Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp. Anonymous
until the discovery of the actual Arabic originals so barbarously maltreated 8
This MS. is in the handwriting of of Sebbagh, the well-known Syrian collaborator of Silvestre de Sacy, and is supposed to have been copied by him at Paris between the years 1805 and 1810 for some European Orientalist (probably de Perceval himself) from a Baghdad MS. of the early part of the 18th century, of which it professes to be an exact reproduction, as appears from a terminal note, of which the following is a translation:
"And the finishing of it was in the first tenth (decade) of Jumada the Latter [in the] year one thousand one hundred and fifteen of the Hegira (October, 1703) in the handwriting of the neediest of the faithful 9 unto God 10 the Most High, Ahmed ibn Mohammed et Teradi, in the city of Baghdad, and he the Shafiy by sect and the Mosuli by birth and the Baghdadi by sojourn, and indeed he wrote it for himself and set upon it his seal, and God bless and keep our lord Mohammed and his companions! Kebikej 11 (ter)."
This MS. contains the three "interpolated" tales aforesaid, i.e. the Sleeper Awakened (Nights CCCXXXVII-LXXXVI), Zeyn Alasnam (Nights CCCCXCVII-DXIII) and Aladdin (Nights DXIV-XCI), the last two bearing traces of a Syrian origin, especially Aladdin, which is written in a much commoner and looser style than Zeyn Alasnam. The two tales are evidently the work of different authors, Zeyn Alasnam being incomparably superior in style and correctness to Aladdin, which is defaced by all kinds of vulgarisms and solecisms and seems, moreover, to have been less correctly copied than the other. Nevertheless, the Sebbagh text is in every respect preferable to that of Shawish (which appears to abound in faults and errors of every kind, general and particular,) and M. Zotenberg has, therefore, exercised a wise discretion in selecting the former for publication.
III.
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of M. Zorenberg's long and interesting introduction is a series of extracts from the (as yet unpublished) MS. Diary regularly kept by Galland, the last four volumes (1708–15) of which are preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale. These extracts effectually settle the question of the origin of the interpolated tales, as will be seen from the following abstract.
On the 25th March, 1709, Galland records having that day made the acquaintance of a Maronite scholar, by name Youhenna Diab, 12 who had been brought from Aleppo to Paris by Paul Lucas, the celebrated traveller, and with whom he evidently at once broached the question of the Nights, 13 probably complaining to him of the difficulty (or rather impossibility) of obtaining a perfect copy of the work; whereupon Hanna (as he always calls him) appears to have volunteered to help him to fill the lacune by furnishing him with suitable Oriental stories for translation in the same style as those already rendered by him and then and there (says Galland) "told me some very fine Arabian tales, which he promised to put into writing for me." There is no fresh entry on the subject till May 5 following, when (says Galland) "The Maronite Hanna finished telling me the tale of the Lamp." 14
Hanna appears to have remained in Paris till the autumn of the year 1709 and during his stay, Galland's Diary records the communication by him to the French savant of the following stories, afterwards included in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth volumes of the latter's translation, (as well as of several others which he probably intended to translate, had he lived,) 15 i.e. (May 10, 1709) "Babe Abdalla" and "Sidi Nouman," (May 13, 1709) "The Enchanted Horse," (May 22, 1709) "Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou," (May 25, 1709) "The Two Sisters who envied their younger Sister," (May 27, 1709) "All Baba and the Forty Thieves," (May 29, 1709) "Cogia Hassan Alhabbal" and (May 31, 1709) "Ali Cogia." The Maronite seems to have left for the East in October, 1709, (Galland says under date October 25, "Received this evening a letter from Hanna, who writes me from Marseilles, under date the 17th, in Arabic, to the effect that he had arrived there in good health,") but not without having at least in part fulfilled his promise to put in writing the tales communicated by him to Galland, as appears by the entry of November 3, 1710, "Began yesterday to read the Arabian story of the Lamp, which had been written me in Arabic more than a year ago by the Maronite of Damascus 16 whom M. Lucas brought with him, with a view to putting it into French. Finished reading it this morning. Here is the title of this tale, 'Story of Aladdin, son of a tailor, and that which befell him with an African Magician on account of (or through) a lamp.'" (The Diary adds that he began that evening to put his translation into writing and finished it in the course of the ensuing fortnight.) And that of January 10, 1711, "Finished the translation of the tenth volume of the 1001 Nights after the Arabic text which I had from the hand (de la main) of Hanna or Jean Dipi, 17 whom M. Lucas brought to France on his return from his last journey in the Levant." The only other entry bearing upon the question is that of August 24, 1711, in which Galland says, "Being quit of my labours upon the translation etc. of the Koran, I read a part of the Arabian Tales which the Maronite Hanna had told me and which I had summarily reduced to writing, to see which of them I should select to make up the eleventh volume of the Thousand and One Nights."
From these entries it appears beyond question that Galland received from the Maronite Hanna, in the Spring and Summer of 1709, the Arabic text of the stories of Aladdin, Baba Abdalla, Sidi Nouman and Cogia Hassan Alhabbal, i.e. the whole of the tales included in his ninth and tenth volumes (with the exception of The Sleeper Awakened, of which he does not speak) and that he composed the five remaining tales contained in his eleventh and twelfth volumes (i.e. Ali Baba, Ali Cogia, The Enchanted Horse, Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou and The Two Sisters who envied their younger Sister,) upon the details thereof taken down from Hanna's lips and by the aid of copious summaries made at the time. These entries in Galland's diary dispose, therefore, of the question of the origin of the "interpolated" tales, with the exception (1) of The Sleeper Awakened (with which we need not, for the present, concern ourselves farther) and (2) of Nos. 1 and 2a and b, i.e. Zeyn Alasnam, Codadad and his brothers and The Princess of Deryabar (forming, with Ganem, his eighth volume), as to which Galland, as I pointed out in my terminal essay (p. 264), cautions us, in a prefatory note to his ninth volume, that these two stories form no part of the Thousand and One Nights and that they had been inserted and printed without the cognizance of the translator, who was unaware of the trick that had been played him till after the actual publication of the volume, adding that care would be taken to expunge the intrusive tales from the second edition (which, however, was never done, Galland dying before the republication and it being probably found that the stranger tales had taken too firm a hold upon public favour to be sacrificed, as originally proposed); and the invaluable Diary supplies the necessary supplemental information as to their origin. "M. Petis de la Croix," says Galland under date of January 17, 1710, "Professor and King's Reader of the Arabic tongue, who did me the honour to visit me this morning, was extremely surprised to see two of the Turkish 18 Tales of his translation printed in the eighth volume of the 1001 Nights, which I showed him, and that this should have been done without his participation."
Petis de la Croix, a well-known Orientalist and traveller of the time, published in the course of the same year (1710) the first volume of a collection of Oriental stories, similar in form and character to the 1001 Nights, but divided into "Days" instead of "Nights" and called "The Thousand and One Days, Persian Tales," the preface to which (ascribed to Cazotte) alleges him to have translated the tales from a Persian work called Hezar [o] Yek Roz, i.e. "The Thousand and One Days," the MS. of which had in 1675 been communicated to the translator by a friend of his, by name Mukhlis, (Cazotte styles him "the celebrated Dervish Mocles, chief of the Soufis of Ispahan") during his sojourn in the Persian capital. The preface goes on to state that Mukhlis had, in his youth, translated into Persian certain Indian plays, which had been translated into all the Oriental languages and of which a Turkish version existed in the Bibliotheque Royale, under the title of Alfaraga Badal-Schidda (i.e. El Ferej bad esh Shiddeh), which signified "Joy after Affliction"; but that, wishing to give his work an original air, he converted the aforesaid plays into tales. Cazotte's story of the Indian plays savours somewhat of the cock and the bull and it is probable that the Hezar o Yek Roz (which is not, to my knowledge, extant) was not derived from so recondite a source, but was itself either the original of the well-known Turkish collection or (perhaps) a translation of the latter. At all events, Zeyn Alasnam, Codadad and the Princess of Deryabar occur in a copy (cited by M. Zotenberg), belonging to the Bibliotheque Nationale, of El Ferej bad esh Shidded (of which they form the eighth, ninth and sixth stories respectively) and in a practically identical form, except that in Galland's vol. viii. the two latter stories are fused into one. Sir