SOURCE: Knipp, C. “The The Arabian Nights in England: Galland's Translation and Its Successors.” Journal of Arabic Literature 5 (1974): 44-54.

[In the following essay, Knipp offers a reevaluation of Antoine Galland's early-eighteenth-century translation of The Arabian Nights, arguing that despite its limitations, the work should be regarded as the preeminent translation, a creative work, and a version that is as faithful to the original source as could have been rendered.]

The story of the translations of the Arabian Nights is a colorful and even lurid one. In this story's English segment, very close to center stage, gesticulating wildly, is Sir Richard Burton—explorer, adventurer, polemicist, orientalist, scribbler, and enemy of Victorian morality. We might as well begin with him, since the curtain will not go down anyway until he has done his turn. Here is how Burton, already waving both sock and buskin, begins the Foreword of his edition of the Arabian Nights: “This work,” he says,

laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labour of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half-clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency. Impossible even to open the pages without a vision starting into view; without drawing a picture from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and “respectable” surroundings, the Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as aether, whose every breath raises men's spirits like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after-glow transfiguring and transforming, as by magic, the homely and rugged features of the scene into a fairy-land lit with a light that never shines on other soils or seas …¹

And so on, and so on: Burton continues in this vein for some time, becoming purpler and purpler, rising to the bathetic pinnacle of the English pseudo-oriental style.

And English and pseudo-oriental it certainly is, for Burton was laying the groundwork of a deception. The “long years of official banishment”, as he self-pityingly calls them, spent in such “dull and commonplace and ‘respectable’ surroundings” as South America and the deserts of West Africa, were never spent laboring on a translation of the Arabian Nights. Burton did not work on this text for twenty-five years, as his mendacious dedication to Steinhauser implies, and he did not graciously hold back its publication for four years merely to give John Payne “precedence and possession of the field”, as his Foreword rather disingenuously asserts. He waited in order to crib. He based his translation, which is therefore hardly a translation at all, on John Payne's version (1882-84);² he did it in only two years, toward the end copying Payne verbatim for whole pages at a stretch; he did it to make money, and he sold it as he had planned in advance to the 1,500 subscribers left over from Payne's limited edition of 500.

This story was told by Thomas Wright in 1906 and 1919 and repeated by the two eminent authorities on the Alf Layla, Duncan B. Macdonald (1929; 1938) and Enno Littmann (1956).³ But Burton's most recent biographers, as Mia Gerhardt points out,⁴ have not been aware of the extent of Burton's debt to Payne.⁵ Burton did his publicizing well, and its boom drowns out the quiet voice of scholarship. As Jorge Luis Borges (himself characteristically unaware of Payne) has written, the romantic legend of Burton the explorer gives him a prestige that no other English Arabist can compete with. He was a far more colorful figure than Payne. The Burton legend gives his version the attraction of the forbidden, an attraction on which the fame of Burton's Arabian Nights still rests.⁶ The result is another confusion: just as westerners mistakenly consider the Arabian Nights a “classic” of Arabic literature, whereas it is obscure to, and largely despised by, the Arabs themselves, so English readers for the most part erroneously think that Sir Richard Burton is the pre-eminent translator of the Arabian Nights, whereas the chief distinction his version can claim is to be the most recent lengthy one in English, and, despite its undeniable interest as an element in the Burton legend, the most nearly unreadable one in our language. Burton's edition is certainly fascinating as a personal document; but a translation that is to this extent a personal document is at cross-purposes with itself. The famous sexological Terminal Essay (the title itself borrowed from Payne) is an interesting piece of Victorian pornography; I myself doubted the authenticity of the strange and supposedly first-hand observations of eastern sexual practices when I first read them some ten years ago, and subsequent studies strengthen the suspicion that many of them are Burton's own fantasies and extrapolations. This feeling is shared by Mia Gerhardt,⁷ whose excellent chapter on the major European versions, wider in scope than this paper, should be read by anyone who wants an informed, thorough, and critical discussion of the subject.

The East as seen by westerners has always contained a strong element of legend. Burton deserves credit for recognizing this fact and capitalizing upon it to increase English sympathies toward the Islamic world, and thus help to change ignorance and suspicion to curiosity and sympathetic interest. In this cause, Sir Richard performed an invaluable service. But it must be admitted that his methods were not highly scrupulous. Just as many minor and half-forgotten works have a secondary, parasitical kind of existence, so Burton's famous translation depends for its existence on the much-neglected John Payne. It was Payne, not Burton, who gave the English-speaking world its first lengthy and unbowdlerized version of the Arabian Nights translated directly from the original; and yet this parasite has survived to engulf its host.⁸

So, too, have the subsequent versions engulfed Antoine Galland's original one. The scene has greatly expanded since 1703-1713, when Galland's twelve handy duodecimo volumes first appeared and were brought across the Channel, where they were immediately both read in French and translated into English by a “Grub-street” unknown.⁹ In England and America, there are two basic kinds of Arabian Nights to contend with in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the children's, which exists in many forms, always short and always derivative, though sometimes very different from the base translation; and the adults', usually long and heavily annotated, putatively scholarly, and “unexpurgated”—though the latter claim is mainly post-Victorian advertising and perhaps designed to counteract the tedium produced by the repetitious length. There is not so much to “expurgate” unless one possesses the Victorians' inexhaustible ability to create prurience where there is none; there is merely more repetitious length than any children and most adults have time for—so that it is now the children's versions that chiefly matter to our culture. Galland, from the beginning, was both: suitable for young listeners, worthy of adult readers. The division and diffusion of interest and scope came later.

My purpose now is to re-evaluate Galland's translation of the Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla and present it in just relation to other versions available in English since. So many pretentious new translations, so many popular editions, so many children's condensations have come along since Galland, that even students of Arabic literature find the scene confusing. Translators, though not all by any means as unscrupulous as Sir Richard Burton, must be good publicists: to sell their version, they are obliged to provide a strong hint for the critic by including a preface debunking or undercutting the work of their predecessors. The inevitable result is that though still nodded to respectfully by all—he is, by now, at a safe distance—Galland has lost his place of pre-eminence. He deserves to have it back.

To begin with, we need to be told (or reminded) that any acquaintance with the Arabian Nights, whether limited or extensive, is due to Galland. The book was discovered by him in a larger sense than is generally known. Arabists perhaps need not be told, but western readers at large are almost wholly unaware, that Galland discovered the Arabian Nights for the literate Arab of today, and for us, as well as for the eighteenth-century European readers who first encountered his Mille et une Nuit. Only recently, with Suhayr al-Qalamāwī's book-length study in Arabic (1966), has there been solid evidence that the medieval collection of tales is beginning to be taken seriously in the Arab World as well as in the West.¹⁰ As Suhayr al-Qalamāwī makes clear, it is the Alf Layla's familiarity in the West that has led to this belated interest on the part of Arab scholars and men of letters such as Taha Husayn.¹¹ Thus the obscurity and humble status of the work are such, that if Galland had not come upon the story manuscripts he acquired and translated, the Arabian Nights not only might never have become well known to westerners, but also would remain despised, little known, and unread in the Arab countries. Galland's moment was special. The European public was eager for just the sort of stories he supplied in just the form in which he was able to supply them. There is no certainty that translated oriental tales would have caught on, and hence ultimately become the “classic” they are now said to be, had they made their first appearance at some time and place other than France in the early eighteenth century. Burton would certainly never have discovered them; and no fame would have echoed back from the West to the point of origin. For all of us, then, for orientalists and common readers, for easterners and westerners alike, Galland is the discoverer and source of the Arabian Nights.

All this might be true, of course, and yet Galland's translation might remain dated and inadequate. In fact this is not the case: Burton's is far more dated, and the question of what is “adequate” is a complicated one with many special but no universal answers. Naturally Galland was “handicapped” by the lack of all the paraphernalia of modern scholarship, and by the lack of all that specialized knowledge of the Alf Layla wa-Layla which he could not have, because his pioneering work alone was to lead to its acquisition. But Galland's knowledge was the most advanced possible in his time, and it enabled him to produce that rare thing among scholars, an entertaining, readable, gracefully written book which at the same time only a man of very special learning could have done.

No; speaking as one who has compared various Arabic texts of the Arabian Nights with as many English and European versions as were available to me, and speaking also as one who, though biased a little in favor of the literature of the eighteenth century, at least has no new translation to sell, I am compelled to say that I prefer Galland's French, and the Grub-street Englishing of Galland, to any other version and even to the original, which, in its more authentic written forms—after all, it is essentially an oral work—is poor and uninteresting Arabic. In its chief printed manuscript versions,¹² as distinguished from the bowdlerized and grammatically “corrected” modern Arabic editions, the Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla is a bastardized mixture of literary language and colloquial dialect which in the context of Arabic literature as a whole must seem ungraceful.

Mia Gerhardt rather begs the question in her interesting book on the Arabian Nights when she argues that her ignorance of Arabic need not hamper her from judging the translations reliably, because in the case of stories the precise wording is not important.¹³ Words do matter. “Style” is not easily separated from “content.” Each translation ought to be judged finally on its own merits as a collection of stories, but can be judged as a translation only by comparison with the principal manuscripts. Ideally a translation will pass both tests, and it competes successfully with all other translations of the work only if it does. The question of the special requirements of particular readers apart, Galland is most successful in achieving the delicate compromises translation requires. His free-flowing version captures the simplicity of the original, but the genius of the French language allowed him to do this without being (as the Arabic tales are) inelegant.

I have said that Burton's translation is “far more dated” than Galland's, and that Burton's only real distinctions are that his version of John Payne's version of the Nights is the lengthiest and the most unreadable. Perhaps the most telling remark on this subject is that of the distinguished Italian Arabist and the editor of the Italian Arabian Nights translation, Francesco Gabrieli, to the effect that to understand Burton's translation he often has to refer to the Arabic text:¹⁴ this is very nearly true even for a native English speaker. The other “adult” versions of the Nights in English suffer from similar stylistic defects, which have been best described by the late A. J. Arberry in the Introduction to his Scheherezade (a pleasant, but fragmentary and, like some of its predecessors, subtly prudish entry into the field of Alf Layla translation). “Earlier translators of the Arabian Nights”, Arberry remarks, referring to his own countrymen,

have almost without exception been so mesmerized by the stylistic peculiarities of Arabic that they have not hesitated to imitate them slavishly in their versions, a thing they would probably have scorned to do, and been soundly schooled to avoid, were their task Homer or Herodotus or Horace or Livy. Not content with inventing a strange Eurasian sort of English, that was the more readily accepted because it seemed profanely to echo the Old Testament in the Authorized Version—and for a good reason, the Semitic original of those Scriptures—they went farther than they needed to have done and, being caught up in the eddies of the Gothic Revival, imported into their diction all the bogus flummery of Ye Olde Englysshe.¹⁵

As Arberry says later on in his discussion, the Arabic of the Alf Layla wa-Layla is “colloquial or half-colloquial”, is consequently close to the conversational in its flavor, and in fact “differs surprisingly little from the Arabic of conversation today”.¹⁶ In substance surely Arberry is speaking with wisdom here. Certain Arabic works, the Maqāmāt for example, could perhaps best be translated into some kind of Kunstprose; but the simplicity and naturalness of the Alf Layla unmistakably call for more direct language. Yet the “adult” English versions of the Arabian Nights are not at all conversational or contemporary. Lane's is overly literal: instead of finding equivalents of idioms, we get things like “he almost flew with delight” … ; but Lane's biblical style is not the mere result of this literalness: a phrase like “rejoiced with exceeding joy” is not merely “literal”, but reflects its author's conscious efforts to echo biblical style. Lane's translation is further marred by excessive prudery and is incomplete. For the seeker of an “adult” Arabian Nights, it is of no use; contrarily, Lane has been frequently used as the basis of modern “children's” versions. Payne's translation suffers from a greater degree of overwroughtness (a pity, since his is the only complete and genuine translation from Arabic into English): he adds archaic verb and pronoun forms, a more recherché vocabulary than Lane's, and a more involuted sentence structure. To Payne's style, which Burton had found not “plain”—that is, vulgar—enough, the latter adds stronger words (“rascal” becoming “pimp”, “impudent woman” “strumpet”, “vile woman” “whore”, and so on); odd hyphenated words, often of his own coinage and occasionally barbarous; still more archaisms, usually with an added pseudo-Elizabethan flavor; and still greater misplaced faithfulness to “literal” meaning. “Literal” seems to be one of those words—like “reality”—which should rarely be used without quotation marks; it is obvious that one man's “literalness” is another's grotesque and artificial clumsiness. The pseudo-medieval approach to the Arabian Nights, culminating in Burton's cribbed and crabbed Elizabethan-Gothic style, is seriously inappropriate, since the language of the original is as simple as it could be, and Arabic has changed relatively much less than English since the Middle Ages; it is probably best, at any rate, for a translator to stay close to the idiom he is most familiar with and therefore most able to handle with ease—the idiom of his own time and country. Arberry's clear, lively, accurate translations of Arabic prose (his sparkling version of the Tawq al-Hamama of Ibn Hazm is an outstanding example) show that, in most respects at least, he was a man for the job; it is a pity that the lengthier project he evidently had in mind¹⁷ was never continued beyond the “Aladdin” and “Judar” stories published in 1960.

Although he meant his bowdlerized selection of the Nights for a general audience, Lane made the accompanying notes so lengthy and elaborate that his nephew (and champion against the inroads of Payne and Burton) was later able to publish them as a separate volume complete unto itself.¹⁸ As Mia Gerhardt concludes,¹⁹ this imbalance suggests a certain confusion in the overall planning of the project; and the failure to meet more than some of the demands of such a project is characteristic of English translations of the Arabian Nights. The producers of the many English and American children's editions have chiefly, perforce, used Scott (1811) or Lane as their basis. Since Scott's edition is a translation of Galland (with a few dubious additions at the end),²⁰ and since the children's editions far outnumber the adults', and Lane's version did not come along until the 1880's, it is still true that the Grub-street Galland, or some abridged, amended version of it, is the form in which most English-speaking readers have been encountering the Arabian Nights over the past two hundred and fifty years. Macdonald (1932) was not able to identify the author of the original English translation, whose exact date of first publication (no complete set being extant)²¹ is unknown (1706? 1708?), but certainly close to that of the French. Retranslators of Galland (e.g., Frederick Gilbert: London, 1868), predictably enough, have remarked on the Grub-street version's “errors” and “inelegancies”. In fact, as befits a piece of hack work far less pretentious than Burton's, the Grub-street Galland departs little from its source; one finds few actual cuts or alterations. The following example is illustrative:

Galland's French	Grub-street version
Il s'entretint avec cet ambassadeur	[He] discoursed with that ambassador
jusqu'à minuit. Alors, voulant encore	till midnight. But willing once more
une fois embrasser la reine,	to embrace the queen,
qu'il aimoit beaucoup,	whom he loved entirely,
il retourna seul à son palais.	he returned alone to his palace, and
Il alla droit à l'appartement	went straight to her majesty's
de cette Princesse,	apartment;
qui ne s'attendant pas à le revoir,	who not expecting his return,
avoit reçu dans son lit un des	had taken one of the meanest officers
derniers Officiers de sa Maison.	of the household to her bed,
Il y avoit déjà long temps qu'ils	where they both lay fast asleep,
étoient couchez, & ils dormoient	having been there a considerable time.22
tous deux d'un profond sommeil.

One notes the carelessly awkward “who”, and the alteration of the pace and flow of Galland's last sentence (“Il y avoit déjà long temps”), with the suspenseful story-teller's pause it creates, to the flat dependent clause (“where they both lay”) with a prosaic ending (“a considerable time”) in disappointing contrast to the fairy-tale magic effect of “ils dormoient tous deux d'un profond sommeil”. But if one agrees to admire Galland's translation, a few small betrayals are preferable to total abandonment.

Using slightly different Arabic texts, here is how Mardrus (1899-1904) and Khawan (1965-67) in French, and Lane, Payne, and Burton in English, have rendered the passage; and following these I give … my translation of that text:

Mardrus:

Mais, vers le milieu de la nuit, il se rappela une chose oubliée au palais, et revint et entra dans le palais. Et il trouva son épouse étendue sur sa couche et accolée par un esclave noir d'entre les e sclaves. À cette vue, le monde noirçit sur son visage.

(I, 4-1918)

Khawan:

Lorsqu'il pénétra dans la chambre de celle-ci, il la trouva endormie à côté de l'un des adolescents préposés au service des cuisines. Ils dormaient enlacés l'un à l'autre.

(I, 32)

Lane:

At midnight, however, he remembered that he had left in his palace an article which he should have brought with him; and having returned to the palace to fetch it, he there beheld his wife sleeping in his bed, and attended by a male negro slave, who had fallen asleep by her side. On beholding this scene, the world became black before his eyes …

Payne:

In the middle of the night, it chanced that he bethought him of somewhat he had forgotten in his palace; so he returned thither privily and entered his apartments, where he found his wife asleep in his own bed, in the arms of one of his black slaves. When he saw this, the world grew black in his sight …

Burton:

But when the night was half spent he bethought him that he had forgotten in his palace somewhat which he should have brought with him, so he returned privily and entered his apartments, where he found the Queen, his wife, asleep on his own carpet-bed, embracing with both arms a black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with kitchen grease and grime. When he saw this the world waxed black before his sight …

Calcutta II:

… When it was the middle of the night he remembered something he had forgotten in his castle, so he went back, entered his castle, and found his wife lying in his bed embracing one of the black slaves. When he saw this he became enraged.

Of course the unadorned (and unpunctuated) Arabic narrative requires a little padding to give it a more natural flow in English or French. … More subordination is natural in French or English: hence Lane's “having returned … he then beheld”. But one remains unconvinced of the need for Lane's bowdlerization (the slave attending instead of embracing) or for Burton's (typical) exaggeration of the loathsomeness of the black slave—who certainly moves around freely on the social (and professional) scale as one goes from one translation to another.

In the larger context such comparisons as these provide, we can see Galland's virtues and limitations fairly clearly. One of course notices the seventeenth-century Frenchman's decorum, the restraint and poise of his tone, and comparing that with the grotesqueries of Payne-Burton or even the relatively simple style but still heavy movement of Lane, at first one is inclined to feel that Galland may have watered down his source. After consulting the Arabic texts, however, one realizes that simplicity, even spareness of diction to the point of crudeness, is quite appropriate here. Mardrus and Khawan aim at capturing this crudeness in repetitions that are probably deliberately somewhat awkward (“palais … palais”; “endormis … dormaient”). Galland's chief unfaithfulness consists in adding polish. But he adds nothing else irrelevant. As Muhammed Abdel-Halim shows in his authoritative Antoine Galland: sa vie, son æuvre (1970), Galland was so imbued with the spirit and schooled in the method of Arabic story-telling that, faithful though he was, he was capable of creating an Arabic story himself out of a slender outline, had in effect himself become an Arabic story-teller—a feat not, in practical terms, ever duplicated by translators of the Alf Layla wa-Layla since the French scholar's historic discovery.

Galland's story-telling skill is not only unusual in a scholar but perhaps also represents a deeper affinity with the Arabic tales than other redactors have shown, the kind of affinity without which any translation is likely to be cold and mechanical, no matter how well-meaning the translator may be. The reader who goes back to Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une Nuit is truly returning to the source. It is difficult to find a more happy, creative, and successful translation in the West. One could only wish that this good fortune had befallen some greater work of the literature of the Islamic and Arabic worlds, which contains so many treasures still unknown among us.

Notes

1. Richard F. Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Burton Club “Baghdad Edition” (printed in England), 10 vols. (London, 1885-86), I, vii.

2. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, 9 vols., “For Subscribers Only” (London, 1884). Since Payne was over-subscribed for the ultimately small printing (500 copies), Burton determined to gather up the remaining 1,500 ready customers, the other subscribers to Payne's translation.

3. Wright, The Life of Sir Richard Burton (London, 1906) and The Life of John Payne (London, 1919); Macdonald, “Thousand and One Nights”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. ff., 1929, and “Alf Laila wa-Laila”, in Enzyklopeidie des Islam (Ergänzungsband, 1938); Littmann, “Alf Layla wa-Layla”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1956).

4. Mia Irene Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden, 1963), p. 78.

5. The most recent biography of Burton, Seton Dearden, The Arabian Knight (1936; rev. London, 1953), Ch. XII, presents Burton's highly fictionalized version of his translation work without reservations.

6. Jorge Luis Borges, “Los traductores de las 1001 Noches” (1935), in Historia de la eternidad (Buenos Aires, 1953), pp. 101-111.

7. Gerhardt, pp. 91-93.

8. It has proliferated in America through the omnipresent Modern Library abridgement (New York, 1932; many reprintings), among whose few selections is included an apocryphal story invented by Burton, “How Abu Hasan Brake Wind”.

9. For the most complete description of early editions and translations of Galland, see Duncan B. Macdonald, “A Bibliographical and Literary Study of the First Appearance of the Arabian Nights in Europe”, Library Quarterly, II (1932), 387-420.

10. Suhayr al-Qalamāwī, Alf Layla wa-Layla (Cairo, 1966).

11. The late Tawfiq Sayegh, a writer and teacher with an exceptional range of knowledge of both Arabic and English literatures, once told me how he read the tales first in English, and then only later, at Harvard, was eventually moved by contact with western orientalists to shut himself in his rooms and devour the Arabic original.

12. See the entry “Alf Layla wa-Layla” (by Littmann) in The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden, 1960) for summary of data on the principal recensions and reprints of MSS.

13. Gerhardt, Introduction, pp. 1 ff.

14. “Nel Burton, l'orientalista non inglese per capire certi passi trova piu spiccio ricorrere al testo arabo!” “Le Mille e una notte nella cultura europea”, in Storia e civiltà musulmana (Naples, 1947), p. 103.

15. Arberry, Scheherezade (London, 1960), pp. 9-10.

16. Ibid., p. 15.

17. Ibid., pp. 9, 17.

18. Stanley Lane-Poole, ed., Arabian Society in the Middle Ages (London, 1883; rpt. 1971).

19. Gerhardt, p. 77.

20. Gerhardt, p. 68.

21. See Macdonald (1932; op. cit.), pp. 405-406, and “Notes on Sales: Oriental Tales”, The Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1930, p. 324.

22. Opening sequence.