Sindbad: And Other Stories from the Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition)

This book is the follow-up companion to Haddawy's masterful Arabian Nights, and both volumes are indispensable to anyone who loves this famous collection of stories. As Haddawy explains, the need for this separate collection is made necessary by the Night's curious history....

When the work was first written down in the 1400s, it was given the title "The 1,001 Nights"--the length of time Shahrazad beguiled King Shahrayar with her wondrous tales. Despite this lofty title, the early manuscripts uniformly end after about 300 nights. It appears no one in the Muslim world minded this inconsistency, and the number 1,001 was taken figuratively to mean "an infinite number." When Europeans first "discovered" the work in the 1700s, however, they assumed these early manuscripts were incomplete and set out to "finish" the work by adding enough tales to reach the necessary 1,001 nights--drawn from other collections, folklore or brand-new stories written to order. Among these later additions are several stories that have, paradoxically, become some of the most famous, best-loved tales of all: Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.

This leads to a difficult situation when translating the Nights. If your goal is to accurately and authentically translate the work, do you include these subsequent stories? Although they may not have been part of the original manuscript, these tales have been associated with the Nights for 300 years... should that count for anything?

When Haddawy first set out to translate the Nights, he chose not to include anything outside of the original core collection of tales. He made an excellent case for doing so--the original stories have a thematic uniformity and high literary merit, as they come from one of the greatest periods of Islamic literature. The subsequent stories, while entertaining, have a hodge-podge of ideas and themes and were quite often put together by literary hacks simply to take up space.

Still, some of those stories are too good (and too popular) to abandon altogether. That brings us to Haddawy's follow-up volume that puts forth exquisite translations of a handful of stories that, while outside the original collection, have come to define the Nights for the general public. Included are Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sindbad and the story of Qamar al-Zaman. All of the virtues of the first volume are carried over to this one--the translation could not be improved upon and the introduction is excellent. Besides being authentic, Haddawy's renditions are also vivid and immediate, without any of the purple patches found in Burton or other Victorian translations. In fact, as a credit to Haddawy's skills as a translator, you can distinguish the subtle differences in tone and style between these stories, which came from separate sources. I don't know how to describe this other than to say that there are moments in Aladdin when you can feel the influence of the roughly contemporaneous Charles Perrault (natural enough since the story was first introduced in a French version of the Nights), which is not felt in, say, Sindbad (which was drawn from an Egyptian manuscript).

This is a HUGELY enjoyable read that you will want to return to again and again.