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  • Relief after Hardship: The Ottoman Turkish Model for The Thousand and One Days by Ulrich Marzolph
  • Pierre-Emmanuel Moog (bio)
Relief after Hardship: The Ottoman Turkish Model for The Thousand and One Days. by Ulrich Marzolph, Wayne State University Press, 2017, 151 pp.

For a nonspecialist of Middle Eastern Muslim literature (that is, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish ones), Relief after Hardship by Ulrich Marzolph seems at first a challenge, if not a hardship, to read through, being full of difficult-to-read names and bibliophilic details about a mostly unknown world. But, with great relief, the reader is quickly pulled into this exciting investigation, through centuries and faraway lands (with manuscripts spreading from London to Tashkent), of the textual relationships among three major collections of tales—namely, the French Pétis de La Croix's Mille et un Jours (henceforth 1001 Days), the Ottoman Turkish Ferec ba'd es-sidde (Relief after Hardship), and the Persian Jāmi' al-hikāyāt (Collection of Tales).

Scholars ultimately have agreed that the French collection was mostly based on the Turkish one, which was itself a translation of the Persian one. This being said, the latter collections were not much studied for themselves but only as hypotexts, at least in the Western world. Marzolph, following in the steps of Austrian scholar Andreas Tietze and with some other researchers such as Aboubakr Chraïbi and Helga Anetshofer, believes those assumptions need to be reconsidered. He takes his reader along with him into a detailed comparison of the structure of the three collections, advancing with great prudence. (He confesses at times with frankness that a certain point "remains to be determined" [27].)

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, through a series of short chapters, Marzolph conducts a methodical demonstration. Then in a second part, dutifully, he offers detailed summaries and comments for each of the forty-two tales of Ferec ba'd es-sidde, which is a feat in and of itself, given the very intricate narrative of those stories.

Marzolph first shows that "out of the forty-two tales Ferec ba'd es-sidde contains, Pétis de la Croix used elements and plots from a mere seventeen tales" (10). In other words, most of the Turkish tales remain unknown through the French collection. Marzolph then shows that the Turkish collection is actually more autonomous from the Persian one than previously believed. To be sure, the traditional ways of cultural transmission run from Persia to the Ottoman world, and, consistently, in the Turkish collection, titles of the tales [End Page 483] are in Persian. Yet, it is necessary to distinguish in Ferec ba'd es-sidde between the tales of the first half, which are homogeneous in terms of literary genres, and the tales of the second part, which are much more diverse. Most of the tales of Ferec ba'd es-sidde belong to the "marvelous and strange" genre (as in the 1001 Nights) "so as to teach that there is more to life and living reality than the ordinary experience," for the purpose of Muslim propaganda, among other reasons (37). The regular appearance of supernatural characters would show "the boundlessness of God's power thus inspiring even more awe and amazement" (38). Many tales pertain also to the "relief after hardship" genre (40). Some others rely on the "seriousness and jocularity" technique (40). Those tales of the first part probably do come from the Jāmi' al-hikāyāt collection, though in different sequences, but the tales of the second part are based on a variety of sources and perhaps on Persian versions of tales originating in the Arabic tradition.

However, Marzolph, in a postscript coming as a coup de théâtre, adds news of the rediscovery of a Persian manuscript, compiled around the early thirteenth century, that could again reshuffle the cards of this literary investigation. I shall not spoil here the pleasure of this book by revealing more about it: actually, it can probably be appreciated only once the reader has made the effort to advance step by step with Marzolph, gaining an intimate view of the literary research in progress.

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