The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources: Arabic Text Edited with Introduction and Notes, pt. 3: Introduction and Indexes

The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources: Arabic Text Edited with Introduction and Notes, pt. 3: Introduction and Indexes. Edited by MUHSIN MAHDI. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1994. Pp. vi + 277 (English text) + 108 (Arabic indexes and corrections). HFI 200, $114.50.

(UMI: Foreign characters omitted.)

The first two volumes of Muhsin Mahdi's great work on the Nights (Leiden, 1984) contained his critical edition of the Galland manuscript, and his arguments for a radically new view of the relations among manuscripts. The third and final volume begins with three chapters on "the history of the Arabic Nights from its arrival in Europe early in the eighteenth century through the publication of the last of the four editions during the first half of the nineteenth century," a history that includes, as already argued in part 2, some spectacular moments in the life of the Syrian family of manuscripts. There follow three interpretations, and two important indices: an extensive general index to the Arabic text of the Nights including both names and objects, and an index to the critical apparatus and description of manuscripts.

The historical chapters have, besides thorough scholarship, the quick plotting, ambiguous characters, and rich local color (much of it from personal letters and diaries) of a good detective story. Mahdi describes how Galland, taking the title literally, went about looking for a complete Thousand and One Nights to translate, and failing to find any such thing, "concocted one" over the years, supplementing his three-volume manuscript of 282 nights (acquired in 1701) at first with Sindbad, which he had translated before launching his Nights project, then with stories (Qamar al-Zaman and perhaps Ghanim, in Mahdi's view) from an unidentified manuscript in his possession, and finally with stories told to him by Hanna, a "Maronite from Aleppo" whom he met in 1709. By a coincidence worthy of the Nights the Galland manuscript (G), whose putative shortfall of nights set in train fraud after fraud, "includes what all knowledgeable students of the Nights have considered the original core of the work as we know it today," a core that Mahdi regards (p. 8) as a "collection of relatively homogeneous stories that betray the hand of a consummate storyteller," composed...