A Hundred and One Nights transed. by Bruce Fudge (review)

A Hundred and One Nights is the first English translation and bilingual edition of the Mi'at Laylah wa-laylah, a collection of sixteen stories written in Middle Arabic in Maghribi script. This collection exists in seven known manuscripts in which most of the material is virtually identical, a consistency that sets A Hundred and One Nights in the written transmission of semipopular storytelling of the premodern Arabic literary culture. Five of the seven manuscripts contain the same sixteen tales in consistent order and may present additional tales at the end. The other two manuscripts contain the core stories but in different orders, with additional tales among them. Fudge chose to translate manuscript A, published in Arabic in 1979. However, he supplemented or replaced A's wording with that of another manuscript to clarify or improve the story, and all substitutions are signaled in the endnotes.

The collection of tales is preceded with a foreword by Robert Irwin and a rich fifteen-page introduction explaining what makes A Hundred and One Nights distinct from and probably older than the Thousand and One Nights, as well as the origins and variants of the frame story (which consists of an opening story but not an end one) and an overview of the tales told by Shahrazãd. Then, a fascinating thirteen-page note on the text comes that explains the differences between the manuscripts, lists the other translated editions up to date, and presents a knowledgeable study of the characteristics of a Middle Arabic written text, seldom studied in Arabic literature, enabling the reader to fully understand the distinction between the two levels of language. After a couple of pages of endnotes related to the introduction, come the stories themselves, with the script on the left page and its linear English translation on the right page. The paragraphs are numbered to easily follow both languages.

The collection is introduced by Shaykh Fihrãs, the philosopher and first narrator. He was called to the court of King Dãrim, who heard about the book, and, after a month of festivities, Fihrãs starts telling the stories from beginning to end. He then introduces the second narrator, Shahrazãd, and how she came to tell the stories to her king in India. The transition from one narrator to the next is not always consistent: sometimes, the new night starts with "Fihrãs the philosopher spoke:" and either the Shahrazãd frame story is reintroduced or she speaks directly: "She said." Other times, Shahrazãd introduces the night without the support of the first narrator. Whether the philosopher or Shahrazãd speaks first, the end part of the story from the night before is retold. At the end of each night, consistently the same sentence closes the story: "And here the dawn reached Shahrazãd, so she ceased to speak." As many secondary narrators are also introduced in the stories themselves, it is sometimes confusing for the reader to know who the narrative voice is, but this confusion is part of the reading experience.

A Hundred and One Nights has only two stories in common with the Thousand and One Nights: "The Ebony Horse" (tale 14) and "The Prince and the Seven Viziers" (tale 12). The latter also features a series of twenty narrators who are trying to convince the king of the treachery of women. Two other stories are rudimental versions of the ones found in the Thousand and One Nights, prompting Fudge to think that they are in an earlier phase of development: "[T]he first part of 'The Story of the Young Merchant and His Wife' is clearly based on the same tale as 'The Story of the Three Apples,' one of the most carefully crafted episodes of the Thousand and One Nights. Similarly, 'Ghar bat al-Husn' is a skeletal version of the story of 'Nu m and Ni mah' in the Thousand and One Nights" (xxi–xxii).

All stories are...