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  ALADDIN

  A New Translation

  TRANSLATED BY YASMINE SEALE

  EDITED BY PAULO LEMOS HORTA

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  THE TAILOR’S SON

  A RING AND A LAMP

  THE SLAVE OF THE RING

  THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP

  THE SULTAN’S DAUGHTER

  BEFORE THE SULTAN

  A WEDDING INTERRUPTED

  PRINCE ALADDIN

  A PALACE OF WONDERS

  NEW LAMPS FOR OLD

  THE PRINCESS’S REVENGE

  THE MAGICIAN’S BROTHER

  EPILOGUE

  Selected Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  One of the world’s most famous and beloved fairy tales, “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” has been retold and adapted time and time again since it first appeared in French in the early eighteenth century. It may seem surprising that a story so powerfully associated with the collection of Arabic tales known as the Thousand and One Nights should have come down to us through French—but it is also apt. The tale has never stopped traveling. Authors from Charles Dickens and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Clarice Lispector and Salman Rushdie have written about their experiences of encountering the story as children. My own mother often regaled me with the story of her first encounter with the tale, as a six-year-old orphan receiving her first gift of the Arabian Nights from her adoptive father in the north of Brazil. Through the centuries, the tale’s broad and lasting appeal rests on its ability to encompass both our wildest longings and our deepest uncertainties—both the childhood dream of wish fulfillment and the terrors of coming of age.

  At the heart of the story is the mystery surrounding Aladdin himself. Why should he, a boy of little talent or ambition, have been chosen for the extraordinary adventures that await him? Why should he, rather than another, have the lamp?

  In an attempt to answer this riddle, scholars and screenwriters alike have invented variations on the tale that have the boy perform some meritorious act to demonstrate that he deserves the lamp. Folklorists have identified precedents in Buddhist tales where characters save animals from danger and are rewarded with a wishing stone. The Disney film portrays Aladdin as a “diamond in the rough,” forced by poverty to steal but generously giving to those who are less fortunate than himself. Others have argued that it is in fact the lamp that makes the man. Richard Francis Burton, the infamous adventurer and translator of the Arabian Nights, suggested that the lamp had the power to alter “the physique and morale of the owner” and therefore to transform the “raw” youth into “a finished courtier, warrior, statesman.” The scholar Tzvetan Todorov sees Aladdin as part of a line of what he calls “narrative men,” devoid of character other than the marvels and machinations of fate that work through them.

  Like many a comic book hero—think of Peter Parker receiving a bite from a radioactive spider—Aladdin is transformed into the tale’s hero by coming into possession of the lamp. Once in command of it, and its slave the jinni, Aladdin is no longer a passive recipient of magical good fortune but an agent of his own fate. The heroine of the story, the princess Badr al-Budur, is equally active in shaping its outcome, saving Aladdin’s life by outwitting the magician in the tale’s climax.

  “Aladdin” has a peculiar relationship to the Thousand and One Nights. First added to the collection in the French translation produced by Antoine Galland in early eighteenth century Paris, the tale of “Aladdin” has not been found in any authentic Arabic manuscript predating this telling. Galland added the story, along with other tales such as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” to his French collection, after running out of stories to translate from his Arabic manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights. In his diary, Galland claimed that a Maronite Christian traveler from Aleppo named Hanna Diyab told him these stories during a visit to Paris in 1709, and, in the case of “Aladdin,” gave him a manuscript of the tale. While some scholars have doubted the existence of this mysterious Syrian storyteller, the recent discovery of Diyab’s memoir chronicling his travels to Paris confirms that he both met the French translator and provided him with stories with which to complete his translation of the Thousand and One Nights.

  Despite this revelation, fundamental questions regarding the origins of “Aladdin” remain unanswered. Whose story is Aladdin really? There is broad agreement that, compared to the original Arabic tales of the Thousand and One Nights, “Aladdin” and the other tales told to Galland by Diyab draw more heavily on the marvelous, in the sense of both material treasures and supernatural creatures and events. Some have attributed these differences to the imagination of the French Orientalist Galland, who used the raw material of a text of unknown provenance to channel his own conception of an exotic East. The novelist Marina Warner has pointed to the presence of popular eighteenth century storytelling elements—talismans, spoken charms, and the inversion of social order—as evidence of a French hand in Aladdin’s composition. The discovery of Diyab’s memoir, however, suggests that the gift of the tale to Galland was the product of the fertile imagination of a young Syrian Maronite raised within the storytelling culture of a caravan city. The novelist and Arabist Robert Irwin has argued that many of the elements identified as peculiar to a European narrative tradition in “Aladdin” have clear precedents in popular Arabic literature. The Thousand and One Nights contains other stories of lazy youths undeserving of their good fortune, and other characters who conjure jinn from rings and build palaces to woo the objects of their desire.

  I find it intriguing to read the tale of Aladdin alongside Diyab’s record of his own youthful adventures as he journeyed from Aleppo to Paris and the royal court at Versailles in defiance of his family’s wishes. The similarities between the two narratives might help explain his attraction to the tale that he provided to Galland, even if he did not have a hand in its composition. The youngest of several brothers who apprenticed with a French merchant in Aleppo, Hanna Diyab understood the appeal of the magician’s empty promise to help Aladdin establish himself as a cloth merchant in the market. This magician, who lures Aladdin into his service by pretending to be his uncle, carries echoes of the French adventurer Paul Lucas, who enticed Diyab to accompany him on a treasure-hunting journey through the Mediterranean with the promise of a position at the French court. Lucas’s reputation rested on the various false identities he assumed and on his purported skill in the use of amulets and charms to heal ailments. In his memoir, Diyab relates the Frenchman’s claim that he could harness the power of the philosopher’s stone against the ravages of age. Strangely enough, the first tomb-raiding expedition that Diyab describes in his account of his time with Lucas yielded both a ring and a lamp.

  Diyab’s description of his travels with Lucas bears the mark of a confident storyteller, not averse to heightening suspense by embedding a tale within another in the manner of Shahrazad. His account of the wonders of Versailles, where he was presented to Louis XIV, contains phrases that mirror the descriptions of palaces and princesses in the stories of “Aladdin” and “Prince Ahmad,” another tale added to the Arabian Nights thanks to Diyab. Not much older than the adolescent Aladdin when he visited Paris, Diyab reveals a sympathy for the impoverished and the persecuted during the harsh winter of 1708–9 and the famine that ensued in the following months. No surprise, then, that the tales he recounted to Galland in the spring of 1709 often revolve around the young and the socially marginal, not least the story of a poor boy whose life is transformed by the possession of a magical lamp.

  Whether one attributes the story’s appeal to the perspective of the young Syrian traveler or the learned French translator, “Aladdin” proved a timely response to the emerging thirst among the French reading public for fairy tales. Galla
nd’s Les Mille et Une Nuits was the publishing phenomenon of its day, arriving at the height of the Parisian craze for the conte de fées, and shaping all aspects of French taste in its wake, from stage sets to street fashion and interior design. Legend has it that impatient readers waiting for the next installment of the twelve-volume collection would pelt the windows of Galland’s apartment with stones until he came out to relate a new tale. Galland himself protested in a letter that he was not overly fond of the genre, and he resented that his treatises on coins and coffee were not as popular. But the stories Diyab gave to Galland were remarkably well suited to the demands of the French publishing market at that moment. “Aladdin,” alongside “Ali Baba” and “Prince Ahmad,” would prove to be among the most enduringly popular stories from the Arabian Nights, circulating around the globe, from page to stage to screen. These added stories have become the lens through which European readers viewed the Thousand and One Nights as a whole. By adding Diyab’s tales to the collection, Galland taught Europe to read the entire story collection as a repository of marvels.

  English translations of “Aladdin” allowed it to circulate in a variety of new contexts. Even before Galland had finished his multi-volume translation in 1717, an anonymous “Grub Street” version of his Arabian Nights was being published in London, and “Aladdin” would take its place as part of this new world of popular publishing. By the early nineteenth century, English versions of the story were circulating in stand-alone chapbooks, in collections of Arabian Nights tales adapted for children, and in general anthologies of fairy tales, where the story might be bound together with an English fairy tale like “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The abridged version of “Aladdin” for children published by Elizabeth Newbery in 1790 as part of The Oriental Moralist was carefully stripped of any element that “might give the least offence to the most delicate reader,” and so this Aladdin has the vizier’s son spend his lonely wedding night in a stable with clean straw rather than locked in a lavatory. In these popular children’s editions, Aladdin had to offer an appropriate example of virtue for young minds.

  Originally set in a nameless kingdom in China, the story of Aladdin was transposed to other settings in a never-ending cycle of adaptation. While illustrated editions of the story often gave flight to exotic fantasies of the Orient, Aladdin’s adventures could also unfold in the streets of Paris or London. The uncertainties of the story’s original sources were forgotten in popular pastiches where French palaces and scenes were used to illustrate vaguely Chinese landscapes. In nineteenth century England, to come across “Aladdin” as part of the Thousand and One Nights was the exception rather than the rule. The overwhelming majority of Victorian readers, like the majority of readers in English ever since, encountered “Aladdin” in adaptations for children.

  As the popularity of “Aladdin” grew, in the late eighteenth century it made the leap onto the British stage, where it became one of the most frequently performed pantomimes of the Christmas season. As a pantomime, a theatrical entertainment for children involving music and comedy, “Aladdin” was transformed into a crowd-pleasing spectacle that exploited the exotic settings and the rapid shifts of fortune in the story: the version staged at Drury Lane in 1885 included a remarkable eleven scene changes. These productions, as well as other theatrical adaptations, brought the attention of early filmmakers to the story. The first films based on Arabian Nights stories were often simply filmed versions of the stage productions and extravaganzas that were already popular with the general public, often featuring the plots and characters added by Galland and Diyab to the Nights.

  Long before Disney chose “Aladdin” as the basis for its animated film of 1992, the tale was already an established global franchise. Connoisseurs of silent film will remember The Thief of Bagdad, the Douglas Fairbanks hit from 1924, which borrowed from “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba,” and “Prince Ahmad,” but even before this Hollywood hit German studios were already exploring Oriental fantasies on film—in Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921). Aladdin’s most significant appearance in these years was in German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger’s full-length animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which devoted one of the film’s five acts to his backstory. The emerging Indian film industry was similarly enthralled by “Aladdin” and other stories from the Nights in these early years of cinema, even before the success of American imports like The Thief of Bagdad consolidated the genre. Disney’s animated feature is only one late installment in a long tradition of portraying “Aladdin” on the big screen.

  As the story of Aladdin and his magical lamp cycled through European translations and adaptations, it was integrated into the basic vocabulary of Western letters. In some cases, authors merely deployed Aladdin as a familiar reference point in tales of exotic adventure. In The Count of Monte Cristo, for instance, Alexandre Dumas stages an Arabian Nights fantasy in a Mediterranean setting that features a cave of treasures presided over by Sindbad the Sailor and an Aladdin character drawn to the fantastic visions induced by hashish. The darker side of the dreamworld offered by Aladdin’s lamp is also highlighted in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle Imp,” where the protagonist buys a bottle that grants wishes, but must contend with the risk of eternal damnation if he dies with the magic bottle in his possession. In Stevenson’s version of the fairy tale, nothing is free.

  Despite the story’s obvious association with supernatural interventions and alternate realities, authors operating in a realist mode have also deployed Aladdin’s lamp as a metaphor for dreams of freedom and prosperity—even when they seem liable to collapse. In Moby-Dick, Aladdin’s lamp symbolizes the special pleasures generated by the successful pursuit of the precious resource of whale oil. While the ordinary merchantman must “dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet,” the whaleman “lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.” For Dickens, who immersed himself in the storytelling devices of the Arabian Nights, the story of Aladdin provided a template for thinking about the play of fate within the complex landscape of the Victorian city. Characters such as Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop seem to benefit from their own mysterious jinn—falling into an Arabian Nights dream where marriage to “the Princess of China” is accompanied by the summoning of “black slaves with jars of jewels on their heads.” A more sustained use of references to “Aladdin” runs through Dickens’s essays for Household Words, where the marvels of the hidden cave and the powers of the jinn pale before the vast treasure generated by a certain London firm and the sudden appearance of palaces in the surburban outskirts—the product of forces beyond human understanding.1

  The power of tales of the Arabian Nights—and Aladdin’s lamp—to unlock the sense of wonder in childhood dreams forms a consistent thread in the literature of the twentieth century as writers have reflected on their own hybrid cultural inheritance. In his memoir Aké, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka associates the tales of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” with biblical stories of miracle and a realm of magic that may be entered through the consumption of the forbidden fruit of childhood. The pomegranate “with its stone-hearted look and feel unlocked the cellars of Ali Baba, extracted the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, plucked the strings of the harp that restored David to sanity, parted the waters of the Nile and filled our parsonage with incense from the dim temple of Jerusalem.” For Salman Rushdie, retelling “Aladdin” in post-imperial London in The Satanic Verses was an opportunity to wrestle with colonial legacies and the frustrated aspirations of youth. In his native Mumbai, the young Saladin yearns for the magic lamp that rests next to the gilded tomes of Burton’s edition of the Thousand and One Nights in his father’s study, only for his stern father to withhold the lamp as a metaphor of the freedom he is denied. In the last chapter of the novel, “A Wonderful Lamp,” this conflict unexpectedly gives way to
the fairy tale of Saladin’s reconciliation not only with his ailing father but also with the cosmopolitan heritage of his Muslim Indian upbringing.

  Female authors have sometimes invoked “Aladdin” to refer not to boundless freedom and possibilities but to the specific challenges and limitations they face as women and writers. Clarice Lispector used her first encounter with the tale to signal her dissatisfaction with the possibilities open to her as a woman in mid-twentieth century Brazil. Evoking a stand-alone edition of “Aladdin,” one of the first books she read, she recalled her early sense that she was unlikely to get what she wanted by wishing but would have to create her own opportunities. The Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo wrote that even if she “could have a magic lamp like Aladdin and, by rubbing it, could have the power to write like Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Cervantes, or Dostoevsky,” she would not make that wish, for “a woman cannot unburden herself of her thoughts and feelings in a man’s style, just as she cannot speak with a man’s voice.”

  The image of Aladdin and his magic lamp is so ubiquitous that the scholar of folklore Ulrich Marzolph has coined the term “Aladdin Syndrome” to refer to the tendency to use this story to represent the Thousand and One Nights, Arabic literature, and Middle Eastern cultures as a whole. In popular culture, the telling and retelling of “Aladdin” becomes like a game of telephone, in which representations of Middle Eastern cultures and peoples become increasingly garbled. As the symbolism of “Aladdin” became detached from its original source, it could be deployed with both positive and negative connotations within American popular culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, as middle-class and upper-class Americans experienced a steady rise in prosperity, Aladdin became a useful metaphor for consumer dreams fueled by capitalist expansion.2 Most Americans today know “Aladdin” from the 1992 Disney animated film, which often plays up racial stereotypes in the portrayal of characters who appear to be a curious hodgepodge of Middle Eastern cultures. Perhaps the most striking symptom of “Aladdin Syndrome” is the poll of Republican primary voters conducted in December 2015 in which 30 percent of those polled supported the U.S. bombing of Agrabah, the fictional city in which Disney’s Aladdin takes place.