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WORK TITLE: Marvellous Thieves
WORK NOTES:
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http://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/academics/faculty/paulo-lemos-horta.html * http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/paulohorta.html * http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-marvellous-thieves-by-paulo-lemos-horta-1-4333351
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2014047074
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2014047074
HEADING: Horta, Paulo Lemos
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100 1_ |a Horta, Paulo Lemos
670 __ |a The Arabian nights, 2014: |b t.p. (selection and arrangement by Wen-chin Ouyang and Paulo Lemos Horta) preface (assistant professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he teaches World Literature; currently finishing a monograph, Inventing Ali Baba’s Cave)
953 __ |a xk09
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of British Columbia, B.A., M.A.; Queen’s University, M.A.; University of Toronto, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, assistant professor; New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, assistant professor.
AWARDS:World Literature and Cultural Research Grant and President’s Research Grant, both from Simon Fraser University.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Paulo Lemos Horta is a writer and educator. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, a master’s degree from Queen’s University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Horta has served as an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, which awarded him with its President’s Research Grant and World Literature and Cultural Research Grant. He later joined New York University, Abu Dhabi, where he teaches courses in literature, arts, and the humanities. Horta collaborated with Wen-chin Ouyang to compile the 2014 book, The Arabian Nights: An Anthology. He is also the coeditor, with Bruce Robbins, of Cosmopolitanisms.
In 2017, Horta released Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. In this volume, he analyzes several translations of The Arabian Nights, highlighting the ways in which the translators enhanced and/or altered the stories in the book.
Ali Houissa, reviewer in Library Journal, suggested: “Horta’s scholarly, albeit witty and entertaining analysis … will have wide appeal and particularly interest scholars and students of literature.” A Kirkus Reviews writer described Marvellous Thieves as “a fascinating work of cultural and literary history” and “an insightful examination of a significant literary work and the fraught complexities of translation.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly called it an “enchanting work” that featured “a multitude of storytellers nearly as colorful as Sinbad or Aladdin.” Stuart Kelly, critic on the Scotsman website, commented: “This vivid, intellectually lively and revelatory book gives complex answers—and brilliant stories of literary sleuthing—to a couple of seemingly simple questions.” Kelly also described the volume as a “delightfully askance book.” Kelly added: “The real point about this clever book is that many of the things we think about modernity—let alone postmodernity—have already happened. Postmodernism says that the book is always fluid; no text shows this as clearly as Arabian Nights. There can be no perfect version. It shows that authors are also collaborators, translators, plagiarists, elusive.” “This is literary history come alive, and Horta makes each edition of the tales feel like an important footstep,” wrote Glenn Dallas on the Seattle Book Review website. Reviewing the book on the PopMatters website, Matthew Snider noted: “It’s clear that Marvellous Thieves has progressed far beyond Edward Williams Lane’s now-passé tale of witnessing ink-stained divination.” Snider added: “There are numerous books recounting the problematic legacy of colonial translators, ethnographers, or simple civil servants like Torrens, but that book is not Marvellous Thieves and Horta has given readers a highly enjoyable account of the story behind the Thousand and One Nights.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2016, review of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.
Library Journal, February 1, 2017, Ali Houissa, review of Marvellous Thieves, p. 82.
Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2016, review of Marvellous Thieves, p. 45.
ONLINE
New York University, Abu Dhabi Website, http://nyuad.nyu.edu/ (August 16, 2017), author faculty profile.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (February 1, 2017), Matthew Snider, review of Marvellous Thieves.
Scotsman Online, http://www.scotsman.com (January 6, 2017), Stuart Kelly, review of Marvellous Thieves.
Seattle Book Review, https://seattlebookreview.com/ (February, 2017), Glenn Dallas, review of Marvellous Thieves.*
Paulo Lemos Horta
Paulo Lemos Horta, Assistant Professor of Literature, NYUAD
Paulo Lemos Horta, Assistant Professor of Literature, Arts and Humanities, NYUAD
Paulo Lemos Horta
Assistant Professor of Literature, Arts and Humanities
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Ph.D., University of Toronto; M.A., Queen’s University; M.A., B.A., University of British Columbia, Canada.
Paulo Lemos Horta is a scholar of world literature, the works and authors who exert an impact beyond their cultures of origin. He is currently interested in the cross-cultural collaborations that influenced The Thousand and One Nights, and the reception of the works of 16th Century Portuguese author Luis de Camões, who lived in the Middle East and South Asia. His latest book, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights will be published by Harvard University Press in January 2017.
His position in Abu Dhabi, long a cultural crossroads, will provide him a unique opportunity to further his study of both. He joins NYU Abu Dhabi from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he was an assistant professor. There, he was instrumental in developing the university’s world literature program from the ground up. He is co-editing a volume for the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature and has presented the results of his research on the 1001 Nights and world literature at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, SOAS, and the Universidad de Sevilla. At Simon Fraser University he was the recipient of a World Literature and Cultural Research Grant and a President’s Research Grant.
At NYU Abu Dhabi, Horta teaches classes on The Thousand and One Nights, the theory and practice of literary translation, and a global history of magic realism, commonly associated with Latin American literature, but also with contemporary Arabic and Persian works. He will bring to the translation course as guest lecturers participants in the Kalima project, an ambitious translation project underway in Abu Dhabi. Horta serves as co-director of a multi-campus research group on world literature, which is hosting a five-year series of interconnected seminars across several continents. He has previously taught classes in political science and literature on globalization, immigration and multiculturalism, and genres and methods in world literature.
Horta holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in English from Queen’s University, and a B.A. and an M.A. in political science from University of British Columbia, Canada.
QUOTED: "Horta's scholarly, albeit witty and entertaining analysis ... will have wide appeal and particularly interest scholars and students of literature."
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Print Marked Items
Horta, Paulo Lemos. Marvellous Thieves: Secret
Authors of the Arabian Nights
Ali Houissa
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Horta, Paulo Lemos. Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. Harvard Univ. Jan. 2017.384p.
photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780674545052. $29.95. LIT
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Arabian Nights originated many centuries ago in regions of the Near East, Central, and South Asia. While most
scholars agree it was a composite, frame story collected over time based largely on folk tales, European translations
included more stories that were not in the original Arabic versions and may well have been the creation of translators
and interpreters. For example, "Aladdin's Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" appeared first in Antoine
Galland's French translation. Horta (literature, New York Univ. Abu Dhabi) focuses on "new" material added by
European translators, who variously recast the original stories. While exploring the literary context in which imitation,
invention, forgery, and plagiarism flourished, the author pays particular attention to myriad ways cultural nuances had
been handled in the tales. In the seven chapters of this well-researched and highly engaging work, readers will uncover
the origins of the Arabian Nights as it exists today in the West. This work is a major contribution to the study of the
complexities inherent in translating such a masterpiece. VERDICT Horta's scholarly, albeit witty and entertaining
analysis and style, will have wide appeal and particularly interest scholars and students of literature.--Ali Houissa,
Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Houissa, Ali. "Horta, Paulo Lemos. Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights." Library Journal, 1
Feb. 2017, p. 82+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301249&it=r&asid=060f8fd204fc3268e110e82ae716cc1a.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301249
QUOTED: "a fascinating work of cultural and literary history."
"an insightful examination of a significant literary work and the fraught complexities of translation."
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Horta, Paulo Lemos: MARVELLOUS THIEVES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Horta, Paulo Lemos MARVELLOUS THIEVES Harvard Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-674-
54505-2
From its origin, the Thousand and One Nights has been frequently translated, embellished, and transformed.In his debut
book, a fascinating work of cultural and literary history, Horta (Literature/New York Univ. Abu Dhabi) investigates the
transmutations of the influential collection of Arabic tales, purportedly invented by Shahrazad to distract her husband,
King Shahriyar, from murdering young women in his kingdom. In the second half of the eighth century C.E., Horta
asserts, the collection was first translated from Persian into Arabic; since then, additional stories have been added by
Arabic and European translators, including the familiar "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Story of Aladdin
and the Wonderful Lamp." "The Thousand and One Nights," writes the author, "must be understood not as a singular
work but as an array of texts" that underwent constant interaction with other cultures, which incorporated into the
collection "love stories, trickster tales, historical epics, tales of the supernatural, animal fables, and tales of heroic
journeys to foreign lands." Eventually, it became "one of the key texts in the emergence of world literature in French
and English." Horta focuses on several significant translators: Antoine Galland, the first French translator of the tales;
Pre-Raphaelite poet John Payne; British Orientalist Edward William Lane; and the intrepid explorer Richard Francis
Burton, who disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim to travel to Mecca and Medina in 1853. Besides offering a close
reading of the translations, Horta draws on a memoir by Diyab, a Syrian traveler who told the stories of Aladdin and
Ali Baba to Galland; Lane's notebooks and correspondence; and drafts of Burton's translation. These sources reveal
"partnerships and rivalries" that shaped each translator's text. In investigating Diyab's influence, for example, Horta
notes, "the context of amorality and violence that characterized Diyad's travels survives in these tales even after
Galland's stylish adaptation of the stories to meet French expectations of an Oriental tale." An insightful examination of
a significant literary work and the fraught complexities of translation.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Horta, Paulo Lemos: MARVELLOUS THIEVES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468389133&it=r&asid=c2b95d9d9f4082e6457174d3d3202ca4.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468389133
QUOTED: "enchanting work."
"a multitude of storytellers nearly as colorful as Sinbad or Aladdin."
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Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the
Arabian Nights
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights
Paulo Lemos Horta. Harvard Univ., $29.95 (356p) ISBN 978-0-674-54505-2
In this enchanting work, Horta, an assistant professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, focuses on the
European translations of The Arabian Nights that brought these Middle Eastern tales to a wide western audience. Horta
introduces readers to the complexities of translation, showing how "the tales themselves are intertwined with the lives
and ambitions of the tellers." In the 18th century, Frenchman Antoine Galland relied on a talented storyteller from
Aleppo, Hanna Diyab, who recounted tales, such as "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," that Galland was the first to
include in his version. English translators in the 19th century included Henry Torrens, a linguist in colonial India who
captured the stories' sensuality and poetry; Edward Lane, a "Victorian empiricist" and scholar living in Cairo, who was
helped by an Ottoman Scot and an Egyptian bookseller; pre-Raphaelite poet John Payne; and Richard Burton, a famed
traveler who wove his own pilgrimage to Mecca into the tales and borrowed heavily from Payne's version. Horta pays
particular attention to the differing ways the translators handled a foreign culture's nuances, including the roles of
women. Her fascinating search for the origins of The Arabian Nights as it exists today reveals a multitude of
storytellers nearly as colorful as Sinbad or Aladdin. Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 45. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459022&it=r&asid=ec8520064b37135f75f767848b058e85.
Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473459022
QUOTED: "This vivid, intellectually lively and revelatory book gives complex answers—and brilliant stories of literary sleuthing—to a couple of seemingly simple questions."
"delightfully askance book."
"The real point about this clever book is that many of the things we think about modernity – let alone postmodernity – have already happened. Postmodernism says that the book is always fluid; no text shows this as clearly as Arabian Nights. There can be no perfect version. It shows that authors are also collaborators, translators, plagiarists, elusive."
Book review: Marvellous Thieves, by Paulo Lemos Horta Paolo Lemos Horta STUART KELLY Published: 11:42 Friday 06 January 2017 0 HAVE YOUR SAY The labyrinthine account of how Arabian Nights reached an international audience reveals it as a truly postmodern classic, writes Stuart Kelly This vivid, intellectually lively and revelatory book gives complex answers – and brilliant stories of literary sleuthing – to a couple of seemingly simple questions: who wrote Arabian Nights? And is it called that or Tales From (or Of?) The One Thousand And One Nights? It’s one of those books that has seeped into the collective consciousness. We all know Aladdin, or Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves, or Sinbad, and some of us will know about Scheherazade or Caliph Harun al-Rashid and his trickster sidekick Abu Nawas, or Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Princess Peri-Banu. So the opening twist is one I already knew. For half of those stories, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Peri-Banu, there are no Arabic texts that pre-date the “translation” by Antoine Galland in the first decades of the 18th century. The suspicion was that, despite Galland claiming he received these “orphan stories” from a Syrian traveller called Hanna Diyab, that they had more in common with the fairy stories of Charles Perrault or Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. They were certainly different – in imagery, in opulence, in rags-to-riches transformation. If they were popular, who cared about the provenance? So, twist two: Diyab’s memoirs, in partial form, turn up in the Vatican Library. There is a striking resemblance in his writing style, describing his travels with the French Orientalist adventurer Paul Lucas (and in Lucas’s own three memoirs) to the “orphan stories”. Maybe Galland, a man more inclined to Greece than Baghdad, underplayed the sophistication of Diyab’s recounted yarns. So, twist three, and purl one: when Diyab is writing about French princesses and Corpus Christi processions, his language is so similar to the stories eventually moralised and sentimentalised by Galland, it’s astonishing. “Aladdin” is not a Syrian writing about a fictitious China, but a Syrian traveller to Europe filtering his visions of Europe through traditional Arabic storytelling. He was a boy made good, after all. He had even witnessed Lucas send a servant into a crypt and come out with a lantern and a ring, and seen a palace disappear and reappear at the Opera in Paris. But then twists too many to enumerate appear. Les milles et une nuits was translated from French to English, and was a remarkable success. So much so that it was thought that translating from Arabic to English would be a good idea. Horta, in this delightfully askance book, looks at four of these translators: a liberal genius working for the British in India; a former engraver turned iconic travel writer; a lawyer who wanted to be a Pre-Raphaelite poet; and a man who could have given Flashman a thrashing but thought he was the ideal of cosmopolitanism. The first, Henry Torrens, attempted a fluent translation from a newly acquired manuscript while working in colonial India and trying to promote a free press and British understanding of indigenous languages and cultures. This was the period when Macaulay notoriously said “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. Edward Lane, who made his name as a traveller in Egypt, used a different manuscript and bolstered his book with observations on life in Cairo, thinking it the “soul” of the Arabian Nights. Perhaps the best parts of the book concern a brilliantly complex figure, Osman Effendi, who effected many of Lane’s introductions, found him lodgings, initiated him into Cairean life and who was actually a Scotsman called William Thomson, who had been captured during the Anglo-Turkish War, had converted, fought against the Wahhabis, and whose observations bolstered Lane’s commentary, especially about the supernatural still existing in North Africa. Next along is an aspirant poet who knows little Arabic: John Payne turned the stories into a silky, languid, over-spiced dream. But he had used Torrans and Lane, and was in turn plagiarised by Burton, one of the most famous explorers and braggarts of the day, who did his own by rewriting and added in the bits about sex. His “Terminal Essay” is a masterpiece in pretending to be expert and academic yet circumventing Victorian pursed-lips by basically writing about homosexual tolerance, and any other supposed deviance he could work into the text. As was once said in the Victorian Edinburgh Review “Galland for the nursery, Lane for the study, Burton for the sewers”. The real point about this clever book is that many of the things we think about modernity – let alone postmodernity – have already happened. Postmodernism says that the book is always fluid; no text shows this as clearly as Arabian Nights. There can be no perfect version. It shows that authors are also collaborators, translators, plagiarists, elusive. It deals with whether poetry can be translated or not. It deals with whether the “other” – Arabia, India, Egypt, London cliques – is ever comprehensible. Most of all, it tells the story of Diyab, a Maronite Christian who went into business, travelled to the court of the “Sultan of France” with hopes of being his Arabic librarian, told stories, was impressed and impressive and was shunned, and created the tale countless Scottish families watch as pantomime. He came from and returned to Aleppo. Remember that. *Marvellous Thieves, by Paulo Lemos Horta, Harvard University Press, £22.95
Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-marvellous-thieves-by-paulo-lemos-horta-1-4333351
QUOTED: "This is literary history come alive, and Horta makes each edition of the tales feel like an important footstep."
Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights
We rated this book:
$29.95
In all of literature, there is no collection more elusive or evocative than The Arabian Nights. It encompasses a thousand and one nights of storytelling, and yet there is no definitive version of the collection, no touchstone by which all others can be measured. Each translation has its own flavor, its own feeling, its own motivation, and its own legacy. And Marvellous Thieves puts them all under the same microscope.
Paulo Lemos Horta sets a phenomenal task for himself: studying the authors who translated the Arabian Nights (or stole the work of other translators) and encapsulating how each shaped their version of the tales. He hunts down lost sources for those 1,001 stories, ponders how the changes made to each suited the authors’ preconceived notions, and laments how clever female characters were so often downgraded or ignored entirely in several collections, robbing many of the stories of the strong characterization that made them such satisfying reads.
This is literary history come alive, and Horta makes each edition of the tales feel like an important footstep in a narrative legacy stretching back centuries. Some of those translators may have been marvelous thieves, but Horta shows how we all shared in their riches.
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Reviewed By: Glenn Dallas
Author: Paulo Lemos Horta
Star Count: 4/5
QUOTED: "It’s clear that Marvellous Thieves has progressed far beyond Edward Williams Lane’s now-passé tale of witnessing ink-stained divination."
"There are numerous books recounting the problematic legacy of colonial translators, ethnographers, or simple civil servants like Torrens, but that book is not Marvellous Thieves and Horta has given readers a highly enjoyable account of the story behind the Thousand and One Nights."
The Translators of 'Thousand and One Nights' Were Unquestionably Thieves
BY MATTHEW SNIDER
1 February 2017
MARVELLOUS THIEVES NOTES THAT EACH INTERPRETER'S ACTS OF PLAGIARISM, THEFT, AND RECREATION ARE NEARLY AS INTERESTING AS THE TALES THEMSELVES.
cover art
MARVELLOUS THIEVES: SECRET AUTHORS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
PAULO LEMOS HORTA
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS)
US: JAN 2017
AMAZON
In a way, Richard Burton—the subject of the last chapter of Horta’s Marvellous Thieves—encapsulates all that preceded him throughout the book. By the end, Burton came to embody—partly as a result of the Thousand and One Nights’ translational history and partly because of how Paulo Lemos Horta has structured his book—the natural conclusion of each of the included translators’ accumulated endeavors.
Beginning with Antoine Galland in the early 18th century, the men who translated the Thousand and One Nights each, in their own way, sought to merge themselves in some way with the content of the narrative. From the connections Horta draws between Galland’s orphan tales and Hanna Diyab and Paul Lucas’s travels, to Edward Williams Lane’s thorough incorporation of his Modern Egyptians ethnography with his Thousand and One Nights translation. It was Burton, though, by casting himself quite literally as a fictional Arab (then Persian) personality Mirza Abdullah, who brought about the natural evolution of the earlier men’s acts of translation and self-creation.
Near the beginning of Marvellous Thieves, Horta observes that: “Common elements within the travelogues of Lucas and the memoir of Diyab suggest that the two men were exchanging stories ... and both authors reveal an attraction to fabulous tales that mirror features of the orphan tales” (i.e., the tales Antoine Galland included in his translation, told to him by Diyab in Lucas’s Paris apartment). This merging of the lives of the translators (or in this case, the deliverer of some of the orphan tales) and the exoticized world of the Thousand and One Nights is a recurring theme in Horta’s recounting of the men’s lives.
Although Horta’s presentation of Diyab’s personal adventures as possible source for the content of the “orphan tales” sometimes borders on Oxfordian tenuousness, there’s no mistake that Diyab’s life must have flavored the stories he recounted to Galland in Lucas’s apartment. Once again, as the book progresses, it is the translators themselves who seek to live out the exotic adventures Galland only heard of from Diyab. By the book’s end, Burton has even adopted Abdullah’s personality to permit him to act out the experience most unique to the Islamic world: the hajj. Here it’s clear that Marvellous Thieves has progressed far beyond Edward Williams Lane’s now-passé tale of witnessing ink-stained divination.
Connected to their longing to partake in the imagined world of the Thousand and One Nights, another shared characteristic of many of the translators Horta discusses is the effort each man undertook to try and present himself as the singularly qualified figure to translate these stories, often by trying to subtly (or not-so-subtly) dismiss their predecessors’ efforts, no matter how each was indebted to the others. Each took different routes to try to demonstrate that he understood “the Arab” (or “the Indian” or “the Persian”, wherever each imagined the stories originated) best and therefore was best situated to translate the Thousand and One Nights for readers back home. This element figures particularly in the chapters on Lane and Henry Torrens—each man aware of their limits of their own ability and version. Yet Horta casts each man sympathetically despite fertile ground to dismiss many as arrogantly Orientalist (a term Horta retrieves from being only an academic pejorative). Instead, he finds within their rivalries and misunderstandings, a history of several men each with a natural combination of selfish and thoughtful motives.
Of Burton himself, perhaps one of the least sympathetic translators of Thousand and One Nights, Horta writes: “Burton’s ‘Terminal Essay’ to the Arabian Nights reflects his own understanding of the potential that lay within the story collection to provide a disruptive education in alternative beliefs and social practices.” In fact, the role that Thousand and One Nights and its various translations played in educational (or overall colonial) policy is another theme Horta manages to pack succinctly into each account. In the chapter on Torrens (one of the India-situated translators), Horta emphasizes the often-ignored translator’s contributions: “Torrens’s translation ... remained unfinished, but it is the invisible thread that weaves through the history of the Arabian Nights in English.” It was Torrens, in fact, who saw the value of preserving the cultural reservoir of colonial cultures not only for the cultural value but as wise policy, and Torrens emerges from Horta’s account as the most empathetic character.
The translators Horta recounts were unquestionably thieves—of each other, of their sources and interlocutors, of their own personal encounters in Arab, Persian, and Indian cities they visited. But Horta makes a persuasive case that each man’s acts of plagiarism, theft, recreation, and simple fabrication are nearly as interesting stories as the ones they were toiling to bring to Western readers. Each man, whether Antoine Galland and Hanna Diyab or Richard Burton, was seeking to make his mark upon the world and preserve literature. There are numerous books recounting the problematic legacy of colonial translators, ethnographers, or simple civil servants like Torrens, but that book is not Marvellous Thieves and Horta has given readers a highly enjoyable account of the story behind the Thousand and One Nights.
MARVELLOUS THIEVES: SECRET AUTHORS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
Rating:
Matthew Snider writes on culture, literature, and politics from Maryland, and can be found on Twitter @matthewsnider.