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March 24 - November 26, 2024
As she pauses her tale each night, her sister Dunyazad offers praise for these stories and Shahrazad in turn promises Shahriyar even more wonders the next night. These interruptions seldom indicate what the king thinks of this elaborate performance, but the storyteller lives on and the stories unfold night after night. While Victorian readers might expect a happy ending to Shahrazad’s brave effort to save her kingdom, the Arabic manuscripts do not offer such an easy resolution. In this respect, the Nights speaks less to the conventions of the European fairy tale than to the dystopian mode of
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Beneath the veneer of the French translator’s style, the Diyab tales remain compulsively plot-driven stories, a fitting match for the Nights tales translated from Galland’s Arabic manuscript. Indeed, they have benefited from being included in a collection that legitimizes the pleasure offered by a narrative that successfully harnesses surprise and wonder. The impact of these stories has been profound, as their plots and motifs have become part of the common repertoire of storytelling around the world. One scholar of folk stories, Ulrich Marzolph, has argued that among identifiable
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Robert Irwin argues that the Nights story cycle of “The Hunchback” was a significant influence on Henry Fielding as he developed the prototype of the English novel.63 The sheer wealth of quotidian detail that filled the pages of the Nights stories trained the eyes and pens of writers to capture the sights, smells, and tastes of their own markets, streets, and homes.
Even as writers such as Henry James made a claim for interiority as the foundation of the novel, the Arabian Nights represented the importance of narrative pleasure and suspense.
Joyce was attracted by the linguistic virtuosity of Burton’s edition of the stories, and he took seriously Burton’s belief that the Arabs and the Irish shared a penchant for poetry and supernaturalism. If Burton replicated imperial hierarchies in this comparison, Joyce answers with a positive reclamation of the shared histories embodied in the Nights, especially in the tales of wanderers like Sinbad and Harun al-Rashid.
The frame structure of the Nights was a continuing inspiration for the formal experiments of writers such as the American novelist John Barth.
Shahriyar as a powerful symbol of patriarchal violence, and feminist interpretations of the Nights highlight Shahrazad’s intervention in the frame tale as an inspiring tale of courage and resourcefulness in the face of male oppression. Her determination to save her kingdom by offering herself as a bride and weaving a nightly web of stories to distract and reeducate the broken king provides a model of resistance that continues to inspire readers. In this interpretation, Shahrazad must slowly dismantle Shahriyar’s belief that women cannot be trusted by gradually expanding the king’s experience
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Ros Ballaster sees this sisterly relationship as a source of political agency for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century authors such as Jane Austen (pp. 93–96). James Joyce, who was deeply influenced by the Arabian Nights, also references these “inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers,” in his novel Finnegans Wake.
“Mother,” they were saying, “bring him to us. Let us eat his belly.”
“I have to kill you,” said the king, “if only to see your head speak.”
Say to the one the days have shot with arrows How many has life felled, how many raised? If you were sleeping, God’s eye never shuts. For whom has time been fair? For whom the world unchanged?
a woman, five feet of symmetry and grace, a forehead like the sickle moon’s blaze, eyes like the eyes of the doe and the gazelle, brows like the crescent of Shaaban, red anemones for cheeks, a mouth like Solomon’s seal, lips red as native gold, teeth like a line of pearls, a neck like something given to a king, a fountain of a chest, pomegranate breasts, and a navel in whose dimple you could sit a drop of balm, and below was the hint of a rabbit without ears.
a woman with glamour about her,11 the philosopher’s grace and the full moon’s glow, Babylonian eyes and brows taut as bows, alif’s poise and amber scent and sugar lips, a face to shame the sun, a girl like a galaxy, or a dome of golden filigree, or a bride in her finery, or the glitter of tiles on the floor of a pool, or the glisten of tail in a bowl of soup.
Fucking hilarious
am a man of sense and care,14 I have read books, listened and learned and cited my sources,
From inside he heard the sounds of lutes and other strings, clear voices raised in song and recitation, and there were also birds, chattering and praising God in all the languages they knew, turtledoves and Barbary doves and blackbirds, nightingales and larks. Marveling, his mind in ecstasy, he moved toward the music,
I made seven voyages, and each voyage is a tale that dizzies the mind. Everything was set down in the stars, and there is no refuge from that which is written, so listen.”
saying of our Lord Solomon, son of David, that three things are better than three others:9 the day of death better than the day of birth, a living dog better than a dead lion, and the grave better than the palace.
But every time I went down to the port, I asked the travelers and merchants to point me to Baghdad, hoping for a thread to follow home. But no one knew how to get there, or knew anyone going that way. I was disappointed, tired of being a stranger, and remained in this state for some time.
said, “Listen to my story22 and try to understand, and you will see I tell the truth. Lying is the mark of liars.”
The footnote says hypocrisy might be one way to trans lying. But maybe it’s the old Cretan paradox? I am a liar, and I am lying.
William Strang
We reached an area with a grove of camphor trees,36 each of which might have supplied a hundred men with shade. A person wishing to draw camphor has only to pierce the upper bark with a long rod and catch what falls. This is liquid camphor, the honey of that tree, which flows and later sets like gum. Later the tree dries and becomes firewood.
Then I walked around the island and found it like a garden of Paradise, with lush trees and running streams and birds in piping praise for the Eternal.
if I loitered or was slow, he beat me like a captive.
“The poor are poor,” he said, “because they lack a starting sum of money they might increase with work. If they had such a sum, and used it well, over time they would become rich.”
“Sultan of Kashmir, if you wish to marry princesses46 who come to you for protection, learn first to get their consent.”
