Rana Kabbani - a voice through the night(s).

Floating between Cocktail Hour Glamour and Alexa Chung's left breast on the cover of June's UK Vogue are the words Road to Revolution - One Woman's Journey. They point to a four page article by Damascene writer Rana Kabbani about the Arab Spring. She talks about the horrors of living in a police state (in this case a Ba'ath party controlled Syria), the good people that stand up to a regime at great personal cost and the rejection of fear that is moving through the Arab world unifying people and overthrowing governments. Kabbani describes her family's revolutionary history from her grandfather, Tawfik Kabbani, who organised the strikes that were instrumental to the downfall of the French occupation to her own decision to write outspokenly about events in her home country.


She also touches on the slant of the Western media about some prominent Arab women: "Queen Rania of Jordan remains flavour-of-the-month abroad, no doubt for sounding so unthreateningly "Western", when at home she is pilloried for the corruption that shames a country struggling with poverty under a repressive monarchy." This isn't the first time that Kabbani has been vociferous about the way that the Arab world and its diverse peoples are represented by western writers - she is a vehement critic of the Arabian Nights.


In her essay The Arabian Nights as an Orientalist Text which fronts The Arabian Nights Encyclopaedia (and is an abridged version of some themes from her book Imperial Fictions: Europes Myths of Orient) Kabbani argues that The Arabian Nights was "manufactured" by Antoine Galland's propensity to dwell on his idea of a violent and sensual Orient with repeated imagery of "the cruel and vengeful eastern male" repressing the captive female. The fact that the readership embraced the book as a realistic depiction and a true translation "of a text of Arabic letters" shows an "ignorant neglect of the rich traditions of classical and contemporary Arabic letters (and) is a reflection of the West's political and cultural contempt for the Arab World, and for the Muslim world in general"
 
This imagined Orient wasn't benign because "depicting Eastern peoples, however colourful their attire or exotic their habitat, as intrinsically slothful, violent, sexually obsessed, and incapable of sound self-government made it seemed justified, even imperative, for the imperialist to step in and rule them".

The first night.

The Arabian Nights starts with the tale around which all of the others swirl:

It tells of the betrayed, misogynist King Shahriyar who, in reaction to his wife's infidelity, spent three years bedding virgins and executing them at daybreak. Enter Scheherazade, the well read daughter of the King's vizier who, worried for her father's life if he could not keep supplying Shahriyar with young girls, begged to be married to him herself. The post-coital, restless King agreed to be told a story and Scheherazade started with the tale of The Merchant and the Jinni  finishing just before dawn with the words "How can this compare with what I shall tell you this coming night?"

Intrigued, the King postponed the execution and for the next thousand nights Scheherazade told him a whirl of stories within stories full of (in the words of A.S. Byatt) "...everything a tale should have. Sex, death, treachery, vengeance, magic, humour, wit, surprise and a happy ending". It was for Byatt "the greatest story ever told" and ended three children later with Scheherazade's life being spared.

When is a translation not a translation?

A translation's not a translation when the words and meaning have been deliberately tinkered with to the extent that it becomes a new work of fiction with translator as author. This is exactly what happened with Mille et une Nuits. 

In 1704 French Orientalist Antoine Galland started to publish Mille et une Nuits. This text was a "translation" of various manuscripts that he had collected during his travels which had sought to preserve oral folktales traditional in India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt. The problem was that he didn't just translate them; he did a lot of tinkering too. (There's also a question about the suitability of transmitting the meaning of oral folktales through manuscripts but that's a story for another night). He made clear choices about what was left in, what was omitted and what was exaggerated to make sure that Mille et une Nuits would be suitable for and popular with his early 18th Century European readership.

The language shifted from folktale coarse to a stiff and regal French and Galland tried to save the ladies some blushes - explicit reference to the Queen's sexual infidelity was removed from the frame tale.

But the tinkering which has had an impact that has buffeted through the last three centuries is his propensity to dwell on European stereotypes of the East. Galland palpitated with excitement at imagery of harems and retributive violence that made up his imagined Orient - even when he travelled he seemed fixated by instances of sensuality and cruelty. The frame story itself has just about every reductive European image of the East poured into it - a despotic King is ruling a decadent court and sleeping with a different virgin every night before cruelly killing them.

In his introduction, Galland assured his readers that the Orient of Mille et une Nuits was "faithful and realistic". And presto - Galland's made up world became the reality for readers.

Stereotypes reinforce themselves with repetition and the Mille et une Nuits lit the touch paper for an Arabian Nights mania that swept through Europe and every writer that read the "translation" and repeated the false imagery in his or her own work compounded this invented East.

But today's imagery is more realistic, right? It would seem from this Ray Harryhausen quote that Galland's "translation" is still having it's wicked way in Hollywood "When you are making a picture about the Arabian Nights, there are certain things that you are going to have which are repetitous like a sword and a turban".