhsin MahdiTranslator: Husain Haddawy
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-05-17
ISBN: 0393331660
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition)
Book Review: How to Keep Your Husband From Murdering You...skip Powys Mather's translation and read this one!
Summary: 5 Stars
Translated directly from the original Syrian manuscript, these nine stories (and their associated sub-stories and sub-sub-stories) are a conglomerate of morals, fables, historical or comical anecdotes and Middle Eastern culture rolled into an ingenious framework. The Queen of a fictitious kingdom cheats on her husband, so the king decides to have her killed. No longer can he trust any woman again, ever, so he asks his Grand Vizier to find a new woman every night whom he will marry, sleep with and then have executed the following morning before she has a chance to cheat on him. The kingdom is practically despoiled of virgin brides except for the vizier's daughters who he is reluctant to give up, but has no choice but to obey his master. Not to worry, says the daughter to the vizier, and after she and the king have thoroughly got down to business, she asks him if he wants to hear a story.
Alas, the story is unfinished by morning, when Shahrazad discretely falls silent. It was so intriguing the king lets her live until he hears the conclusion. Unfortunately for the king, there is no conclusion, one story grows out of another, which grows out of an other; characters in the stories tell their own stories to the other characters and any time there is a break in a story at all, Shahrazad tells him "oh, but this is nothing compared to the tale of the [INSERT STORY NAME], too bad I'll be dead by then and you won't be able to hear it."
271 Nights are accounted for in the entire work. Apparently, 1001 Nights to medieval Arabs simply meant "a damn long time", so there really never were 1,001 actual nights in the Arabian Nights. Unfortunately for this wonderful classic, the Nights has experienced many adventures in previous releases, especially when 19th Century European "translators" adapted it to Eurocentric perceptions of Arabian culture. Some of the stories we normally associate as having come from the Nights--Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sindbad the sailor--are not in this work because they are actually apocryphal stories from the much later (18th Century) Egyptian canon of Arabic tales, rather than the "pure" Syrian manuscript, edited by Muhsin Mahdi, of the more homogeneous stories which reveal to us the acme of 14th Century (and earlier) Middle Eastern culture of the Abbasid Caliphate. If you *do* want to read a translation of several of the key stories from the Egyptian canon considered more apocryphal to the original (but still worth reading), Haddawy has included them in a second volume entitled "Sindbad and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights", also available on amazon.com. After all, as one reviewer of the latter volume put it, these stories have been associated with the Nights for over 300 years...should that count for anything? Haddawy thinks so.
Incidentally, I have a hardcover, four-volume set of the Mardrus-Mathers translation. Dr J.C. Mardrus translated it from Arabic to French in the late 19th century, and E. Powys Mathers from the French translation into English in the 20th. It was based on this much younger Egyptian manuscript, which is a highly contrived hodgepodge clearly betraying the severe decline in high Arabic literature prevalent during the Ottoman period; whereas Haddawy's Syrian-based work (according to himself) shows a much greater homogeneity (and therefore, accuracy) of Islamic culture of the Mamluk era. And it certainly betrays that fact outright. The Mardus-Mathers translation is full of textual anachronisms and Eurocentricities, such as "they wished each other peace" (instead of just saying "Hi") and such-and-such-Allah (instead of just saying "God"). It's also a little harder to read. P.S.: the four volumes in paperback (yes, paperback!) retail for $110, while the more elegant and authentic (if much shorter) Hussain Haddawy edition retails for $17.95. Hmmm...$17.95 and more accurate, versus $110 and sensationally contrived...gee I dunno, I'm having a hard time deciding this one...
Overall, Haddawy's Arabian Nights is a highly recommended, easy to read, and culturally-accurate translation of the Arabic classic. It's lots of fun, even if it does seem like kid's stories to the uninitiated. Trust me, Hussain Haddawy's is not only the much better economic bargain than the European translations, it is also a superb read. Go for the gold and skip the Mathers edition. Haddawy is a genius.
Summary of The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition)
Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed?new deluxe trade paperback editions of the beloved stories.
Husain Haddawy's rapturously received translation of The Arabian Nights is based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. These stories (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories), told by the Princess Shahrazad under the threat of death if she ceases to amuse, first reached the West around 1700. They fired in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables, and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi tales, the stories of The Arabian Nights provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. The present new translation by Husain Haddawy is of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and is considered to be the most authentic. This early version is without the embellishments and additions that appear in later Indian and Egyptian manuscripts, on which all previous English translations were based.Classics Books
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