The Thousand and One Translations

The Guardian has an interesting article today about one of the seminal translations of world literature--The 1,001 Arabian Nights. The article notes that the book was a "heavy influence" on writers including Montesquieu, Voltaire, Addison, Johnson, and Goethe, before getting into just what version of the Nights said authors might hve read.

The Euro-language translations run the gamut, from the overly domesticated to, well, something quite different. On the domesticated front, there's the 1730 Dutch edition:

Between 1714 and 1730 a series of pirate editions of Galland's translation were printed in the Hague. Each of the 12 volumes had a frontispiece by David Coster, a Dutch artist. Since Coster had no notion of the medieval Islamic world as something alien and strange, his engravings depicted the characters in the stories in European dress. King Shahriyar looks very comfortable in his western-style four-poster bed as he sits up listening to stories told by Sheherazade. The only concession to the exotic is that he has a loosely tied turban as an item of nightwear. The relatives of Gulanar the Mermaid are welcomed into what looks like a French palace and the genie summoned up by Aladdin is merely a very large man in a tattered robe.

And then for "something else," try the version produced by Richard Burton and Albert Letchford in the late 19th century:

When Richard Burton produced his translation from the Arabic in 10 volumes with six supplementary volumes (1885-8), he went to the opposite extreme and not only kept the sex scenes in but exaggerated them, and he produced extensive notes on such matters as homosexuality, bestiality and castration. The first edition of Burton's translation, which was published for subscribers only so as to lessen the danger of being prosecuted for obscenity, had no pictures, but soon after his death in 1890, a young friend and devoted admirer of Burton, Albert Letchford, produced 70 paintings which served as the basis for the illustrations in a new edition of Burton's translation that was published in 1897. Letchford had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter and he had spent time in Egypt. While hardly a great artist, he did share Burton's taste for the erotic and so nudes feature frequently in the illustrations. Moreover, he had a taste for the fantastic and some of his demons and temples are very weird indeed. He was shy and no businessman and consequently he was usually poorly paid. While still a young man, he contracted a disease in Egypt from which he later died in England.

The article serves as a good reminder thattranslation challenges that readers, writers, and translators are up against today are nothing new. We still battle with over-domestication, over-exoticization, as well as questions of copyright, incompletenes, bastardized versions, etc.The Nights may be a special case in that it is a text that seems to have seen all of these challenges at one point or another, to say nothing of the images that have accompanied the various translations, or the renditions of the book in film.