This blog is one reader’s journey through the complete Arabian Nights.
I was inspired to start on this marathon by Tahir Shah‘s wonderful In Arabian Nights, which blends marvellous stories from Morocco into his own nearly fantastical adventures.
In that book Shah recounts how his father gave away their precious Richard Burton edition of the Arabian Nights (because somebody asked him for it), and how miraculously he found another copy of the Burton edition in a most unlikely manner and place in Casablanca. These stories, he said, are like manna to him, the very bread of heaven. I determined to eat it, slice by slice.
I do not intend to relate or even paraphrase the stories, but to reflect and react to what I find of interest in them, while keeping some sort of a thread. Time will tell how effective this is. But it means a new reader can join in at any time and not feel that they have to read all the archives if they are to get anything out of it.
My text is the beautiful new three volume Penguin Classics The Arabian Nights ~ Tales of 1001 Nights translated by Malcolm Lyons, published in 2008. More than 2,600 pages. I expect to be entranced, but also distracted. I am hoping that this blog will keep me on course, and maybe provide entertainment and food for thought for others.
I read a children’s Arabian Nights a long time ago. I know of Sinbad, Scheherazade, Ali Baba, Aladdin, djinns and genies, flying carpets, magic lamps. Maybe as I read I will recognise other stories. But my recollections are vague. I have decided not to read any associated critical works alongside (though I have a few) but just to respond to the stories as I find them.
I hope you will enjoy them too.
Hm, I see your wonderful picture of a typewriter washed up on the beach, with little stones for keys – or are they keys themselves? Is it really a beach? (I wrote breack at first and then corrected it.)
At the same time I hear through the window the cry of an owl, twice, and note that it’s 4am; and wonder if it really is an owl.
Mysteries are pleasing, teasing. And this is the only advice i could give: to tell something, fictional and/or true, like the 1000+1.
It is really a beach, and really an old typewriter. I found it on a deserted beach in Connemara in 2007. Those are not stones, but some of the keys. How did they come to be scattered in the sand beside the typewriter? I have no idea. Was that really an owl you heard, or the voice of the muse?
I think it was really an owl. It hooted twice. They have different cries. Where I used to live, the same distance from the town centre, there were lots of owl cries but there were tall trees very near, on a prehistoric motte, or mound, within the museum grounds. Here it is downtown urban (Victorian factory district) though there are tall trees. Owls could feed on young rats, no shortage of those. We also have seagulls and red kites aplenty. They all have distinctive cries, of course. In the night it is normally quite silent, not even traffic noise. But then (especially Friday night / Saturday morning) there are sometimes astonishingly loud cries & many other noises of human provenance, betraying a wide variety of human joy and suffering.
The beached typewriter is lovely. Once I found under a hedgerow what I at first thought was a concert-size harp, but it was the innards of an upright piano, and not terribly photogenic actually, being half-buried under dead leaves.
I love the symbolism of this photo…an old, rusty typewriter, keys fallen off…but the stories never die, they live, on in the spoke word, in the wind, in our heads, on your blog.
Guyana Gyal, welcome! I am honoured that you came by. I’m glad you like my picture of the typewriter. I couldn’t believe my own eyes when I saw it.
I am now reading book three of the three-volume Dutch edition of the Arabian Nights, translated from Arabic by Richard van Leeuwen. Mesmerising and inspiring. This too has led to a website, not with musings, but with links….