Overwhelmed and Very Grateful
I keep looking for another vintage Thanksgiving postcard, but most of them have creepy children wielding axes and heading toward apprehensive turkeys.
As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel in Miami. I spent yesterday at the Miami Book Fair, where I spoke about Sigrid Schultz, signed books, attended a couple of panels, navigated crowds, and listened to some wonderful music. It’s been exciting, humbling, nerve-wracking, and exhausting.[1] In a couple of hours I will catch a plane back to Chicago, where I’ll have two days at home before My Own True Love and I head to the Missouri Ozarks for Thanksgiving with my family.
In some ways, this is emblematic of my last year: lots of travel, lots of chances to talk about The Dragon from Chicago (on line and in real life), lots of stepping outside my comfort zone. Even though I occasionally have to remind myself just how lucky I am, I am grateful for the opportunities. (And the fact that people have showed up at my events. Every author I know lives in fear of the event where no one comes.)
I say it every year, but I am also so very grateful for those of you who read History in the Margins, week after week. You send me comments and suggestions. You ask hard questions. You share my posts with your friends. Without you, I would be talking to myself.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all.Here’s to another year of exploring history together.
[1] I did not go to the parties on Friday and Saturday night, or take advantage of any of the other opportunities to meet and mingle with my fellow authors. Which would have been a good thing, but I just didn’t have the juice. This kind of thing is difficult for those of us who are very introverted and more than a little shy.
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Speaking of sending me ideas, I am currently issuing invitations to my annual Women’s History Month series of mini-interviews. I have some great people on board already, but I need more. If you “do” women’s history in any format, or know someone who does, or have an idea of someone you would love to see in the series, drop me a line. I’ve interviewed academics, biographers, podcasters, historical novelists, tour guides, poets, and even a textile artist, but would be happy to talk to people who explore women’s history through music, puppet shows, graphic novels, other visual arts, interpretive dance….
From the Archives: Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic (aka Fairy Tales, Pt. 3)
While I was checking the archives to be sure that I hadn’t previously written about Antoine Galland’s Thousand and One Nights, I ran across this review from 2012, which led me to pull Stranger Magic off the shelves and dive in.
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I’m fascinated by the Arabian Nights. By the stories themselves and the way they fit together into their complicated frame story. By their transformation from Arabic street tales to a established position in the Western canon. By their echoes in Western culture, from the Romantic poets to Disney.
So I was delighted to get a chance to review historian and critic Marina Warner’s new work on the tales.
Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights is a multi-faceted study of the popular tales of wonder and magic known as the Arabian Nights.
Warner discusses the tales in the Arabian Nights with the interdisciplinary approach that she used to good effect in her earlier study of Western fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde. She examines them through the lenses of literary criticism, history, folklore studies, feminist theory and popular culture. She pays particular attention to the history of the Arabian Nights in the west, from the reception of the first translation from the Arabic by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century through its influence in works as distinct as Mozart’s operas and the Harry Potter books.
Not assuming that readers will have the same familiarity with “The Prince of the Black Islands” as they do with “Sleeping Beauty”, Warner retells fifteen tales before she unravels them into their constituent themes, symbols and assumptions. She moves easily from the Biblical story of King Solomon to magic carpets, from the reputation of Egypt as the home of ancient magic to Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical experiments, and from the wealth of the Islamic world in the twelve century to post-Reformation anxiety about Catholic religious practices.
Warner succeeds once again in balancing entertainment with erudition. Like her earlier works, Stranger Magic is accessible enough for the general reader and rich enough to keep a specialist scribbling in the margins.
Fairy Tales, Pt 2: Antoine Galland and the Arabian Nights
When I sat down to write about Charles Perrault and Tales of Mother Goose, I had no intention of writing more about the writers who “created” fairy tales as we know them . But as I wrote about Perrault I remembered some of my favorite stories,[1] and stumbled across a new one. Suddenly a small series of blog posts presented themselves.[2]
Next up, Antoine Galland (1646-1715) : classical scholar, linguist, diplomat and the man who made Les Mille et Une Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights), better known in English as The Arabian Nights, a canonical work in Western literature.
Trained as a classical scholar, Galland worked as an interpreter for the French diplomatic mission in Constantinople, from 1670 to 1675, where he studied Turkish, modern Greek, Arabic and Persian. Back in France, he became the curator of the royal collection of coins and medals.[3] He held the chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal in Paris from 1709 until his death in 1715. Over the course of his career, he collected, transcribed, and translated many Turkish, Persian and Arabic manuscripts.
The Thousand and One Nights was a diversion for Galland. He worked on the tales after dinner as a way to unwind after a long day of serious scholarship—I picture candlelight, a glass of wine, and perhaps a large cat purring next to him on the work table.[4] (
Galland drew most of his stories from several Arabic manuscripts of collected tales. The collections were drawn from a a body of oral tradition—popular tales told by street entertainers, based on folklore that stretched from India to Egypt. Each storyteller augmented plots, embroidered descriptions, and filled the tales with literary allusions and quotations to reflect both his own taste and that of his audience. Over time, Arab literati collected the stories, much as Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected fairy tales from German peasants in the 19th century, and the tales in the resulting manuscripts varied according to the time and place they were heard and the taste of the man compiling the collection.
In some ways, Galland was not unlike the Arab coffeehouse storytellers who recounted—and often tailored—familiar tales to their audiences. Galland selected the stories he deemed most suitable for a European audience, and in so doing established a canon of tales for Europeans that is distinct from the original material. Aimed at a courtly rather than a scholarly audience, Galland’s translation was often deliberately inaccurate. As he wrote to Cuper, his version was not “attached precisely to the text, for that would not have given pleasure to the readers. To the extent that it was possible, I have rendered the Arabic into good French without being slavishly attached to the Arabic words.”
Galland’s Thousand and One Nights was published in France in 12 small volumes between 1704 and 1717. He deliberately targeted the audience who had enjoyed Perrault’s fanciful tales. If anything, he was even more successful. The ladies of the court were so impatient to know what happened next that Galland had to lend them manuscript versions that they passed from hand to hand until the next volume was published. That’s the kind of audience an author can only dream of.
[1] Including one outlier in the mid-nineteenth century.
[2] And happy I was to see them. I have a long list of possible posts, but none of them were calling my name.
[3] Just to make the timing clear, Galland , like Perrault, worked during the reign of Louis XIV
[4] It’s a seductive image. It’s taken me several years to break myself of the habit of going back to work after dinner. I can imagine all too well the lure of working on something that isn’t really my work. Luckily I have My Own True Love to keep me honest. (Ms. Whiskey would be all for going back to the desk.)