Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Upon reading The Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classic Collection)The Arabian Nights by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books you know about from cartoons and cultural osmosis, but generally don't read. Well, I'm glad I finally did. Not only is there a lot to enjoy, there's a lot to learn--about the literature of other peoples, historical customs, attitudes toward law and justice, and a thousand (and one) other important things. All taken with a grain of salt, of course, but instructive just the same...

But what I liked learning about most was the place of the servant, and the slave, and the con artist, and the liar, and the murderer, and the swindler, and all the people of that sort. That, to me, was the most interesting part of these stories. They were filled with kings and viziers, true, but they also dealt with people at the bottom of the social ladder, those just getting by, the unfortunates, telling how they lived, how they avoided being crushed by the powerful, what they believed, what they valued. One example of this is seeing how readily sympathetic characters would lie, and how often they would be completely forgiven even when found out. I did not expect that. There was a reverence for the clever con-artist, who was often rewarded, or at least forgiven, because again and again they were respected for their brilliance, even if it was criminal. Some of this parallels western stories and fairy tales, but much of it felt quite different. I liked that.

I wish I had enjoyed the poetry in the Richard Burton translation. I tried to. There is a lot of verse throughout, and the translator worked really hard, it seems, to make the couplets resemble the original, and rhyme in English. The lines are so tortured I can hardly understand their meaning most of the time, even when trying to puzzle it out, which is made worse by Burton, in the late 1800s, using language that I have never seen anywhere else--not in Shakespeare, or Austen, or Tolkien, or Blake, or Spenser. (Where'd he get "fou" and "gar" and "cark" and "undight"? Okay, undight looks like something Spenser would have used...) I would like to have the text rendered in plain prose. I might have enjoyed that more. Would have.

But that's minor. Overall, this volume is a great pleasure. Much more profane than I expected, in a good way--earthier, and more accessible--it is filled with memorable characters and fantastic (in the original sense) stories, offering a fairy-tale glimpse into the kind of lives people enjoyed across the Muslim world centuries ago. Well worth, in my opinion, the time it takes it to read through its pages.

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