Sheherezade?s Ventriloquists Contributed by Tegan Raleigh

Ever since Antoine Galland published Les Mille et une nuits in 1704, the story of Sheherezade and her spellbinding narrative powers has inspired immensely diverse adaptations in the West, from Disney's Aladdin to Pier Pasolini's Il Fiore delle mille e una notte, a soft-core porno with Oriental conceits. There have been bowdlerized versions fit for bedtime stories and other, bawdier versions, like Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights, passed around by randy schoolboys. Although many classics have undergone profound metamorphoses over time, nothing compares to the variety of the Nights. The irony is that a narrative underscored by a theme of matrimonial fidelity has produced some of the most faithless translations that we have today. But is fidelity a moot point when the source text is itself a translation, transcription, and transmogrification? Since there is no one definitive source for the Nights, doesn't that make it fair game for a translator's whimsy? There is not just one manuscript of the Nights, but four; and the Breslau, Calcutta I, Calcutta II, and Bulaq editions resemble one another, but, like independent-minded quadruplets, do not always agree. To complicate matters even more, these manuscripts are most likely translations from the Persian Hazar Afsana (A Thousand Stories), an ancient text that is now lost but gets mention in 10th century annals of Arabic literature. And since many of the tales appear to be Indian in origin, some scholars of the Nights posit that the Hazar Afsana was itself a translation from various Indian sources. It is possible to translate the Nights, no matter how nebulous its author may be, in an irresponsible way. The mos