[HN Gopher] Arabian Nights
___________________________________________________________________
Arabian Nights
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-04-01 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pgdp.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pgdp.net)
| riffraff wrote:
| > Many of the well-known modern stories, like that of Aladdin,
| have the more prurient elements removed or are stories that were
| added much later.
|
| I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version
| and can share what this is about?
|
| I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own
| language also has the same censoring.
| gostsamo wrote:
| I've read part of the stories some time ago. What made me the
| most impression was how much the heroes of the stories spent in
| thinking and talking about cuckolding. Not sure if this is what
| the author means though.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Aladdin isn't an example of a story with the prurient elements
| removed, it's an example of a story that was added much later.
| Aladdin is not present in Middle Eastern versions of the
| Arabian Nights at all; it first appears in a book written by a
| French guy.
| riffraff wrote:
| oh, I see, thanks.
| devindotcom wrote:
| If you read the story "The Porter and the Three Ladies of
| Baghdad" (I think... this is from memory) the women (the
| escalating beauty of whom as the porter meets each is
| incredibly phrased by Burton) eventually are fooling around
| with the porter and they are pointing to each other's crotches
| and joking about different names: "thy cleft, thy slit, thy
| coynte, thy clitoris" and the women suggest "the basil of the
| bridges" (I confess myself mystified) and "the husked sesame
| seed" (husked due to female circumcision).
|
| Other translations are muuuuuch more tame. Abridged versions
| probably skip it entirely. When I first read the unexpurgated
| Burton my mind was blown on the regular.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Wait until you read some Abu Nuwas
| Iv wrote:
| I remember reading a story where sailors discovered an island
| where plant-women were growing. They were friendly and gave
| fruits growing on them to the sailors, but the few who tried to
| "embrace" them got absorbed. Yep, there was some vore hentai
| connoisseurs at the time.
| adrian_b wrote:
| In the original there were frequent occurrences of the names of
| various anatomical parts or of various acts that are considered
| taboo now. Also there were many explicit descriptions of love
| scenes, even if a poetic language was used for them.
|
| Of the old translations, only the French translation of Mardrus
| and the uncensored variant of Burton were somewhat close to the
| original text. Even the "uncensored" variant of Burton was more
| distant from the original text than the Mardrus translation.
|
| There exists a much more recent French translation which is
| said to be more faithful to the original text than any of the
| previous translations (while the Mardrus translation was not
| censored, there were many places where it was not a word-by-
| word translation).
|
| I do not remember precisely, because I have read it a long time
| ago, but I believe that the new good French translation is that
| by Andre Miquel et al.; various editions of that may be found
| at Amazon. I am not aware of any decent English translation.
|
| When I was very young, I have read a translation into my
| language of the French translation of Mardrus. The first few
| volumes matched the French text, so they were quite explicit.
| Then it seems that someone noticed that and ordered the
| translators to remove any explicit parts, so the following
| volumes were obviously censored, lacking many words or entire
| scenes from the French Mardrus text.
| riffraff wrote:
| interesting, thanks.
| gh-throw wrote:
| Mardrus got translated into English by Mathers. It's the
| edition I've read (partially--my copy is in four very fat
| volumes, so it's _a lot_ of reading). Can confirm that it
| includes tons of stuff I 'd expect to be missing from any
| kind of Bowdlerized or censored version. Not sure I'd
| recommend it for a modern reader in English given the other
| options available, these days.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Powys_Mathers
| [deleted]
| krtkush wrote:
| TIL Project Gutenberg is blocked in Germany.
| skytreader wrote:
| Technically, Project Gutenberg _blocks_ Germany. Anyway this
| also surprised me last year! Protip: Main PG is blocking DE IPs
| but mirrors aren 't. Unfortunately, [mirrors](https://www.reddi
| t.com/r/books/comments/81t0ad/project_guten...) don't have the
| convenient search infra, just the texts. If you can get the ID
| somehow, then you can navigate to the text in question.
|
| Maybe I missed a more convenient mirror. In which case I'd be
| really glad for links to convenient mirrors.
| emanueldima wrote:
| https://www.gitenberg.org
| skytreader wrote:
| Cooool! Exactly what I'm looking for. Actually think I've
| heard of this before (I follow one of the GH contributors)
| but realized, just now, it's _the_ mirror I am looking for.
| Thanks!
| SamBam wrote:
| Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg would be
| displeased.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I live in a place governed by the military, and they like to
| block things. But I have no idea why a country like Germany
| would do that.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Because of Mein Kampf perhaps? Then again it's on Amazon, do
| they block Amazon?
| Vespasian wrote:
| No, that book has been in the public domain in Germany
| since 2015. Since then several annotated editions have been
| published.
|
| IANAL, but it might be problematic to publish a modern
| version without any critical commentary as this could be
| interpreted as "glorifying naziism and the holocaust in
| public" which is a crime in Germany (SS 130 StGB [1]).
|
| Before 2015 it was not banned in a political sense. The
| state of Bavaria claimed Hitlers copyright after the war
| and did not grant any rights to republish it. Ownership or
| sale of historical editions was always possible.
|
| The project Gutenberg block is by them because they lost a
| copyright court case in 2018 (which was about ~20 books by
| 3 authors). See the other comment with a detailed link.
| They were not required to deny access to the complete site
| but only to these specific works.
|
| [1]https://www.gesetze-im-
| internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
| bloak wrote:
| This might have something to do with it:
|
| https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
|
| (Thomas Mann and Alfred Doblin are out of copyright in the
| USA, but not in Germany, but obviously there's more to it
| than that because different countries having different
| copyright durations is a very normal situation.)
| ernesth wrote:
| There is nothing more to it: Project Gutenberg distributed
| books in Germany that are not in the Public Domain there.
| The rights holder sued. PG was condemned to stop
| distributing those books in Germany. PG complied by
| blocking the whole site in Germany.
|
| No country has the same copyright law as USA. In those
| other countries, Project Gutenberg has not yet been sued.
| (Edit: and probably in some countries, people downloading
| from PG would be the only one in illegality, not PG)
|
| For example Alfred Doblin's and Thomas Mann's books are not
| in the public domain in all of Europe, in most of South
| America, or in Australia.
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| Virtually impossible to find them all in one go, have to drill
| down 17 times!!! No PDFs. What a _horrible_ user interface!!!
| open-source-ux wrote:
| For more information on the _The One Thousand and One Nights_ ,
| the following BBC radio programme (broadcast just last week)
| discusses the origins of the stories, the translations, and their
| enduring popularity. It's a very stimulating discussion. Download
| as a MP3 if you want to listen offline:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszjwy
|
| Programme description from the above page:
|
| > The One Thousand and One Nights are a collection of fantastical
| stories of flying carpets, magic and genies whose ancient origins
| go back to the 7th century or earlier. The tales are told by
| Scheherazade who uses the power of storytelling night after night
| to stop her Sultan husband from beheading her.
|
| > These highly influential stories were brought to the West in
| the 18th century, when more tales like Aladdin and Ali Baba were
| said to have been added by the French translator, and it has
| continued to evolve over the centuries. Rajan Datar and guests
| explore why these stories became so popular around the world and
| what they mean to us today.
|
| > Joining Rajan is Wen Chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic at SOAS
| in London; Dr Sandra Naddaff, senior lecturer in Comparative
| Literature at Harvard University; and the Iranian TV producer
| Shabnam Rezaei.
| glandium wrote:
| This being HN, for some reason, I was expecting the article to be
| about the pinball.
| qsort wrote:
| Or at least the Magic: the Gathering set.
| reportgunner wrote:
| I thought it would be about the Magic: the Gathering set.
| [deleted]
| Ambolia wrote:
| Unfortunately the format of most ebooks at Project Gutenberg is
| usually really bad. Usable on computer screen, but unusable on
| eBook readers.
|
| Just checked the "mobi" version of the volume 1 from this link,
| and it looks like all paragraphs are just walls of texts with no
| paragraphs and the footnotes don't really work unless you scroll
| manually. I guess it's better than nothing, but not very
| comfortable to read.
|
| Usually it's even worse with text from the margins, header than
| footer getting mixed with the normal text.
|
| Does anybody know if there is a website or project where one
| could find "curated" or properly formatted books with expired
| Copyright? Maybe one where other people can collaborate?
| timonoko wrote:
| These are sole issues of the reader software, unless of course
| your Ebook is some kind of closed-down kindle-type device.
| Coolreader and Koreader are examples of versatile and
| programmable softwares, which are available on Android and
| Linux-based E-ink readers.
| nbonaparte wrote:
| Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org) is what you're
| looking for.
| altgans wrote:
| Is there an archive of the whole collection? My internet is
| unreliable and I usually try to get everything offline.
| CAT0 wrote:
| The Internet need something like this for all languages, not
| only english.
| robin_reala wrote:
| This question comes up a lot. The source to our production
| pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest
| part of why we produce good work is that we have a high
| quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part
| is very specific to English, and that's the difficult part
| to replicate for other languages.
|
| [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/
|
| [2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/
| depressedpanda wrote:
| Not that I doubt you, but what about the manual is very
| specific to English and wouldn't work for other
| languages?
| toast0 wrote:
| From a brief look, the typography section of the manual
| is definitely language specific. Different written
| languages often have a much different typographic
| convention; depending on the language, different
| countries using it may have major or minor differences in
| conventions. And of course, there are different
| interpretations of the convention; they've included by
| reference a specific version of the Chicago Manual of
| Style. For another language, you'd need to at least need
| a different exhaustive manual to reference, as well as
| changing or reviewing the specific guidelines.
|
| That's work that really needs to be done by a fluent,
| literate user of that language, hopefully with background
| in that language's literature and experience in
| copyediting, and familiarity with publishing. It's not
| really work you can demand of someone who did a good job
| (I assume) of it in English; they won't do a good job of
| it in another language without deep experience in that
| language. Developing and publishing the works in the
| language also needs to be done by people fluent in the
| language.
|
| The example of the English version can be a guide for
| other languages, and there's of course room for
| collaboration on software between languages, but asking
| the English language project to expand to other languages
| is unlikely to get good results unless the developers
| also are fluent in those languages.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I'm curious, why xhtml instead of LaTeX?
| robin_reala wrote:
| When we edit, we're literally building a standard ePub3
| file, which natively uses XHTML as its document
| representation. The pipeline then produces alternative
| versions of the same file. We could work in LaTeX, but it
| would reduce our contributor count (more people know
| XHTML than LaTeX) and we'd need to transform it anyway,
| with the potential of introducing new bugs.
| eduardo_f wrote:
| We're working on a fork of Standard Ebooks focusing on
| Spanish.
|
| We're actually looking for Spanish-speaking collaborators:
|
| https://www.libro.org/
| pps wrote:
| In Poland we have 5649 ebooks done so far by
| https://wolnelektury.pl/
| _hzw wrote:
| For Japanese, we have Aozora Bunko [1]
|
| [1] https://www.aozora.gr.jp/
| [deleted]
| robin_reala wrote:
| _Arabian Nights_ has been on my list to produce for SE for a
| couple of years now, but its sheer size is imposing. I'll
| probably do it in the not too distant future though.
| developer92 wrote:
| Perhaps a collaboration?
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Did you produce the Edgar Allan Poe Short Fiction
| collection? I'm reading it right now, it's great! And huge!
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-
| fict...
| robin_reala wrote:
| Yep! Glad you're enjoying it. Here are my share of the SE
| productions: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/
|
| Biggest so far (and biggest on SE at 1.2m words) has been
| Samuel Pepys' Diary:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
| dbrgn wrote:
| Whoa, SE looks incredible. Thanks for your work on that!
|
| Are there any plans to support non-English ebooks as
| well?
|
| Edit: Regarding non-English ebooks, I was thinking about
| books like "Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst"
| (Birdflight As The Basis Of Aviation) by Otto Lilienthal
| (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54565). It's a
| fantastic book with nice hand-drawn illustrations, and it
| would deserve being presented/typeset in a beautiful way.
| Currently available ebooks are mostly bad.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Sorry, no. Like I said in another comment, a large part
| of what makes SE good is our manual of style, which is
| really just applicable to English works. If you want to
| use the toolchain to produce a novel in another language
| feel free (removing our logo and name, of course).
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Thank you for your efforts!
|
| That book is more than 2600 pages! How long did that
| take?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Nearly two years, but I took a bunch of time out to work
| on smaller pieces. The biggest problem was that Gutenberg
| had only transcribed about a third of the footnotes, so I
| spent a long time adding the remaining ones back in.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| So you were transcribing a diary written in a shorthand?
| Or from a print version?
| robin_reala wrote:
| From scanned original sources. I just opened a random
| page at archive.org to give you an example:
|
| https://archive.org/details/diaryofsamuelpep01pepy/page/2
| 28/...
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Do you use OCR? Sorry for the million questions.
| robin_reala wrote:
| No problem! Yes, archive.org has OCRed all the text, but
| it needs a lot of finessing to bring up the quality to an
| acceptable standard.
|
| Typically, Standard Ebooks will try to avoid OCR unless
| it's something that's missing from Gutenberg.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Thank you for your time!
|
| (If you started some sort of AMA here I'm sure it would
| be successful.)
| jfk13 wrote:
| Great work! Is there any link between this and the Pepys
| Diary site at https://www.pepysdiary.com (also an awesome
| resource)?
| robin_reala wrote:
| I had a chat with Phil after I finished, and he sent over
| a list of transcription problems with Gutenberg that I'd
| missed which was very kind. But apart from that, no
| direct collaboration.
| devchix wrote:
| This site is amazing! Thank you!
|
| For those who loved the Andrew Lang rainbow-color fairy
| tale books, Lang also published a volume of The Arabian
| Nights, not a translation but a recounting of selected
| tales. I encountered the Richard Burton commodious 3-volume
| set as a child. It's amazing that nobody at the time
| thought to proctor my reading choice, given the racism,
| misogyny, salaciousness, naughty illustrations, everything
| delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone and just laid out
| there. To read it cover-to-cover is actually not terribly
| fun. There's lots of little folk tale snippets, fables,
| poetry, and Burton footnoted the hell out of everything.
| [deleted]
| _ph_ wrote:
| I had a good result by using the text version and running it
| through LaTex for formatting and then converted it into an
| ebook format. I think it involved a Perl script for marking
| sections.
| Iv wrote:
| Funny to use Aladdin as an example: it was added later to the
| original manuscript.
| eternalban wrote:
| This little bit of cultural misappropriation has always bugged
| me. Oddly enough, it is always the Europeans insisting on these
| Persian/Iranian matters being "Arab". I seriously wonder if this
| is still nursing ancient Persian Greek/Roman rivalries and is a
| byproduct of a chauvinist classical education of the European
| educated set of 19th century. I find it very strange.
|
| In the OP, we have a female Persian name (Shahrzad, the story
| teller) and a male Persian name (Shahryar, the king).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights#Pe...
|
| "The earliest mentions of the Nights refer to it as an Arabic
| translation from a Persian book, Hezar Afsan (aka Afsaneh or
| Afsana), meaning 'The Thousand Stories'."
|
| Hezar means 1000. Afsan means fantasy/story. Now it's true that
| the modern version is called _Hezaar-o yek Shab_ (Thousand and
| one nights). So possibly that 'one' story is the Arab
| contribution.
|
| [Filed under the "The Gulf" files]
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| The version of these tales that became internationally famous
| date from a time after Persia had already been under Arabic and
| Muslim influence for centuries and the Persian language had
| become replete with Arabic borrowings. It is the same reason
| that many of the traditions and foreign words borrowed into the
| cultures of Central Asia and the Volga-Kama region are
| generally referred to as "Arabo-Persian", even though those
| peoples were dealing mainly with Persian speakers and rarely
| met an actual Arab.
| eternalban wrote:
| As I said this is a minor item.
|
| The major one, which one sees to this day in contemporary
| European sources (even scholarly matter), is how Arabs
| translated ancient sources into Arabic. This occulation of
| (substantial and far reaching) contribution of Iran to
| "Western civilization" is unique to European sources.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Clas.
| ..
|
| Arab historians themselves, to their lasting credit, had the
| intellectual integrity:
|
| " _It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most
| Muslim scholars...in the intellectual sciences have been non-
| Arabs...thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after
| him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of Persian
| descent...they invented rules of (Arabic) grammar...great
| jurists were Persians... only the Persians engaged in the
| task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly
| works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes
| apparent, 'If learning were suspended in the highest parts of
| heaven the Persians would attain it"...The intellectual
| sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone
| by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them...as was the case
| with all crafts...This situation continued in the cities as
| long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan
| and Transoxiana (modern Central Asia), retained their
| sedentary culture._ "
|
| - _Muqaddimah_ , by Abu Zayd 'Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn
| Khaldun al-Hadrami, translated by F. Rosenthal (III, pp.
| 311-15, 271-4 [Arabic]; Frye, R.N. (1977). Golden Age of
| Persia, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p.91).
|
| Soviet Russian historians are equally factual regarding these
| matters. As I said, this is a remarkable feature of European
| version of history as far as Iran is concerned.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Soviet Russian historians are equally factual regarding
| these matters
|
| It is within the Soviet Russian research tradition (after
| all, most publications on the history of the languages and
| cultures of Central Asia and the Volga-Kama were produced
| then, when these regions were within the USSR) that the
| aforementioned term "Arabo-Persian" is heavily used.
|
| Your posts on this matter make you appear to be one of
| those Persian nationalists who can't stop banging on about
| how Persians aren't Arabs. I think many people here are
| capable of understanding the nuances involved, and it isn't
| really appropriate for you to continue to claim
| victimization.
| eternalban wrote:
| > Your posts on this matter make you appear to be one of
| those Persian nationalists who can't stop banging on
| about how Persians aren't Arabs.
|
| Not correct and borderline ad hom. I am a Muslim and do
| not care for such ethnic distinctions.
| goto11 wrote:
| > I seriously wonder if this is still nursing ancient Persian
| Greek/Roman rivalries and is a byproduct of a chauvinist
| classical education of the European educated set of 19th
| century. I find it very strange.
|
| You are overthinking this. It is called Arabian Nights (in some
| translations) because the stories are translated from Arabic.
| It is like calling the Brothers Grimm fairy tales German, even
| though some of the stories may have originated somewhere else.
|
| The 19 century orientalists were certainly chauvinist by modern
| standards, but did not in particular elevate Arab culture above
| Persian culture.
|
| Suggesting that Arab culture supplied just one story to the
| collection makes _you_ the chauvinist. The stories have all
| kinds of origins - Persian, Indian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian,
| Syrian, even European.
| Iv wrote:
| Always fun to remind people that Aladdin is actually Chinese in
| the original stories.
|
| But then, let's be fair, their depiction of China sounds like it
| was just a placeholder for "far away land"
| somethingtoday wrote:
| Even to this day, the word China in Arabic (pronounced "seen")
| means far away.
|
| So if your friend lives across town and you are inconvenienced,
| in Arabic you would say "why do you live in China?".
| minikites wrote:
| Taking "the slow boat to China" is an idiom in English for a
| long duration or long journey.
| Flex247A wrote:
| In Hindi, we pronounce it as 'Cheen', with the 'ch' sound.
| heistus wrote:
| The word "china" might mean 'far' but only in a metaphorical
| way As is the case in many other languages. But the word for
| "far" or "far away" in arabic is definitely not "china /
| lSyn"
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I love that in Arabic, China is a metaphor for "far away,"
| and in Chinese, China is basically "the central place." I am
| hoping to find out that the Pashto or Hindu for China means
| "medium far away."
| legends2k wrote:
| Surprising, China's pronunciation in Tamil is also similar,
| 'Seena '!
| [deleted]
| axiom92 wrote:
| On a related note, some languages become placeholder for
| "gibberish." For example, English speakers often say "it sounds
| Greek."
|
| https://twitter.com/TommSciortino/status/1357376440170258434
| sorenso wrote:
| Perhaps one of the greatest Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Islamic
| contributions to world literature, the many stories of the
| Arabian Nights, in their various forms and genres, have
| influenced literature, music, art, and cinema, and continue to do
| so until our present day.
| goto11 wrote:
| Fun fact about Arabian Nights: Some of the stories are only known
| from the French translation by Galland. By his own account he
| wrote them down (in French) based on narration from a Syrian
| Maronite storyteller who visited him in Paris. The well known
| story of Aladdin only exists in French - there is no known
| original in Arabic.
|
| Borges suggested Galland might simply have made up the story of
| Aladdin on his own, others that is might be an original creation
| by the Maronite storyteller.
|
| Folklorists have pointed out that the set of stories recorded
| from the storyteller have a number of story tropes more
| characteristic of European rather than Middle Eastern folk tales.
|
| Wikipedia carefully states: "Aladdin is a folk tale most probably
| of Middle Eastern origin".
| hassancf wrote:
| Sorry for being blunt but: absence of evidence is not evidence
| of absence (of original texts in Arabic about Alaaddin that
| predate Galland etc).
|
| A lot of the original stories may be verbal oral and not
| necessarily written, another lot may be lost (burn libraries
| etc) and this all happened from 400 to 1000 years ago, so not
| exactly yesterday.
| jarenmf wrote:
| Indeed, Hanna Diyab is a very interesting person
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Diyab
| masterphilo wrote:
| > Folklorists have pointed out that the set of stories recorded
| from the storyteller have a number of story tropes more
| characteristic of European rather than Middle Eastern folk
| tales.
|
| Interesting, could you give us an example of these
| characteristics?
|
| Islamic and European societies during the period of these
| stories were different in unique ways, and for that reason I'm
| not exactly sure how those characteristics were more similar to
| the one rather than the other.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| So the crucial thing about story telling is that it's not a
| literary genre. And that means that's it's often
| extemporaneous. In order to make up stories on the spot,
| storytellers use a body of elements (motifs, incidents, etc.)
| that they can dump in when they need them. Literary genres
| close to oral storytelling, like chivalric romance, the
| Sanskrit katha, and Arabian nights tales, usually keep this
| quality. (Btw, a good storyteller can do amazing things in
| this framework).
|
| The issue with Alladin, Sinbad, and Ali baba, is that they
| lack most of the common motifs of Arabian nights tales (IE
| the slave whose mistake solves the problem, bedtricks, the
| sultan who solves everything, the discovered needed object)
| but do possess motifs very characteristic of 17 and 18th
| century French folktales (notably alladins rags to riches
| story, and the princesses cup trick). They also are less
| motif heavy in general! That doesn't mean the translator made
| them up by the way... the resemblance to French folktales
| could be an accident, and they could be from another
| storytelling tradition, but they don't seem like Arabian
| nights stories
| [deleted]
| defen wrote:
| > By his own account he wrote them down (in French) based on
| narration from a Syrian Maronite storyteller who visited him in
| Paris
|
| That sounds a lot like the origin story of Don Quixote...
| (within the text, it was allegedly told to Cervantes by Cide
| Hamete Benengeli)
| goto11 wrote:
| The storyteller did exist though. He even wrote a memoir! But
| he didn't write down his own stories. He narrated them for
| Galland, presumably in French, and Galland wrote them down...
| a few days later... from memory.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Thousand and One Nights, Vol.
| I., by Anonymous
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34206/34206-h/34206-h.htm
| Balgair wrote:
| The abridged Harvard Classics copy is here, for anyone looking
| for another source/version:
| http://www.myharvardclassics.com/downloads/20120213_1/downlo...
| natemcintosh wrote:
| I would highly recommend the musical interpretation by Rimsky-
| Korsakov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade_(Rimsky-
| Korsakov). The violin soloist as Scheherazade leads the Sultan
| through the stories. See the Overview section of the wikipedia
| page for her theme, and his theme. It's a piece I always love to
| come back to.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I've enjoyed that one since I was a child. Funnily enough I
| listened to it just a few weeks ago after having not listened
| to it for years.
| fmajid wrote:
| Jorge Luis Borges wrote an excellent comparison of translations
| of the Arabian Nights, notably those of Galland, Burton, Lane and
| Mardrus. His conclusion was the Lane one was most faithful to the
| original, despite being prudishly bowdlerized, that Mardrus
| emphasized the sensual aspects to titillate his readers and
| Burton on the other hand over-emphasized the violence. I've read
| the Galland, Mardrus and Burton but not Lane, and can agree on
| his characterizations of the first three.
|
| It's great to see they have left the footnotes, that are some of
| the most interesting aspects of the translation (trigger warning:
| Burton was a Victorian and exhibits all the casual racism of his
| epoch, despite being very forward-looking in surprising ways).
|
| My favorite one is from volume 1:
|
| [FN#543] Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to
| the police and generally to employes of Government. It is a word
| which tells a history.
| grandpa wrote:
| The opening of Borges' essay is absolutely brilliant writing:
|
| > AT TRIESTE, IN 1872, in a palace with damp statues and
| deficient hygienic facilities, a gentleman on whose face an
| African scar told its tale -- Captain Richard Francis Burton,
| the English consul -- embarked on a famous translation of the
| Quitab aliflaila ua laila, which the roumis know by the title,
| The Thousand and One Nights. One of the secret aims of his work
| was the annihilation of another gentleman (also weatherbeaten,
| and with a dark Moorish beard) who was compiling a vast
| dictionary in England and who died long before he was
| annihilated by Burton. That gentleman was Edward Lane, the
| Orientalist, author of a highly scrupulous version of The
| Thousand and One Nights that had supplanted a version by
| Galland. Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane;
| to understand Burton we must understand this hostile dynasty.
|
| Borges also admires Burton's footnotes:
|
| > Thus Volume Six (which I have before me) includes some three
| hundred notes, among which are the following: a condemnation of
| jails and a defense of corporal punishment and fines; some
| examples of the Islamic respect for bread; a legend about the
| hairiness of Queen Belkis' legs; an enumeration of the four
| colors that are emblematic of death; a theory and practice of
| Oriental ingratitude; the information that angels prefer a
| piebald mount, while Djinns favor horses with a bright-bay
| coat; a synopsis of the mythology surrounding the secret Night
| of Power or Night of Nights; a denunciation of the
| superficiality of Andrew Lang; a diatribe against rule by
| democracy; a census of the names of Mohammed, on the Earth, in
| the Fire, and in the Garden; a mention of the Amalekite people,
| of long years and large stature; a note on the private parts of
| the Moslem, which for the man extend from the navel to his
| knees, and for the woman from the top of the head to the tips
| of her toes; a consideration of the asa'o [roasted beef] of the
| Argentine gaucho; a warning about the discomforts of
| "equitation" when the steed is human; an allusion to a
| grandiose plan for cross-breeding baboons with women and thus
| deriving a sub-race of good proletarians. At fifty, a man has
| accumulated affections, ironies, obscenities, and copious
| anecdotes; Burton unburdened himself of them in his notes.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I did not know this exists. Can't wait to look it up and read
| it, thanks.
| gwern wrote:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1936-borges-
| thetranslators...
| HelloNurse wrote:
| The files at the provided link are dated 2002 and 2016, not 2021.
| Am I missing something?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm one of the lucky 10,000 who didn't know that the entirety
| of the Arabian Nights was on Gutenberg.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The sixth supplement volume was released this year:
| http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64384
|
| I'm not seeing the last and seventh supplement volume (volume
| 17 of 17 in total), perhaps that was released recently?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If someone wants to listen to some of these stories, the Myths
| and Legends podcast does a nice exploration and breakdown of a
| lot of these and other stories.
| Tepix wrote:
| Meta-comment: The text on this page is tiny! 12px according to
| the stylesheet.
|
| I have to increase it to 150% to get a comfortable font size.
| That's crazy.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It's exactly the same font-size as on this site, isn't it? I
| don't think it's an unusually small font-size.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| I have HN zoomed in to 200% on my monitor.
| Zababa wrote:
| I personally use HN zoomed to 125% on a 23 inches monitor
| that's about 25 inches from my eyes. I like how the simple
| design scales well.
| Tepix wrote:
| HN is 9pt which is also tiny indeed.
| idlewords wrote:
| There's a really nice modern translation of the Arabian nights by
| Husain Haddawy, that is worth your time. The preface to that
| translation goes into a lot of fun detail about the book's
| complex trajectory, and its unhappy translations by Burton and
| others. The first volume contains the closest thing to Arabian
| Nights "canon". Haddawy then published a second volume with
| stories that glommed onto the text later, but are massively
| popular, including Ala-Addin and the Magic Lamp and Sinbad the
| Sailor.
|
| The Burton translation is of more interest as an psychosexual
| glimpse into the guy's mind, and an Orientalist artifact, than
| for the story istelf. Burton wrote in a bizarrely archaicized
| English that has no counterpart in the text, which reads like all
| oral storytelling everywhere--repetitive, engaging, and fun.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Interesting. I have made it through only a third or so of the
| Mathers' translation (translated to English from the French
| translation).
|
| I started the Burton translation but found the wording - dense?
| It seemed it should be more authentic though since it was a
| direct English translation.
|
| Burton, as I have glimpsed, was quite a character.
| idlewords wrote:
| Burton translated into a fantastical, archaicized, almost
| unreadable version of English of his own invention. The
| Haddaway introduction has some nice examples of his prose
| compared to a "straight" translation of the original text.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I find Burton's translation incredible - though certainly
| it is also fantastical and archaicized. For a first reader
| I think it might be a bit daunting, but honestly I love it.
|
| Like any ancient work, it's worth hopping between a few
| translations over the years depending on what you're
| currently into. I've got a shelf full of Iliads and
| Odysseys because I can't decide which I like best.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Amazing how the 'almost unreadable' Burton's Thousand
| Nights continues to sell to this day, even on Kindle. As
| far as I can gather, there is plenty of sexual imagery in
| the original manuscript undoubtedly emphasized by Burton.
| Suggestions of really gross mis-translation or invention by
| Burton, seem to be thin on the ground.
| idlewords wrote:
| I just referred you to a source for both. Burton is more
| inspired fanfic than translation. Some people like it!
| gjm11 wrote:
| The trouble with Burton isn't _inaccuracy_ so much as
| _unreadability_ , or at least _clumsiness_ , because he
| translated into an idiosyncratic variety of English never
| used by anyone else before or since.
|
| Here's an example from the introduction to Dawood's
| translation, which I happen to have handy:
|
| "But she rejoined by saying, 'Allah upon you both that ye
| come down forthright, and if you come not, I will rouse
| upon you my husband, this Ifrit, and he shall do you to
| die by the illest of deaths'; and she continued making
| signals to them."
|
| I'm sure that's an accurate enough translation of the
| relevant bit of the _Nights_. But it 's not good English.
| "Allah upon you"? "do you to die by the illest of
| deaths"? Maybe the idea is to give it an exotic flavour,
| but the stories themselves provide enough of that, and so
| far as I know the original language wouldn't feel exotic
| to a native reader.
| almostarockstar wrote:
| I'm fascinated.
|
| It sounds like a pidgin, or literal translation. Can
| anybody compare the grammar used to that of the original
| text? Or is it a work of complete imagination?
| Wohlf wrote:
| In fairness I believe Shakespeare also wrote his works in
| idiosyncratic English.
| webmobdev wrote:
| The english translation that you quoted sounds very
| similar in nature to the english translation of Quranic
| verses. The Quran is kind of poetic in its language and
| hence its translation always sounds a bit odd. This makes
| me wonder whether the original Arabian Nights were also
| in the nature of a _narrative poem_?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| English is my second language and I find his translation
| (and the fragment you quoted) clear, interesting and
| poetic. Reminds of King James Bible translation, which I
| also greatly enjoy.
| gjm11 wrote:
| One thing the KJV has in common with Burton's translation
| is a certain deliberate archaism -- its language was
| rather old-fashioned when it was published in 1610.
|
| There's (obviously) absolutely nothing with liking
| deliberately archaic, slightly high-flown language.
| Personally I find it rather annoying in Burton but like
| it in the KJV, but different people have different
| tastes.
|
| Though ... A lot of people who read the KJV are doing so
| not so much for the enjoyment of its literary style, but
| because they believe it to be the Word of God;
| unfortunately this means that many people are seeking
| divine enlightenment from a translation that (1) in many
| cases they don't understand well just because its
| language is hundreds of years separated from what they're
| accustomed to speaking and reading, and that (2) is based
| on now-outdated textual scholarship and therefore does a
| suboptimal job of reporting what the allegedly divinely
| inspired writers actually wrote. That seems unfortunate.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-01 23:02 UTC)