Eastern Dreams (16 page)

Given the growing English presence abroad and the increasing importance of English as a language, the first and most important of these pirated editions appeared in London early in 1706. The subtitle of Galland's work was modified from
Arabian Tales, Translated into French
to the full English title
Arabian Winter-Evenings' Entertainments
or
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
, thereby sealing the book's common name in the English-speaking world. This is known as the “Grub Street” edition, a nod toward the London thoroughfare where writers, poets, pamphleteers and publishers plied their uncertain trade. Translators making no more than a shilling a page merely “
pitchforked into Gallic English the French paraphrase of Galland,” receiving no royalties or acknowledgment for their work, and ensuring that the first English translator or translators of the
Arabian Nights
from Galland's French version will remain forever unknown.

Released by the bookseller Andrew Bell, the English
Nights
quickly followed the French original by creating a sensation, with the title page containing the following brief, if inaccurate, introduction:

Arabian Nights Entertainments:
consisting of one thousand and one stories, told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the execution of a bloody vow he had made to marry a lady every day, and have her head cut off next morning…. Containing a better account of the customs, manners, and religion of the Eastern nations … than is to be met with in any author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Mss. By M. Galland, of the Royal Academy, and now done in English.

Here Bell seems to have taken Galland's titular statement that the tales are essentially “Arabian” at face value, compressing the English title even as his introduction acknowledges that the book's characters traverse national and ethnic lines. Perhaps there was also, as in France, an element of marketing involved, a sense that placing the name of a fabled region front and centre might increase sales. Whatever the reason, the French and English title changes would create a permanent association of the
Nights
with Arabia more than any other land.

Even this first pirated English translation was then pirated in turn. Soon after its London debut, the
Arabian Nights
appeared in similarly unauthorized editions in Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. “
Read Sindbad and you will be sick of Aeneas,” the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole assured a friend, praising the
Nights
for possessing “a wildness … that captivates.”

The book's popularity was no flash in the pan. Over the course of the next century Galland's
Nights
continued to be pirated, running to more than thirty editions in French and English alone. Frequent newspaper and journal serializations, as well as cheap “chapbook” editions of individual stories like “Sindbad” and “Aladdin,” contributed to a continuous dissemination of
Arabian Nights
' tales and characters throughout Europe and eventually the
greater world. By the end of the century, the
Nights
had leapfrogged the seas to reach North America and Australia. Little wonder, then, that during the Napoleonic Era an anthologist could note that much of Europe believed the
Nights
'

store house of ingenious fiction … imagery … [and] supernatural agency skillfully introduced” had “contributed more to the … delight of every succeeding generation … than all the works which the industry and … imagination of Europeans have provided for the instruction and entertainment of youth.

Just as important, the
Arabian Nights
' popularity was not restricted to the West, for the Galland edition was likewise pirated in Asia by being
re
translated into eastern languages in the decades following its appearance. Since it is now clear that all Arabic editions containing Galland's orphan stories appeared only after the publication of his
Nights
, at least some of this more recent Arabic material must have come from
Les mille et une nuits
. Nor was Arabic the only eastern language to see translations of Galland's work. A century and a half later, Sir Richard Burton claimed to have found three separate Hindi editions of Galland while in India, making the first European adaption of
The Thousand and One Nights
not only a western but also an eastern success story as well.

Then, the deluge. What no one involved with the book—not Galland, nor the
Nights
' hack translators, nor its thousands of readers—could foretell was an altogether remarkable set of circumstances that would see the work spawn a hydra-headed influence on western art and thought for many decades to come. At its publication, the
Arabian Nights
was a hugely popular storybook
in many languages, but little else. Yet by appearing at a critical juncture in East–West relations, the work not only provided enjoyment but also became a focal point for those oriental fantasies that had fascinated westerners for generations. Very quickly, it came to represent the common impression of the Muslim Orient like nothing else—an early indicator of the Enlightenment tendency to observe Asian societies through an approving glass. Eighteenth-century philosophers, disillusioned with the current state of European civilization, became inclined to praise Asian cultures as models for the West. The chinoiserie craze that began in the mid-seventeenth century saw European artistic styles influenced by Chinese themes and forms, and was an outgrowth of the near-reverence that the Enlightenment West accorded China. Likewise, the
Nights
made the world of Islam an enticing world of alien enchantment, different enough to be intriguingly strange, but sufficiently close for westerners to understand.

Admired as the
Nights
was, no one should believe that the western passion for oriental romance was due solely to its publication. Besides the cultural impact of the Bible, allusions to the East appear frequently in Elizabethan and Jacobean arts—think of
Othello
or the Moroccan prince in
The Merchant of Venice
—as part of a general European curiosity about the Orient. It is beyond doubt, however, that the glowing popular reception of the
Nights
served as a prime stimulus toward establishing the idea of an exotic eastern world as an enduring vision. Soon catchphrases like “genie in a bottle,” “magic carpet ride” and “Aladdin's lamp” entered common usage. There appeared
Arabian Nights
–themed balls and masques, and a clutch of western artists and composers began using “oriental” themes in their work. The developing English pantomime tradition frequently employed Sindbad, Ali Baba and especially Aladdin as stock characters—even today, “Aladdin” ranks second only to “Cinderella” as a “panto” show. Since there is no limit to
the number of wishes Aladdin's lamp may grant in the original tale, it was probably one of these early stage adaptions that introduced the “three wishes only” device to add suspense to Aladdin's drama.

Literary buccaneers were not the only ones looking to make some profit from the
Nights
' popular success. With the work setting a kind of bookish seal on Europe's burgeoning fascination with the East, it was inevitable that imitations and collections of competing eastern tales would arrive in the wake of
Les mille et une nuits
. Within a short time, other compendiums began appearing, chief among them François Pétis de la Croix's collection of translated
Turkish Tales
in 1707, followed three years later by a series of Persian stories pointedly entitled
Mille et une jours
—“A Thousand and One Days.”

The efforts of scholars like Galland and Pétis de la Croix were legitimate adaptations of genuine eastern folklore, but in sheer numbers they were no match for the series of endless knock-offs that appeared for more than a century after the
Nights
' first appearance. The exact number of such fictions is difficult to determine, but it is probable that Britain and France alone saw the publication of more than a thousand essays, short tales, novels and long poems. These were soon numerous enough to constitute a new genre of literature: the European “oriental tale” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Like knock-offs in general, many were forgettable dreck, written for no reason other than to cash in on the prevailing taste for opulent eastern melodrama. But better writers saw in the mock-oriental story scope for satire or allegory, using exotic locales and characters to poke fun at their own societies or addressing philosophical issues by employing fashionable eastern settings. A few of these fictions, like Samuel Johnson's
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
and James Justinian Morier's perennial favourite about a rascally Persian barber,
The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan
,
have become bona fide classics. But most are little more than poor men's versions of the
Nights
—sensationalist literature emphasizing the coarseness and licentiousness, as well as the mystery and the magic, present even in Galland's expurgated version.

Enough of these imitations appeared that a reaction against the
Nights
and its kin set in among the educated classes. This did nothing to dampen general enthusiasm for the work, but it did indicate that not everyone welcomed the
Arabian Nights
with high acclaim. A number of establishment figures saw the popular enthusiasm for the
Nights
, eastern tales and the oriental craze in general as nothing but a regrettable fad—quickly begun, quickly forgotten and of no particular value.

Voltaire, although he claimed to have read the
Nights
ten times and used oriental themes in many of his
philosophe
romances, still professed scorn for those mock-eastern tales enjoying such a vogue, calling them “
senseless stories that mean nothing.” Within a few years, Britain's Earl of Shaftesbury was making sneering references to the prevailing “Moorish fancy” in literature. “
Monsters and monsterland were never more in request,” Shaftesbury wrote, “and we may often see a philosopher, or wit, run a tale-gathering in these idle deserts as familiarly as the silliest woman or merest boy.”

This last phrase is suggestive of a belief among some Brits that there was something childish or even unmanly about reading the
Arabian Nights
and similar works, an early expression of the attitude of innate cultural superiority that would come to be criticized as “orientalism.” The fashion for eastern romance was thought to have something unbecomingly feminine in its nature—literature appropriate for a lady's fancy, perhaps, but hardly proper for more rational Enlightenment gentlemen.

Curiously, this was essentially the same attitude, centuries removed, as that of classical Islam, when upper-class court ladies in Baghdad or Cairo might read such works as the
Nights
for
enjoyment, but educated men thought them nonsense fit only for the hoi polloi. When Alexander Pope sent copies of the
Arabian Nights
to Bishop Francis Atterbury, Atterbury responded by sniffing that the work was likely “
the product of some Woman's imagination,” containing no moral that he could see, and dismissing the tales as things “so extravagant, monstrous, and disproportioned” that they were likely to give “a judicious eye pain.” Some who read too much into Galland's adaption even questioned the
Nights
' authenticity. Just before the French Revolution, the English critic James Beattie puzzled over

whether the tales be really Arabick [
sic
], or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty. If they be Oriental, they are translated with unwarranted latitude; for the whole tenor of the style is in the French mode: and the Caliph … and the Emperor of China, are addressed in … terms … usual at the court of France.

Whether in France, Britain or elsewhere, the public didn't care a button about establishment opinions. For the century and a half following the appearance of Galland's volumes, the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
bedazzled much of the West with its blend of the fantastic and the extraordinary. Even the most sober-minded of individuals were not immune to the book's charm. A telling anecdote concerns a distinguished lord advocate for Scotland, Sir James Stewart, who found his daughters reading the
Nights
one Saturday evening. Good Presbyterian that he was, the outraged father snatched the book from their hands with a stern Calvinist lecture against reading such frivolity on the eve of the Holy Sabbath. That was Sir James's mistake: actually putting his hands on the work. The next morning his family came downstairs, dressed for divine services, only to find their patriarch engrossed in reading the
Arabian Nights
, which he confessed sheepishly he had been doing all night long.