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are, however, very close to the fourteenth-century manuscript and similarlycontain only the nucleus and the very first part of “Qamar al-Zaman.”If the Syrian branch shows a fortunately stunted growth that helpedpreserve the original, the Egyptian branch, on the contrary, shows aproliferation that produced an abundance of poisonous fruits that provedalmost fatal to the original. First, there exists a plethora of Egyptian copies allof which, except for one written in the seventeenth century, are late, datingbetween the second part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenthcentury. Second, these copies delete or modify passages that exist in theSyrian manuscripts, add others, and indiscriminately borrow from each other.Third, the copyists, driven to complete one thousand and one nights, keptadding folk tales, fables, and anecdotes from Indian, Persian, and Turkish, aswell as indigenous sources, both from the oral and from the written traditions.One such example is the story of Sindbad, which, though early in date, is alater addition. What emerged, of course, was a large, heterogeneous,indiscriminate collection of stories by different hands and from differentsources, representing different layers of culture, literary conventions andstyles tinged with the Ottoman cast of the time, a work very different fromthe fundamentally homogeneous original, which was the clear expression ofthe life, culture, and literary style of a single historical moment, namely, theMamluk period. This is the more significant because the Ottoman period ismarked by a sharp decline in Arabic culture in general and literature inparticular.The mania for collecting more stories and “completing” the work ledsome copyists to resort even to forgery. Such is the case of none other than“The Story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.” This story is not among theeleven basic stories of the original work, nor does it appear in any knownArabic manuscript or edition, save in two, both written in Paris, long after ithad appeared in Galland’s translation. Galland himself, as his diaries indicate,first heard the story in 1709 from Hanna Diab, a Maromite Christian ofAleppo, who may have subsequently written it down and given it to Gallandfor his translation. The first time the story appeared in Arabic was in 1787, ina manuscript written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, namedDionysius Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis, a manuscript designed tocomplete the missing portions of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript.

The story appeared again in a manuscript written between 1805 and 1808, inParis, by Mikhail Sabbagh, a Syrian collaborator of Silvestre de Sacy.Sabbagh claimed to have copied it in turn from a Baghdad manuscript writtenin 1703. Such good fortune, in retrieving not one but two versions of a lostwonderful tale, might be cause for rejoicing, as it indeed was among thescholars. However, a careful examination of the two versions, both in thelight of the general style of the Nights and in the light of Galland’stranslation, leads to a less joyful conclusion. Chavis fabricated the text bytranslating Galland back into Arabic, as is manifest from his French syntaxand turns of phrase, and Sabbagh perpetuated the hoax by improvingChavis’s translation and claiming it to be a Baghdad version. And thisforgery was the source used by Payne and Burton for their own translationsof the story.The Printed EditionsIF THE HISTORY of the manuscripts is a confusing tale, that of the printededitions of The Thousand and One Nights is a sad comedy of errors. The firstedition was published by Fort William College in Calcutta, in two volumescomprising the first two hundred nights (vol. 1 in 1814; vol. 2 in 1818). Theeditor was one Shaikh Ahmad ibn-Mahmud Shirawani, an instructor ofArabic at the college. He pieced this edition together from a late Syrianmanuscript and a work containing classical anecdotes, choosing the texts atrandom. He deleted, added, and modified numerous passages and tried tochange, whenever he could, the colloquial to literary expres-sions. He editedas he pleased. Then came the Breslau edition, the first eight volumes ofwhich were published by Maximilian Habicht, between 1824 and 1838, andthe last four by Heinrich Fleischer, between 1842 and 1843. For reasonsknown only to himself, Professor Habicht claimed to have based his editionnot on a Syrian or an Egyptian but on a Tunisian manuscript, thus confusingthe scholars until they finally disproved the claim by discovering that he hadpatched the text together from copies of the fourteenth-century Syrianmanuscript and late Egyptian ones.It was on such a late Egyptian manuscript that the first Bulaq edition of1835 was exclusively based. It is a manuscript whose copyist, by culling,collecting, and interpolating numerous tales of recent vintage and written in a

late style, swelled the old text, and by subdividing the material, obtained onethousand and one nights, thus producing a “complete” version of the Nights,a version very different from the Mamluk original in substance, form, andstyle. The Bulaq editor, Abd al-Rahman al-Safti Al-Sharqawi, not content toedit and print an accurate text of the manuscript, took it upon himself tocorrect, emend, and improve the language, producing a work that was in hisjudgment superior in literary quality to the original. Then came the secondCalcutta edition, published in four volumes by William Macnaghten, between1839 and 1842. Edited by several hands, it was based on a late Egyptianmanuscript copied in 1829, with interpolations and with “corrections” in thesubstance and the style, according to the first Calcutta and the Breslaueditions. Thus “thoroughly edited” and “completed,” as its editors claimed, ithas ever since vied with the Bulaq edition in the estimation of scholars andgeneral readers, not to mention all the major translators. Thus “authentic”came to mean complete and, ironically, spurious. (For a full history of themanuscripts and printed editions, see Muhsin Mahdi’s Arabic introduction tohis edition of the text of the Nights, Alf Layla wa Layla, Leiden, 1984, and hisEnglish introduction in the forthcoming third volume.)The Mahdi EditionIT IS ONE of the curiosities of literary history that a work that has beencirculating since the ninth century, that has been heard and read for centuriesby young and old everywhere, and that has become a world classic shouldwait until very recently for a proper edition. This is curious yetunderstandable as one of the anomalies of comparative cultural studies.While the history of textual scholarship in the West has been, since theRenaissance, increasingly one of keen accuracy and authenticity, itscounterpart in the East, especially in the case of the Nights, has been one oferror and corruption, at the hands of Eastern and Western scholars alike, theresult of ignorance and contempt. It is all the more gratifying, therefore, thatthe most recent edition of the Arabic text of the Nights should be by far thebest. After years of sifting, analyzing, and collating virtually all availabletexts, Muhsin Mahdi has published the definitive edition of the fourteenthcentury Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Alf Layla wa Layla,Leiden, 1984). Mahdi fills lacunae, emends corruptions, and elucidatesobscurities; however, he refrains from providing punctuation and diacritical

marks or corrected spellings. What emerges is a coherent and precise work ofart that, unlike other versions, is like a restored icon or musical score, withoutthe added layers of paint or distortions, hence, as close to the original aspossible. Thus a long-standing grievance has been finally redressed, andredressed with a sense of poetic justice, not only because this edition redeemsall others from a general curse, but also because it is the work of a man whois at once the product of East and West. And it is particularly gratifying to mepersonally, because it has provided me with the text for my translation.Past TranslationsNOT SO FORTUNATE were the major translators of the work into English,Edward Lane (1839–41), John Payne (1882–84), and Richard Burton (1885–86). Lane based his translation on the Bulaq, the first Calcutta, and theBreslau; Payne on the second Calcutta and the Breslau; and Burton on theBulaq, the second Calcutta, and the Breslau editions. These translators didnot, as one might expect, compare the various editions to establish anaccurate text for their translations (assuming that, given what they had, such atask was possible); instead they deleted and added at random, or at will, fromthe various sources to piece together a text that suited their individualpurposes: in the case of Lane, a detailed but expurgated version; in the caseof Payne and Burton, versions that are as full and complete as possible. Ineffect, they followed the same Arabic editorial tradition, except that whereasthe editors of Bulaq and Calcutta produced a corrupt text in Arabic, thetranslators of London produced an even more corrupt text in English. Eventhe two less significant twentieth-century translations followed this pattern.Edward Poweys Mather based his English version (Routledge, 1937) on aFrench translation by J. C. Mardrus, which was based on the Bulaq andsecond Calcutta editions. Since he knew no Arabic, he altered the Frenchtext, ignorant of what he was doing to the Arabic or how far he had strayedfrom it. And N. J. Dawood, who translated a selection of tales (Penguin,1956), which includes less than three of the eleven basic stories of the Nights,followed the second Calcutta, “editing” and “correcting” here and there in thelight of the Bulaq edition.Interestingly, the only exception to this pattern is Galland himself, thevery first to translate the work in Europe (1704–17). His French translation of

the basic stories was based on none other than the fourteenth-century Syriantext, as well as other sources. But instead of following the text faithfully,Galland deleted, added, and altered drastically to produce not a translation,but a French adaptation, or rather a work of his own creation. He did succeed,however, in establishing the work as a classic, for no sooner had histranslation begun to appear than a Grub Street English version followed(1706–8), went into many editions, and was itself followed by othertranslations, pseudotranslations, and imitations, so numerous that by 1800there were more than eighty such collections. It was such hack versions thatinflamed the imagination of Europe, of general readers and poets alike, fromPope to Wordsworth. The Nights could shine in the dark.These translators did not deviate from the letter of the original becausethey did not know sufficient Arabic. On the contrary, a careful comparisonbetween any given Arabic passage and their own respective translation of itreveals an admirable command of Arabic diction, grammar, and syntax,except where the text itself poses severe problems, as it often does. Althoughthe tales are generally written in the conversational style of the storyteller,they modulate between the colloquial and the literary, and even ornate, withina given passage, from passage to passage, and from story to story, and bothtypes pose problems in regards to diction, grammar, and syntax. A greatmany words are thirteenth-century Syrian and Egyptian colloquial idioms,which have long since disappeared from usage or whose meanings have beenaltered; and many others are of Persian origin, either used without alterationor Arabized. The sentences are often ungrammatical, hence capable of severaldifferent and often contradictory readings. The typical structure is that of aninterminable running sentence, consisting of brief coordinated clauses, oftenwithout apparent regard for place, time, or causality. The translator istherefore forced to interpret and reorder the clauses in a subordinated andlogical sequence, in order to suit the European habits of reading and thinking,if his reader is to understand the passage at all. To make matters worse, thetext, including Mahdi’s, normally bears neither diacritical nor punctuationmarks. In Arabic, the diacritical marks distinguish one letter from another,thus differentiating between words that share the same letters but havedifferent roots and therefore different meanings. Thus a word may offer twovery different readings in a given sentence. This is not a problem when one of

the meanings is unlikely in the context, but when both are possible, thetranslator must choose a single interpretation. The diacritical marks alsoindicate the forms of conjugation and declension. Their absence, therefore,coupled with the faulty grammar of some sentences, makes every sentence anencounter, assuming, that is, that one always knows where a sentence or aunit of expression begins or ends, for the Arabic text uses no punctuation, noteven question marks.What makes a coherent reading or translation of such a text possible isan eye familiar with Arabic prose and an ear attuned to the rhythm of thespoken language, ideally the eye and ear of someone who reads, writes, andspeaks Arabic like a native. It is a wonder, therefore, that foreign translators,like Lane, Payne, and Burton, made so few mistakes, yet no wonder that theymade them. In diction, for instance, when they met words they could notunderstand, they often dropped them from their text. In grammar, amisreading, for instance, of the conjugation of the verb “to overtake,” whichalso means “to realize,” leads Burton to translate the refrain “But morningovertook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence,” as “And Shahrazadperceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.” Thisexample would seem innocuous enough were it not that it is repeated onethousand times and were it not that it spoils the dramatic poignancy of thesituation, when the morning, the hour of her execution, finally catches upwith Shahrazad. In syntax, reordering the clauses for a coherent reading oftenrequires knowledge of Arab life and culture. For example, the followingpassage, translated literally, reads:After a while, our mother also died, and left us three thousand dinars,which we divided equally among ourselves. I was the youngest. My twosisters prepared their dowries and got married.Burton translates it as follows:After a while my mother also deceased, leaving me and my sistersgerman three thousand dinars; so each daughter received her portion of athousand dinars and I the same, albe’ the youngest. In due course oftime, my sisters married with the usual festivities.But it should read:

After a while, our mother also died, leaving us three thousand dinars,which we divided equally among ourselves. Since I was the youngest ofthe three, my two sisters prepared their dowries and got married beforeme.For what is at issue here is not the Islamic law of inheritance but marriagecustoms in Arab society.Moreover, the problem for the translators was compounded in that, asoften as not, a given passage had already been altered by the editor of amanuscript or a printed edition or by both. For the tales, for all theirpopularity among the people, were regarded with condescension andcontempt by the Arab literati of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.These included the editors themselves, self-appointed men of taste andjudgment, who, trained during the period of the decline of Arabic literature,had little judgment and no taste. They regarded these folk tales asentertaining in substance but vulgar in style, and they undertook to improvethem according to their own light.Their method was to condense, amplify, or alter. They took a givenpassage, summarized it, and recast it in correct, polite, or literary Arabic,often sacrificing vivid details vital to the art of the story-teller for emptyacademic phrases or poetic diction. For instance, “The Story of theHunchback” opens with this passage:It is related, O King, that there lived once in China a tailor who had apretty, compatible, and loyal wife. It happened one day that they wentout for a stroll to enjoy the sights at a place of entertainment, where theyspent the whole day in diversions and fun, and when they returned homeat the end of the day, they met on the way a jolly hunchback. He wassmartly dressed in a folded inner robe and an open outer robe, withgathered sleeves and an embroidered collarband, in the Egyptian style,and sporting a scarf and a tall green hat, with knots of yellow silk stuffedwith ambergris. The hunchback was short, like him of whom the poet’Antar said:Lovely the hunchback who can hide his hump,Like a pearl hidden in an oyster shell,

A man who looks like a castor oil branch,From which dangles a rotten citric lump.He was busy playing on the tambourine, singing, and improvising allkinds of funny gestures. When they drew near and looked at him, theysaw that he was drunk, reeking of wine. Then he placed the tambourineunder his arm and began to beat time by clapping his hands, as he sangthe following verses:Go early to the darling in yon jug;Bring her to me,And fete her as you fete a pretty girl,With joy and glee,And make her as pure as a virgin bride,Unveiled to please,That I may honor my friend with a cupOf wine from Greece.If you, my friend, care for the best in life,Life can repay,Then at this moment fill my empty cup,Without delay.Don’t you, my tantalizer, on the plainThe gardens see? [W]hen the tailor and his wife saw the hunchback in this condition,drunk and reeking of wine, now singing, now beating the tambourine,they were delighted with him and invited him home to sup and drinkwith them that night. He accepted gladly and walked with them to theirhome.I have deliberately chosen this lengthy passage in order to show howdrastically the Egyptian editor reduces and excises (in this case two entire

poems) and to show the extent of the substance and flavor the reader missesas a result. Payne’s translation is accurate, but he uses the edited version, andso he reads:There lived once in the city of Bassora a tailor, who was open-handedand loved pleasure and merrymaking: and he was wont, he and his wife,to go out by times, a-pleasuring, to the public places of recreation. Oneday they went out as usual and were returning home in the evening,when they fell in with a hunchback, the sight of whom would make thedisappointed laugh and dispel chagrin from the sorrowful. So the

IT HAS BEEN some years now since as a little boy in Baghdad I used to listen to tales from The Thousand and One Nights. It sometimes seems like yesterday, sometimes like ages ago, for the