Having read A Thousand Nights and One Night, I decided to top it off with Fables of the East, an anthology of works charting the entrance and impact of ‘eastern’ writings into Britain in the early modern period.
It’s actually a companion piece to Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785, so there wasn’t much in the book to explain why these pieces in particular were chosen. The idea of ‘the east’ is very wide in the selection, spanning from China to Turkey, including sojourns in India and Iran. It also includes more travel writing, history and epistolary fiction than actual fables. I wasn’t sure why this was without the argument of the main text, but I enjoyed what I got.
The first was the most famous, The Arabian Nights Entertainments. This was a translation of the dedication, preface and initial frame story from the Galland edition, the first available in the west and translated from his French. The book describes Galland as a ‘translator’, his authority being very suspected (and I imagine the reasons for this were better explained in the companion book).
It was interesting to read this ‘original’ version so shortly after a different translation. One thing it highlighted is that the frame story has Shahryar being a Sassanian, a Persian dynasty that existed before the advent of Islam. This suggests the ancient nature of the frame story with Scheherezade, but also means that the stories of the past with Haroun Al-Rashid actually took place after the story framing it - a strange thing to think about. It’s also interesting how the frame story is all about illicit sex, an act carefully elided by a ‘modesty will not allow’… it did allow in my edition.
The next inclusion was from a Sanskrit fable collection, here called The Fables of Pilpay, but also known as Panchatantra. This has a frame story of a sage telling a Chinese Emperor about another sage telling his king animal fables to teach wise conduct and rule. These animals stories seem rather like Reynard the Fox, with a battle of wits between the sneaky fox and the lion king (though the king is triumphant in these stories).
The part we had involved a war between corvids and owls. A raven has volunteered to be a spy in the owl camp, has had himself beaten up and gone to the owls claiming that he has been turned on by the other corvids. One of the advisors is deeply suspicious and suggests a tale to show why he is so, the leader of the owls agrees to the tale with a wonderfully irritated, “I shall hear this fable for once, but I will not promise to be a pin the better for it.” The true response to most forms of advice.
The advisor’s fable is about a mouse who is turned into a woman but ends up marrying a rat anyway. To quote another fabulist, ‘a leopard can’t change his spots’. Turns out the advisor was right and the crow leads all the owls to complete destruction. It’s funny, there were very few animal fables in The Thousand Nights and One Night, when they seem such a staple of the genre.
The next chapter is from The History of Commladeve. This is broadly a translation of an earlier text but with heavy additions. One of these is having the narrator being a character’s best friend, but reincarnated as a parrot. I found this one stodgy in its attempt to emulate the lushness of A Thousand Nights and One Night, and a little boring as a story.
The next entry is an oriental tale completely invented by an East Indian Company chaplain. It’s about a poor girl called Urad who is mentored by a genie in disguise. When her mother dies, a local fisherman tries to rape her, then a band of brigands, then a wizard and finally a vizier. She’s protected throughout by magic peppercorns that dissolve illusions, turn her into an ant (using the now regional term ‘pismire’) and summon lions to eat her tormentors. It starts a little slowly, but once the magical peppercorns enter, it’s good fun.
The reader is now very lucky indeed because the next section is by the fantastic Eliza Haywood, what’s more, best Eliza Haywood, early Haywood. It’s from a novel called Philidore and Placentia, I think the name ‘Placentia’ is a hilarious one for a heroine. This extract is about a very unlucky Grand Tourist who is captured and made a slave before being castrated for his amors with one of his master’s wives. He escaped but is too embarrassed to return home sans testicles. To be honest, it was his own fault. He’s lucky he was spared the old spike up the anus so favoured in the Nights.
This is followed by a Spectator essay about how fables allow us to take advice because it’s artfully given, then one of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, ‘Mi Li, A Chinese Fairy Tale’. It’s not my favourite of his tales, I prefer the one about Pissimissi, or the dead prince with three legs who doesn’t marry the one legged princess. However, it is a nice bit of Walpole silliness and Ballaster points out how Mi Li can also be read as ‘my lie.’
We then get travel tales, with François Bernier traveling to Kashmir with Aurangzeb, the Mughal Emperor. He did not travel light. A lot of the section talks about how many people (and mules, camels, elephants and such) went with him and how they set up. Essentially most of Delhi travelled with him, with all the market places from the city being re-set up in tent form whenever they stopped. This is not to count the whole harem, court, army.. essentially an entire city on the move, recreating high streets and districts every time they stop. One very important thing, try to be as far away from the harem as they travel as any glimpse may involve being beaten up. As a later text had, the Mughal Emperor might be one of the richest monarchs in the world, but he also had some of the biggest expenses and hassle.
It sounds like a deeply unpleasant experience, with skin-baking heat, possibility of bad water and worms that infest a person’s legs. Not to mention the chaos at every river crossing. The Emperor has a better time, he even takes time to hunt… and cheats. There was an account of lion hunts, where the lions are essentially herded into a spot for the Emperor to shoot repeatedly. There were even suspicions that the lions were drugged. Even with all this, Aurangzeb missed one and they had to stop the whole journey to track the lion down and kill it, as failing to kill a lion was regarded as bad luck.
This was followed by part of a history of the Mughal Empire of the siege of Chitor, which read more like an Arabian Night than some of the more fabulist entries. Then there were some letters of Elizabeth Montagu, which I read a few years ago with the Samuel Johnson Reading Circle.
The most interesting pieces were the three last ones. I’d never heard of the first, The Turkish Spy. Apparently it launched a whole genre of epistolary spy novels. Mahmut is an Arab but is working for the Ottoman Empire and is pretending to be a Moldavian scholar. He’s in Paris, reporting on the scandals and intrigues around Cardinal Richelieu. He also writes to his brother in India, talking about the Mughal Empire, clearly using the books featured earlier in this one. The last letter ends with a deep paranoia, with Mahmut thinking that his government are killing off the spies no longer useful to them so he goes into hiding. It’s a very interesting idea for a book, but is rather dour and humourless, and at 8 volumes, I don’t think I’ll be looking for it.
The next extract is from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, which takes the format of the Persian Spy but lightens the claustrophobia of it, with the main letter writers being travellers rather than spies. I’ve got a copy but I’m yet to read it. Most of the extracts chosen here are actually concerning the difficulties Usbek has at leaving his seraglio behind. There are letters from the eunuchs saying that the women are restless, suggestions of lesbianism and finally, a letter from his favourite and most loyal wife. She’s written to Usbek to say how much she hates him and is killing herself to spite him. It’s a strange inclusion for a book that felt quite light otherwise.
The last selection is from something I’ve read many times, Oliver Goldsmith’s A Citizen of the World. It was lovely to spend a little time with Lien Altangi, the puzzled, quizzical and ultimately very likeable writer of his letters from a ‘Chinese’ man.
One of the through lines of all the text was how English understanding of eastern lands was mediated through the French in particular. Although the period covered in the selection is the same one in which the East India Company were establishing their power in India, with a couple of the authors working for them, most of the texts were French first. Only Elizabeth Montagu’s letters and Goldsmiths Citizen of the World were written in English first. This then had the interesting element of how much of English writing about ‘the east’ was also criticism of France, and how many of the prejudices were French ones over English.
With that, the anthology was over - not as many fables as I’d have liked but I read my Goldsmith at the end and went home happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment