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NOTES ON ARABIAN NIGHTS

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notes

Borges on the Nights

Borges was a great advocate of the Nights and referenced it often both in his fiction, eg. 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941), 'The South' (1944) as well as in his essays and lectures, 'When Fiction Lives in Fiction' (1939), 'Translators of the The Thousand and One Nights' (1934-1936), 'The Thousand and One Nights' (1977).

The Imaginative Man who Falls in Love

(When love of the Map takes precedence over love of the Territory!)

Borges writes:

(...) The same is true of the imaginative man who falls in love. The generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the tantalizing destiny invested in it) takes priority over individual features, which are tolerated only because of their prior genre.

The extreme example -- the person who falls in love by word of mouth -- is very common in the literatures of Persia and Arabia. To hear the description of a queen -- her hair like nights of separation and exile, but her face like a day of delight, her breasts like marble spheres that lend their light to moons, her gait that puts antelopes to shame and is the despair of willow trees, the onerous hips which keep her from rising, her feet, narrow as spearheads -- and to fall in love with her unto tranquility and death is one of the traditional themes of 'The Thousand and One Nights' (...)

(Footnote to 'A History of Eternity'. 1936.)

See, for example, the story of The Unwise Schoolmaster Who Fell in Love by Report (402nd and 403rd Night).

references

(Primary Literature)

* Burton, Richard

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: a Plain and Literal Translation of Arabian Nights Entertainment.

Various editions. The Burton Club editions are normally bound in 16 volumes, 10 volumes of a the tales and 6 volumes (The Supplemental Nights) of orphan stories.

Haddawy, Husain

The Arabian Nights (Everyman's Library).

Ingram: "Haddawy uses Muhsin Mahdi's widely accepted, recent, definitive edition, which is based on the 14th-century Syrian manuscript to form the first serious translation into English in more than a century."

Haddawy, Husain