The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 2

A couple of years ago I read an abridged version of the 1001 Nights, which was originally published by Penguin Classics in the 1950s. I liked it so much I decided to read the whole thing, which is now published by Penguin Classics in a more modern translation from 2005. Be warned, though. The unabridged version runs to three volumes, each of around 900 closely printed pages. Volume II covers nights 295 to 719 and includes the tale of Sindbad and his seven voyages. There is also a useful introduction describing the various European translations of the text over the last four hundred years, as well as a glossary and some maps of Baghdad and Cairo. If you think that Shahrazad tells 1001 separate tales, you’ve been led astray. What you get here are a serious of tales within tales within tales. Some of these inter-linked tales last for up to forty or fifty nights in some cases. If that sounds a bit daunting, it isn’t. You soon get the hang of it. What happens is that in many of the tales a character will start telling a tale about someone else, and on it goes. There is a useful index at the end showing how the tales are linked. Splitting these tales into “nights” is a handy device because it splits the tales into bite-size chunks. Some “nights” are shorter than others – barely a page in some cases. Either it’s summer or Shahrazad and her husband were otherwise engaged for part of the night. The “nights” are also a reminder that Shahrazad’s life is on a knife edge. If she fails to entertain the tyrannical King Shahriyar sufficiently to make him want her to continue her story-telling the following night, she faces the chop. Literally. Fortunately, she is a narrator of genius and the demanding king and demanding reader are equally entertained. One observation (assuming that this is an accurate translation): blackness is frequently associated with wickedness and ugliness. By contrast, beautiful characters are not just white. They have silver skin and are compared to the moon. Male and female beauty are often described using identical terms. At times beautiful men have the same physical characteristics as beautiful women. There is a strong homoerotic element in some stories with some male characters either openly homosexual or seemingly unaware of their homosexuality as they feel a strong attraction for a beautiful young man. There is a lot of wine drinking. There is an obsession with wealth and palaces and political power and signs of early capitalism with lots of trading and wealth acquisition going on. There are women who seem to be living independently, often with vast wealth and making their own decisions about marriage. There are women who are highly intelligent and inventive, especially the trickster Dalila the Wily (nights 698 to 708). Amazing how she gets away with it. Highly entertaining and I am looking forward to reading Volume III.

Great book, wonderful stories, beautifully translated.

What an excellent collection of stories, from the one's that you _think_ you know to those that are completely new.

Only on volume one at moment

I still haven't finished the first volume! But so happy for this accessible translation. Good introductions and background to the world in which the stories were set.

Nicely readable as kindle edition

great

Read all three books as currently doing research for a potential film....

Awesome book. Includes all nights by number

This is good book for childrens.

I feel that I am having one of the great reading experiences of my life with this new translation of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. Volume I was mind-blowing with its kaleidoscopic variety and Volume II is even more so. There is more variation in both story structure and subject matter. One of the more interestingly structured stories tells of a king's concubine who tries to seduce the king's son. When he rebuffs her, she goes to his father and accuses him of trying to seduce her and demands that he be beheaded. The king is set to do it, but then a vizier comes forth and tells a story about the wiles of women and why the king should not believe her. The king decides against executing his son. Then the next day the disappointed concubine returns begging the king to reconsider, and tells a story to illustrate the wiles of men which convinces the king to kill his son. Then a second vizier steps forward and tells a story about the wiles of women and the king changes his mind again. And so it goes through seven viziers until the king is saved at the last minute from making a terrible mistake. Many of the stories in this volume deal with con artists and tricksters. Some of them made me really uncomfortable when it looked as though injustice would prevail. Not all the stories have happy endings. (Dalila the Trickster, who is the vilest con artist in the book, just made me angry!) This volume is even sexier than the first volume and in places gets fairly graphic, with jokes about penis size and egg white used as a substitute for another substance. As in volume I, the women tend to be lusty and the men moon over unattainable beauties. One lusty woman has a secret love affair with a bear! Both lesbianism and male homosexuality are depicted. One homosexual story is a comic tale of a young man eluding the amorous advances of an older man and another is the only positive depiction of homosexuality in the book. In that story a young man discovers that his brother is having an affair with a neighbor when he finds them asleep together, but seeing that his brother is happy, he decides to keep mum about it. One of the stories is basically an adolescent gross-out joke featuring pus and vomit. Several stories go beyond fantasy into the surreal, such as the one that features an epic battle between apes and giant ants. The same saga features a talking female snake that is rather frightening, but ends up being a very noble character. This volume contains the saga of Sinbad (two different versions), which I did not find nearly as interesting as some of the other stories. However, there is one section (between about a third and halfway through the book) that I found excruciating. It's about a young woman who is engaged in a battle of wits with multiple scholars on such subjects as anatomy and Islamic religion. Maybe that was fascinating stuff for a medieval Muslim, but for this 21st Century non-Muslim, it was a big bore. But once I got past the halfway point in the book, I zoomed through the rest of it. I recommend just scanning this section, even though I did not. This is a great work of literature in which I found fragments that reminded me of Shakespeare, The Bible, Grimm, Homer, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I wish I had read it a long time ago and I look forward to the final volume. Five stars despite the slow section.

La presentación del libro es buena. La tipografía es algo pequeña pero legible. La organización del texto es muy clara y el tono de la traducción es envolvente. Muy recomendable.

Todo perfecto