Here is our Sunday morning video of a Tribute to Kay Nielsen, courtesy of joshje777. Enjoy! Check back next Sunday for the next in the series.
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Showing posts with label Arabian Nights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arabian Nights. Show all posts
Video Tribute to Kay Nielsen by joshje777
Library Essentials Month: The Arabian Nights: An Encyclopedia
My knowledge of The Arabian Nights is greater than the average person walking down the street, but not by too much. It has not been my focus of study and I have usually only explored further when I needed to know more about how a tale connected to one of the many European fairy tales I have studied or to read about Scheherazade, one of the most interesting women in folklore. So when I need help, I have a few carefully selected books on my shelf to reference, especially The Arabian Nights: An Encyclopedia (Two Volume Set)
by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen.For example, when I was working on Sleeping Beauties: Sleeping Beauty and Snow White Tales From Around the World
, I spent way too long trying to figure out the source for The Ninth Captain's Tale which is sometimes referenced as a Sleeping Beauty tale. With the help of the encyclopedia and some other detective work, I finally found an answer. I wrote about it last year. I was very happy and the encyclopedia guided me to the answers I had sought.About the book from the publisher:
The most comprehensive treatment of the Arabian Nights ever published, with more than 800 detailed encyclopedic entries and a wealth of authoritative essays and resources.It also provides an appendix with an AT System guide to the tales. Very helpful. It is now out of print, but still available used. Some universities also have online access to it through their databases since ABC-CLIO provides subscription services like that. I don't have easy access to those, so a paper version was my best choice. I don't use it all the time, but when I do, it saves me a lot of time and either answers my questions or sends me off in the right direction for my answer.
An ancient source of wisdom and perhaps the most pervasive Islamic influence on Western culture, the tales of the Arabian Nights have inspired the imagination of young and old. From fantastic characters to love and magic powers, these tales have stimulated creative works of Western literature, art, architecture, music, and popular culture for many centuries.
The tales of the Arabian Nights have long been the focus of scholarly research and critique, but no English language work has ever attempted an all-embracing treatment of them. The fruit of years of research, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference work introducing both the Arabian Nights and the context of their genesis and aftermath in Near Eastern, European, and world culture.
Editors Ulrich Marzolph, one of the world's foremost scholars of Near Eastern narrative culture, and Richard van Leeuwen, a prominent scholar of the Arabian Nights, present detailed, authoritative, and up-to-date research on virtually all aspects of the tales, including major protagonists, themes, important translations, textual history, adaptations, reworkings, works inspired by the Arabian Nights, and aspects of literary theory, and provide extensive bibliographies for each tale. In addition to the 800+ encyclopedic entries and numerous essays, the work introduces research that has not previously been published, making it an invaluable resource to scholars, educators, students, and the general public, as well as an essential addition to the core collection of academic and public libraries.
Features
• Includes 800+ encyclopedic entries covering all aspects of the Arabian Nights
• Begins with a fascinating introduction and a variety of essays by renowned scholars, presenting areas of pivotal interest and concern
• Includes a concordance of tales in different editions and translations
• Provides an extensive bibliography, featuring reference works published in English and other languages
Highlights
• The most comprehensive reference work on the subject
• Combines detailed information with impeccable research drawn from primary sources and previous work
• Written by leading scholars of the Arabian Nights
• Provides up-to-date, accessible information on virtually all aspects of the tales
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, in Rhyme (Calla Editions)
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, in Rhyme (Calla Editions)
is another new release in Dover's Calla Editions line. This one is by Arthur Ransome and illustrated by Thomas Mackenzie. I'm not as familiar with this book but I have been charmed with what I have seen. Arthur Ransome was a literary rock star in his day. Mackenzie is not as well known as his contemporaries. His work for this book is beautiful and comparable to Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen. 
Book description:
From the elegant typography and silhouetted endpapers to the twelve color plates and the addition of myriad decorative elements — ornamental heads, initials, silhouettes, partial borders, and much more — this hardcover edition is a unique presentation and a design triumph. Ransome's charming verse rendering, combined with Mackenzie's superb achievement, brings the tale of Aladdin to life in a new idiom.
Whatever Gets You through the Night by Andrei Codrescu
Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
by Andrei Codrescu (Kindle edition
) is a new book released this month by Princeton University Press.All I have to share is the publisher's promotional material provided below. So there have been a lot of Arabian Nights materials released this past year. Should I devote a week to Arabian Nights? Anyone here interested in that? I haven't been able to see the BBC documentary since I am stateside but I have other materials to share.
Book description from the publisher:
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."--Whatever Gets You through the Night
Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling--one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd--and so is the story Codrescu tells.
From the Inside Flap
"Like a supercomputer concealed inside an exotic, aphrodisiac fruit, Codrescu's retelling of this ancient bawdy wonderwork ends up by surprisingly calculating the future of our race."--Tom Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
"This extraordinary rewriting of the Arabian Nights is a tour de force. Andrei Codrescu writes with verve, eloquence, and a fervent imagination."--Jack Zipes, adapter of the Signet Classics
Arabian Nights
"This is a masterpiece of storytelling that could find its place alongside the fairy-tale works of Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and Salman Rushdie. Andrei Codrescu gives readers a new and highly entertaining experience of Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights."--Donald Haase, editor of Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies
"Andrei Codrescu's brilliant retelling of the Arabian Nights is of the same caliber as Borges's Ficciones. A pleasure to read, it has the lightness, strength, and sparkle of a spider's web."--Cristina Bacchilega, author of Postmodern Fairy Tales
Richard E Grant unravels origins of The Arabian Nights
In conjunction with the airing of Secrets of The Arabian Nights on BBC Four, BBC News has an article about the Arabian Nights, Richard E Grant unravels origins of The Arabian Nights. It's a great overview article and here's an excerpt of some of the highlights:
The tales have their roots in oral storytelling thousands of years ago including folk tales from India and mystical stories from PersiaThere is also a short 2 minute video preview on the article page but it doesn't have an embedding option, so I can't share it here, but it wasn't blocked for North American viewers.
They were carried and spread by traders travelling on the great trade routes of the East where they began to take shape
The oral stories were collected and written down in the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo
In the 10th Century, an Arab historian recorded the tales and called them A Thousand Nights
The earliest manuscript of the tales is in Arabic and was written in Syria in the 14th Century
French traveller and scholar Antoine Galland translated it from Arabic in to French in the 1600s
He began with Sinbad the Sailor, which was an immediate sensation in Parisian high society
After fans stood outside his house and demanded more, he is believed to have written more stories and embellished others, such as Ali Baba and Aladdin
In 1706 an anonymous translation of Galland's book called The Arabian Nights arrived in Britain
Records show the first theatrical performance of Aladdin was held in 1788 in London's Covent Garden
Secrets of The Arabian Nights on BBC Four
If you are in the UK, Secrets of The Arabian Nights is on BBC Four 21 April 2100 BST. Here's the description:
The Arabian Nights first arrived in the West 300 years ago, and ever since then its stories have entranced generations of children and seduced adults with a vision of an exotic, magical Middle East. Actor and director Richard E Grant wants to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination.Now I only hope this will be available in some format in the U.S. sometime in the near future...
He travels to Paris to discover how the stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin were first brought to the West by the pioneering Arabist Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. The Nights quickly became an overnight literary sensation and were quickly translated into all the major European languages. Richard then travels to Cairo to explore the medieval Islamic world which first created them.
He quickly finds that some of the stories can still be deeply controversial, because of their sexually-explicit content. Richard meets the Egyptian writer and publisher Gamal al Ghitani, who received death threats when he published a new edition of the book.
He also finds that the ribald and riotous stories in the Nights represent a very different view of Islam than fundamentalism. Can the Nights still enrich and change the West's distorted image of the Arab world?
Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights by Robert Irwin
Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (Studies in the Arcadian Library)
by Robert Irwin is officially released today. I have not seen a copy of it but it sounds fascinating for any Arabian Nights enthusiast or illustration in general. I will someone would produce a volume like this on fairy tale illustration!Book description from the publisher:
In this richly-illustrated book, illustrations of various Western editions of The Arabian Nights from the eighteenth to the twentieth century are presented and analysed. Visions of the Jinn is simultaneously a closely-focused study of a special case in the history of book illustration, an account of the evolution of an important strand of visual fantasy and a presentation of a hitherto neglected area of Orientalism. Some of the artists - Dulac, Dore, Brangwyn - are famous. Many others, such as Coster or Letchford, are almost totally unknown. In the course of the book, the discussion also reveals much about the visual discovery of the Near East in modern times. This volume will make an important contribution both to the history of book illustration and, more generally, to the history of the book. His analyses of the individual illustrators, mainly English but also French and German can be regarded as a contribution to art history.The Guardian also ran a recent article about the book by Irwin at The Arabian Nights: a thousand and one illustrations. Here's an excerpt:
A lady on a divan telling stories to a turbaned sultan; men with scimitars running down a dark and narrow street; a jinni issuing like a vast dark cloud from a flask; a prince in a pavilion guarded by lions; a veiled lady at the entrance to a shop; a young man on a flying carpet circling over a domed palace; a man clinging to driftwood in a stormy sea . . . These days, thanks to illustrated children's books, comics, films and video games, people are much more likely to have a sense of what the world of The Arabian Nights should look like than to have actual knowledge of the stories themselves. It was not always so. The first edition of The Arabian Nights had no pictures, and even when, in the late 18th century, fully illustrated editions began to be published, their illustrations gave little sense of the exotic medieval Arab environment in which the stories were set. Only from the 19th century onwards did some illustrators try to get Arab buildings and costumes right.The article is quite lengthy and informative, so do click through to read it all if it interests you.
In 1701 the orientalist and antiquarian Antoine Galland published a translation from Arabic into French of "The Voyages of Sindbad". The translation was well received and since Galland had been told that "The Voyages of Sindbad" were part of a much larger collection of stories known as Alf Layla wa Layla, or "The Thousand and One Nights", he located a three or four-volume manuscript of this work and set about translating it. His translation, published in 12 volumes in the years 1704-17 was a raging success. His Les mille et une nuit was not received as a collection of children's stories (nor should it be). On the contrary, it was read and enthused over by courtiers and intellectuals in Versailles and Paris, and Versailles and Paris set the fashions for the rest of Europe. So translations of Galland into English, Italian, Russian and other languages soon followed. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Addison, Johnson and Goethe were among the 18th-century writers whose work was heavily influenced by the Nights. The Nights had a crucial role in shaping the origins and evolution not just of fantasy literature, but also of the realistic novel.
Copyright was not policed in the 18th century and books that were successful were almost invariably reissued in pirate editions. Between 1714 and 1730 a series of pirate editions of Galland's translation were printed in the Hague. Each of the 12 volumes had a frontispiece by David Coster, a Dutch artist. Since Coster had no notion of the medieval Islamic world as something alien and strange, his engravings depicted the characters in the stories in European dress. King Shahriyar looks very comfortable in his western-style four-poster bed as he sits up listening to stories told by Sheherazade. The only concession to the exotic is that he has a loosely tied turban as an item of nightwear. The relatives of Gulanar the Mermaid are welcomed into what looks like a French palace and the genie summoned up by Aladdin is merely a very large man in a tattered robe.
More Arabian Nights from Robert Irwin:
Fairytale Reflections (12) John Dickinson at SMoST
Fairytale Reflections (12) John Dickinson was yesterday's weekly post at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.
Dickinson chose to write about The Arabian Nights for his personal reflections. I especially enjoyed his thoughts on Scheherazade, my favorite character from the tales. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite. As always follow the link to read more about Dickinson's own work as well as the full piece:
And Scheherazade herself. The young woman who, night after night, tells the stories to her husband the Caliph, knowing that if she ever loses his interest she will be executed in the morning like all his other wives before her. In the sweltering darkness she whispers to him, and he listens with his head propped on silken pillows as she ends one tale and begins another, only to fall silent just as her royal murderer is begging for more. Young as she is, she has mastered the art of the cliffhanger.And covers of some of John Dickinson's books, too. I keep wanting to use his full name since he is Peter Dickinson's
(I never asked myself, when I had that yellow book in my hands, what else she might have known about amusing men in bed. Nor did I wonder if the Caliph’s problem with women might have stemmed from some very private little problem of his own, and the reason the stories worked for him was because nothing else was going to. Sad creature that I am, I can think these things now. )
A thousand stories! I’m a storyteller myself, and used to being asked about my ideas. But where did she get all hers from? Maybe she walked at dawn through in the peacock gardens, her brain dull from fear and lack of sleep, plotting the twists and turns that would keep her alive for one night more. That story about the sailor went well. It must be worth a sequel or two. Is seven pushing it too far? All right, but what’s he going to do on his seven voyages? (Bird flies by with mouse dead in its claws) That’s it! Birds! Big birds, big enough to feed on elephants! That’ll make him sit up. That will get me one more dawn like this. One more…
son and I don't want confusion to develop:
Sleeping Beauty, The Ninth Captain's Tale, and The Arabian Nights
As all of you regular readers know by now, I've been working on Sleeping Beauties for several months now. It is a collection of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty tales gathered from many sources.
One of the stories I found and decided to translate was "Histoire du prince amoureux" or "The Story of the Prince in Love." (I wanted to call it "The Lovestruck Prince," but didn't out of my desire to give as accurate a translation as possible. The tale is very bare bones and I wanted to keep the flavor of it.) The tale appears in Guillaume Spitta-Bey's Contes Arabes Modernes first published in 1883. Anyway, as I was translating it, I kept thinking it sounded a little familiar, but at this point in the process, it's very difficult to keep so many of these tales separate in my brain. So I dismissed my suspicions and kept working.
Now as I have been finalizing the list of tales to be included in the collection, I reread "The Ninth Captain's Tale" which appears on the internet in a few places in full text such as on Ashliman's site and again on this one. It was on my list to investigate further since the earliest version I've found was published in 1923 by Powys Mathers as an English translation of J. C. Mardrus's Arabian Nights, just shy of definite public domain limits. Although it is thought to be out of copyright by many, I wasn't sure. The tale appeared virtually nowhere else and was a little mystery of the Arabian Nights that I often try to avoid, not being well-versed in that area of scholarship.
Now Spitta-Bey had explained in his introduction to Contes Arabes Modernes that his tale was collected from his Egyptian cook, Hassan, who in turn had heard it from one of the many women storytellers during his childhood, such as his mother, aunts or their friends. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more.
The answer is quite simple actually. Mardrus was less than truthful about the sources for his collection of tales. Arabian Nights scholar Victor Chauvin states that Mardrus pretty much "lifted" many of Spitta-Bey's tales from Contes Arabes Modernes, embellished them with more literary touches and passed them off as Arabian Nights tales. After all, Mardrus must have reasoned, they came from Egypt, right?
So, for inquiring minds, there is a reason why "The Ninth Captain's Tale" is so obscure or unknown in most Arabian Nights collections. It doesn't belong there. It is an Egyptian tale collected from an Egyptian cook sometime prior to 1883.
This is not to dismiss the tale's inclusion as an ATU-410 Sleeping Beauty tale. It is a valid tale with an interesting composition. However, it is not an Arabian Nights tale and will not be discussed as such in most Arabian Nights studies. Trying to learn much about it through those sources will be frustrating and overall fruitless.
That said, my translation of "The Story of the Prince in Love" will appear in Sleeping Beauties. It is from Spitta-Bey's French text--his Contes offers both the Arabic and the French--and is very bare bones. Spitta-Bey even apologizes for such in his introduction, explaining his desire to be literal and accurate over literary and entertaining, for "elegance of diction was sacrificed for accuracy". He further explains that Hassan was illiterate, but highly intelligent with an excellent memory. Thus he didn't use literary phrasing in his storytelling, so his personal style was straightforward. Thus my translation is not flowery and almost painfully plain itself.
However, the Mardrus/Mathers version was embellished and is a prettier if less accurate version of the tale. The overall particulars are the same, but the manner of their delivery is different and overall more pleasing for entertainment and even understanding. Mardrus was beloved in his time for his version of Arabian Nights although his work is usually considered "beneath" consideration these days by scholars due to his methods and casual hiding of them.
And that's the story of "The Ninth Captain's Tale." This is known by many Arabian Nights scholars but not necessarily the world at large for I didn't find an overall helpful explanation in this democratic world we call the internet. Now it is here for people to find and learn more about it.
Now if only the questions and answers for Histoire de Troïlus et de Zellandine as well as Baudouin Butor's Le Roman de Pandragus et Libanor were nearly as easy...
Arabian Nights and Marina Warner
I'm a few days behind on this--playing catch up after being sick--but here's Do the tales of the Arabian Nights have resonance for audiences today? Marina Warner warms to the RSC's production of Arabian Nights by Marina Warner, found at The Guardian. (The best newspaper for fairy tale related articles. Someone there shares our interests!)
Here's a passage from the article, but you have to click through to read it all:
The first translation of One Thousand and One Nights into English, under the title Arabian Nights' Entertainments, instantly sparked a craze when it appeared at the beginning of the 18th century, and set the tone for the stories' successful entrance into the history of drama and performance. The first Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp was performed at Drury Lane in London in the 1780s, with designs by Philippe de Loutherbourg, the artist who a few years before had created a fabulous Oriental mise-en-scène for William Beckford's 21st birthday party, which combined séance, orgy, gothic ruins and private theatricals. This inspired Beckford's original Arabian Nights fantasy, the novel Vathek, which is bathed, like the party, in what he recalled was "a strange, necromantic light". Since those days of heady dreams, shows such as Aladdin or Ali Baba have taken an ever more, and more rudely, comic turn. Their bawdy rough-and-tumble does reflect a strain of the multilayered Nights stories; but it's still the case that the traditional panto gives a false sense of the stories, missing the riches of their poetry, enchanted atmosphere, protean originality and endlessly ingenious narrative logic.
The book's earliest readers in France belonged to a courtly world that hardly distinguished between performance and ordinary round, so stylised and ornamented was the royal day at Versailles or in noblemen and women's hotels particuliers, where the first exclamations of delight greeted the fantastic tales of One Thousand and One Nights. But very quickly, the book's storytelling devices were taken over by other voices placed at different, dissenting angles to power: Elizabeth Inchbald and Frances Sheridan put on Oriental disguise to satirise sexual hypocrisy and social conventions; Voltaire, Addison and Swift also found they could use the mode to mock and attack their targets. In the theatre especially, the sheer abundance of the plots of the Nights opened up possibilities: the book presented magical twists and turns that intrinsically lent themselves to high-spirited performance and to technical experiment. The history of the Nights on the stage is consequently intertwined with some brilliant early stagecraft for transformation scenes, flying machines, conjuring illusions, innovatory limelight and other effects (in Islington in the 1890s, the genies in Aladdin were called after the new gases, Paraffin, Benzoline and Colza).
And once again, if you haven't read From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner, well, you really must.
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