On reflecting on the second volume of Mardrus and Mathers’s translation, The Thousand Nights and One Night, I was most struck by the differences from the first volume. Gone were the nested stories and the huge epics, this volume had more self-contained stories or other story collections subsumed within it. ‘The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor’ originally existed outside the text, and it seems like collections like ‘The Flowering Terrace of Wit and the Garden of Gallantry’ did also.
I also noticed that the nights got shorter, with the stories split into smaller chunks. The first book relied on stock phrases between the stories, with Dunyazad remarking that the stories are “sweet and pleasant to the taste”, then the formulaic descriptions of Shahryar conducting justice on his diwan before going back to bed and hearing the next story. Instead, there are far more interactions between the central three, with Shahryar asking for certain kinds of story or threatening beheading if he doesn’t get the kind he wants. There are also more descriptions of Dunyazad being shocked by some of the stories, hiding her face or blushing. Through it all, Scheherazade keeps going, from story to story.
One of the elements that Shahryar demands in a story is gay sex. When he doesn’t get it, he threatens until he does. There were some gay elements in the first volume but this book includes much more transgressive sex in general. ‘The Tale of Kamar Al-Zaman and the Princess Budur, Moon of Moons’ is full of interesting trans moments. It begins with two Ifrit having an argument over whether Kamar or Budur are the most attractive, they have challenges of poetry before putting the two together and seeing who cracks first. After a number of teasing near misses, Budur finds herself masquerading as a king. Kamar comes to the city and she flirts with him, commanding him to have sex with her. He thinks she’s a man and feels a bit strange about it but decides to give it a go. Budur goes right up to the limit when she has to reveal her own sex. The next story also includes cross-dressing but Shahryar declares it too hetero and wants some more gay stuff.
This leads to a story of Abu Nawas, a real poet who did write about loving boys. He’s one of many real people fictionalised in the tales and is part of the court of Haroun Al-Rashid. This was a famous king of Baghdad who is depicted in the tales as mixing generosity and sudden retributive violence, He’s prone to depression and insomnia and often goes out the palace disguised as a merchant to have adventures. He’s often joined by his wazir, Jafar, also based on a real person. Unlike the Disney version, this Jafar is a pretty decent man, often calming the king down in his rages and trying to do his best for others, often under threat of execution himself. He’s the one playing detective in the previous volume and he also seems to have trouble controlling his own family. They are usually joined by Mansrur, the king’s bodyguard and executioner. This trio often pop up in the stories, sometimes joined by the jesting Abus Nawas and their world is fleshed out and developed throughout the tales.
Probably the most famous set of stories in this volume are the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor. He’s very different from the figure in the Harryhausen films though, he’s not an adventurer as much as he is a very unlucky merchant. He sets off from Basrah, is blown off course, has outlandish adventures before returning home richer but swearing off travel - then he sets off again. He comes across the roc twice, once being carried to a land of diamonds. He meets an ancient Greek figure, the old man of the sea, who forces Sindbad to give him a piggyback whilst doing ‘his solid and liquid needs’ on him. Sindbad also meets a giant cannibal whom he blinds in a story reminiscent of Polyphemus. The darkest story has Sindbad living in a society where the spouse is buried alive when the other dies. He lives in the well of corpses by killing any future spouses buried alive and eating their provisions. For all the violence in the whole of the collection, this element was the creepiest to me.
Another travel story is ‘The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass’, an almost Ozymandian reflection on death and the fragility of human achievement. Another notable story was ‘The Ebony Horse’, in which a fantastic mechanical horse is created by a hideous mechanic with ‘lips drooping like a camel’s testicles’. It’s notable because it seems to be the basis of the unfinished ‘Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales - it’s also a very fun story about a cool bit of ‘tech’.
My favourite story in this volume was, ‘The Tale of the Shifts of Delilah the Wily and her Daughter, Zainab the Cheat, with Ahmad the Moth, Hasan the Pest and Ali Quicksilver’. Delilah the Wily and Zainab the Cheat had appeared in a story in the first volume but here they were central to it. The two women perform various tricks and thieveries in order to gain the attention of Haroun Al-Rashid. They do this because he recently made Ahmad the Moth, a thief from a previous story, into his chief of police. In making Ahmad the Moth look foolish, Delilah the Wily plans to be given her deceased husband’s position as keeper of the royal pigeons. In the second part, Ali Quicksilver must sneak and cheat everyone to win the hand of Zainab the Cheat - he gets more than he barginned for with ex-theif turned fried fish seller, Zuraik. It’s a crazy story with a very satisfying ending, and these characters are now entered into the Haroun Al-Rashid group and pop up here and there.
There’s a part where Ali Quicksilver is turned into a donkey and taken to a house where the woman covers her face. The father asks why, as it’s only the two of them and she replies because there’s a strange man in the house. She then pours water in a bowl and says secretive words over it, which turns the donkey back into human. I only mention this because it’s a trope in many of the stories. When a man is turned into an animal, he will inevitably bump into a woman who sees through the spell and covers up. Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping a tally of how many times this happens, but it’s quite a few, and I enjoy it each time.
