Book review: Marvellous Thieves reveals local voices and sources of The Arabian Nights

NYU Abu Dhabi professor Paulo Lemos Horta’s book examines the role of ‘storytellers, translators and cultural insiders’ whose accounts were cannibalised by the Arabian Nights’ early European translators.

An engraving of Aladdin from Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights (1840 edition).  DeAgostini / Getty Images
Powered by automated translation

About the only thing that one can say with any great certainty about Alf Layla wa-Layla or Thousand and One Nights is that it's one of the world's great story collections. Princes, sorcerers, beggars and jinn romp across its pages. Blood is spilt. Passions are roused. Dark plots are sometimes thwarted but oft-times not. Children are fascinated by its colour and fantastical premises. Adults, who stare long and hard, can find universal life-­lessons underpinning the marvellous inventiveness of its authors.

Authorship is the point at which the Gordian knot of Nights' scholarship begins to tighten. Is it possible, let alone necessary, to narrow the stories' myriad sources? Is there an original body of tales? How did the stories travel from their probable origins in Sanskrit literature and pre-Islamic Persian fables to Arabia in the 9th century, before landing in the hands of a few, now-famous European translators?

It's the latter, most recent part of this centuries-long process of cultural exchange that clearly fascinates Paulo Lemos Horta, an assistant professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi and now the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. In it he has undertaken his own work of detection to look past the established characters in the production of the Arabian Nights, the name given to the European version of Thousand and One Nights in the 18th and 19th centuries, and examine the role of "storytellers, translators and cultural insiders" upon whom Antoine Galland, Edward William Lane and Richard Francis Burton relied.

But where to begin? Horta makes a strong case for the importance of unmasking these hitherto voiceless sources in his study of Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite traveller from Aleppo, whom Galland met in Paris in 1709. Galland, the first French translator of the Arabian Nights, who had travelled extensively in the Levant, has long been credited for his stylish, literary rendering of "The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp". Aladdin does not appear in the Arabic manuscript that Galland relied upon for his translation, but his diary notes a meeting with Diyab, who is also the source of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves". Horta's own magic in reading Diyab's recently discovered memoir is not to presume that Galland embellished the tales told by Diyab thanks to his knowledge of Arabia but, rather, to wonder whether it was Diyab who drew on his own wanderings from Aleppo to Paris to colour the tale. In saying so, Horta overturns assumptions of authorship: Galland – and later, Lane and Burton – become collaborators instead.

An almost forgotten and unfinished English translation of the Nights by Henry Torrens, a secretary in Britain's Indian empire bureaucracy, is another rich source that Horta mines to give historical context to the colonising nature of European translations.

Torrens began his work translating the Macan manuscript, which was held by the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, from 1836-37, a full year before Lane, who is usually credited with producing the first full English translation from an Arabic original (1838-1840). A debate was then raging over whether the British Empire should educate its foreign subjects in English or speak to them in their native languages; the printing of a new English version of the story collection when the Thousand and One Nights was already available in Persian and Urdu, Horta argues, should be seen for its "potential to fundamentally alter the way in which the story collection was read in colonial India".

In his revealing biography of Torrens, Horta has the opportunity to explore the mysterious provenance of the Macan manuscript, which appeared in the estate of a British officer and Arabist in 1836. The Macan manuscript is the only Arabic version to offer the full 1,001 nights of storytelling and, as Horta says, Torrens attempted to reproduce its poetic sensibilities. His efforts act as a counterpoint to Lane, who was more comfortable playing the ethnographer than Nights' translator, and who plumped for an oddly scriptural style. Horta is fascinating as he outlines Lane's relationship with Osman, a Scottish soldier enslaved after the 1809 Anglo-Turkish War and simply known as the Ottoman Scot, who helped the English gentleman to blend in on the restive streets of Cairo.

Explorer, soldier, diplomat, Orientalist and "self-mythologiser" extraordinaire, Burton falsely claimed to have begun his own English translation of the Nights during his travels in the 1850s, using invented archaisms to "foreignize" his work – not to render "the complete reproduction of the original" as he said. Horta lists Burton's many such "unfacts", not to mention his arrogance and resort to plagiarism, with coolness, skewering contemporary accounts of his gift for cultural assimilation in favour of the help lent by munchis (Indian teachers and scribes). "For Burton, the practice of translation was part of the politics of knowing and governing other cultures." In his commentaries, however, Horta describes Burton as "uniquely capable", a man for whom the Nights became a prism of his own travels and experiences.

In writing a biography of 200 years of Nights' translation, with its multiplicity of voices, sources, contexts and prejudices, Horta has breathed life into another great story to emerge from the Thousand and One Nights.

Clare Dight is the editor of The Review.