Universe of the Thousand and One Nights

Abstract

The monumental work Thousand and One Nights is a unique representative of the Arabic literature in the West, although it has always been dominated by poetry. This work is also unique in that it, like an ocean or the Universe, collected an abundance of folklore motifs and experiance of literature from the distant and ancient India to the medieval Egypt.

Orientalists and Westem folklorists mainly agree that the origins of the general story of the Thosand and One Nights were in India’s literature from wich Ibn al Mukafa took the same general story for his work Kalila and Dimna Persian literature placed its stories entitled Hezar efsane in a suitable t -u; and the Arabs translated that Collection as early as the 9th century.

With time, the Indian and Persian stories were pushed by original Arabian stories, or those of the Indian-Persian cycle were covered by the layers of Arabian colour. Thus was formed the Baghdad edition of the Nights Collection in the loth or at the beginning of the llth century. Over a few following centuries added were new stories that were particurarly popular in Egypt, or the existing stories were changed through narration so that, most probably, in the 15th century the Egyptian version of the Nights was made and written down and it reached us as such. Judging by the results of the latest folklorists’ research, the process of building up the stories of the Nights has not finished to the present day owing to the living narrative tradition through which the existing stories are being incessently changed and enriched.

From an abundance of the Nights manuscripts the four generally- accepted critical editions were made: Breslava, Bulaq, Calcutta and Beirut ones.

The Collection of stories Thousmd and One nights acquired enormous popularity in the West, inconparably greater than the popularity it enjoyed in the East owing to the first, very free translation by Galland. Extremely well- accepted was the traslation of the Nights into the Frech language by Mardrus. The Galland translation of incomplete text was followed by a series of translations into other European lenguages. Among the first translations into English, the one by E. Lane was well-known and then the ones by Burton and Payne. Known also are the translations into German by G.Wail, M.Henning and, specially, by E. Littmann. Very good is F. Gabrieli’s translation into Italian.

The translation of the integral text from Arabic into Russian by Salje appeared as late as 1939. That work can be criticized mainly for the literal translation of the Arabic phrase and clumsy imitation of the Arabic syntax. Salje’s translation is also import ant because it was translated into Serbian by M. Vidojković, which was the first translation of the itegral text into the so- called Serbo-Croatian language. Besides this one, there is also the (partial) translation by Stanislav Vinaver, who used Mardrus’s work. Neither Vidojković’s nor Vinaver’s translations can be completely satisfactory, since they were indirect. The former kept strictly to the source, and the latter did it far too freely. The first transiators of the Nights from Arabic into the Bosnian language were Osman Nuri Hadžić and Fehim Spaho, who translated only 96 nights. A smaller part of the Collection was translated by Alija Bejtić, while the outstanding Arabist and translator of the Koran, Besim Korkut, made a few selections that, however, represent only an insignificant part of the big collection. Korkut’s translation from Arabic is better than ali the other translations into the Bosnian language, but it aiso needs some stylistic improvements.

Partial translations from Arabic into Bosnian, as well as the integral text in Russian, can be criticized mainly for the obvious imperfection detail, sometimes even frequent roughness of the mother tongue of the translators: the source proved to be stronger than the sovereignty of the mother tongue. It can be claimed, on the basis of the above, that there is a big gap in the foreign literature in the former SFRY that could be filled by an adequate translation of the integral Collection from the Arabic Language