An electric new translation of “Arabian Nights” beautifully captures the shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—of the original tales.
King Shahriyar and his brother King Shahzaman suspect their suffering to be unique in this world. Their wives have slept with other men, and this drives them to grief, to madness—Shahzaman skewers his wife and her lover with a sword—and to a quest to find someone unluckier than them. One morning, after waking up on a wooded beach, they see a woman standing next to a sleeping jinni. “Make love to me and give me satisfaction, or I will set the jinni on you,” she says. The men, reluctantly, oblige.
Diyab’s memoirs were rediscovered in the Vatican Library in 1993 and published, in French, in 2015. They were finally released in English last spring. Horta and Seale’s volume, in turn, pairs Diyab’s stories with a collection of the most influential tales from Arabic manuscripts. Each page is adorned with illustrations and photographs from other translations and adaptations of the tales, as well as a wonderfully detailed cascade of notes that illuminate the stories and their settings.
And yet those older, unfamiliar tales felt nearer to me, their lulling cadence recalling the rhymed folk tales that thrive in Egypt’s villages to this day. The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Seale captures the movement between them beautifully. Nomad warriors descend on a city “as many as grains of sand, impossible to count and to withstand.