The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume I

Anonymous

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• Publié par: sean
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 43
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I by Anonymous Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I Author: Anonymous Translator: John Payne Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8655] [This file was first posted on July 30, 2003] Edition: 10 Language: English *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE BOOK OF THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND ONE NIGHT, VOLUME I *** Text scanned by JC Byers ; proofreading by JC Byers, Janelle Maiu, Coralee Sheehan, and Cameron Fruit Editorial Note: Project Gutenberg also has the translation of this work by Richard F. Burton in 16 volumes.THE BOOK OF THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND ONE NIGHT: Now First Completely Done Into English Prose and Verse, From The Original Arabic, By John Payne (Author of "The Masque of Shadows," "Intaglios: Sonnets," "Songs of Life and Death," "Lautrec," "The Poems of Master Francis Villon of Paris," "New Poems," Etc, Etc.). In Nine Volumes: VOLUME THE FIRST. London Printed For Subscribers Only 1901 Delhi Edition Contents of The First Volume. Introduction. Story of King Shehriyar and his Brother a. Story of the Ox and the Ass 1. The Merchant and the Genie a. The First Old Man's Story b. The Second Old Man's Story c. The Third Old Man's Story 2. The Fisherman and the Genie a. Story of The Physician Douban ab. Story of King Sindbad and his Falcon ac. Story of The King's Son and the Ogress b. Story of the Enchanted Youth 3. The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad a. The First Calender's Story b. The Second Calender's Story ba. Story of the Envier and the Envied c. The Third Calender's Story d. The Eldest Lady's Story e. The Story of the Portress 4. The Three Apples 5. Noureddin Ali of Cairo and His Son Bedreddin Hassan 6. Story of the Hunchback a. The Christian Broker's Story b. The Controller's Story c. The Jewish Physician's Story d. The Tailor's Story e. The Barber's Story ea. Story of the Barber's First Brother eb. Story of the Barber's Second Brother ec. Story of the Barber's Third Brother ed. Story of the Barber's Fourth Brother ee. Story of the Barber's Fifth Brother ef. Story of the Barber's Sixth Brother 7. Noureddin Ali and the Damsel Enis El Jelis 8. Ghanim Ben Eyoub the Slave of Love a. Story of the Eunuch Bekhit b. Story of the Eunich KafourPREFATORY NOTE. The present is, I believe, the first complete translation of the great Arabic compendium of romantic fiction that has been attempted in any European language comprising about four times as much matter as that of Galland and three times as much as that of any other translator known to myself; and a short statement of the sources from which it is derived may therefore be acceptable to my readers. Three printed editions, more or less complete, exist of the Arabic text of the Thousand and One Nights; namely, those of Breslau, Boulac (Cairo) and Calcutta (1839), besides an incomplete one, comprising the first two hundred nights only, published at Calcutta in 1814. Of these, the first is horribly corrupt and greatly inferior, both in style and completeness, to the others, and the second (that of Boulac) is also, though in a far less degree, incomplete, whole stories (as, for instance, that of the Envier and the Envied in the present volume) being omitted and hiatuses, varying in extent from a few lines to several pages, being of frequent occurrence, whilst in addition to these defects, the editor, a learned Egyptian, has played havoc with the style of his original, in an ill-judged attempt to improve it, producing a medley, more curious than edifying, of classical and semi-modern diction and now and then, in his unlucky zeal, completely disguising the pristine meaning of certain passages. The third edition, that which we owe to Sir William Macnaghten and which appears to have been printed from a superior copy of the manuscript followed by the Egyptian editor, is by far the most carefully printed and edited of the three and offers, on the whole, the least corrupt and most comprehensive text of the work. I have therefore adopted it as my standard or basis of translation and have, to the best of my power, remedied the defects (such as hiatuses, misprints, doubtful or corrupt passages, etc.) which are of no infrequent occurrence even in this, the best of the existing texts, by carefully collating it with the editions of Boulac and Breslau (to say nothing of occasional references to the earlier Calcutta edition of the first two hundred nights), adopting from one and the other such variants, additions and corrections as seemed to me best calculated to improve the general effect and most homogeneous with the general spirit of the work, and this so freely that the present version may be said, in great part, to represent a variorum text of the original, formed by a collation of the different printed texts; and no proper estimate can, therefore, be made of the fidelity of the translation, except by those who are intimately acquainted with the whole of these latter. Even with the help of the new lights gained by the laborious process of collation and comparison above mentioned, the exact sense of many passages must still remain doubtful, so corrupt are the extant texts and so incomplete our knowledge, as incorporated in dictionaries, etc, of the peculiar dialect, half classical and half modern, in which the original work is written. One special feature of the present version is the appearance, for the first time, in English metrical shape, preserving the external form and rhyme movement of the originals, of the whole of the poetry with which the Arabic text is so freely interspersed. This great body of verse, equivalent to at least ten thousand twelve-syllable English lines, is of the most unequal quality, varying from poetry worthy of the name to the merest doggrel, and as I have, in pursuance of my original scheme, elected to translate everything, good and bad (with a very few exceptions in cases of manifest mistake or misapplication), I can only hope that my readers will, in judging of my success, take into consideration the enormous difficulties with which I have had to contend and look with indulgence upon my efforts to render, under unusually irksome conditions, the energy and beauty of the original, where these qualities exist, and in their absence, to keep my version from degenerating into absolute doggrel. The present translation being intended as a purely literary work produced with the sole object of supplying the general body of cultivated readers with a fairly representative and characteristic version of the most famous work of narrative fiction in existence, I have deemed it advisable to depart, in several particulars, from the various systems of transliteration of Oriental proper names followed by modern scholars, as, although doubtless admirably adapted to works having a scientific or non-literary object, they rest mainly upon devices (such as the use of apostrophes, accents, diacritical points and the employment of both vowels and consonants in unusual groups and senses) foreign to the genius of the English language and calculated only to annoy the reader of a work of imagination. Of these points of departure from established usage I need only particularize some of the more important; the others will, in general, be found to speak for themselves. One of the most salient is the case of the short vowel fet-heh, which is usually written [a breve], but which I have thought it better to render, as a rule, by [e breve], as in "bed" (a sound practically equivalent to that of a, as in "beggar," adopted by the late Mr. Lane to represent this vowel), reserving the English a, as in "father," to represent the alif of prolongation or long Arabic a, since I should else have no means of differentiating the latter from the former, save by the use of accents or other clumsy expedients, at once, to my mind, foreign to the purpose and vexatious to the reader of a work of pure literature. In like manner, I have eschewed the use of the letter q, as an equivalent for the dotted or guttural kaf (choosing to run the risk of occasionally misleading the reader as to the original Arabic form of a word by leaving him in ignorance whether the k used is the dotted or undotted one,—a point of no importance whatever to the non-scientific public,—rather than employ an English letter in a manner completely unwarranted by the construction of our language, in which q has no power as a terminal or as moved by any vowel other than u, followed by one of the four others) and have supplied its place, where the dotted kaf occurs as a terminal or as preceding a hard vowel, by the hard c, leaving k to represent it (in common with the undotted kaf generally) in those