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Text of the page (random words):
d land of evening you will recall spengler s der untergang des abendlandes that is the downward motion of the land of evening or as it is translated more prosiacally the decline of the west i think that we must not renounce the word orient a word so beautiful for within it by happy chance is the word oro gold in the word orient we feel the word oro for when the sun rises we see a sky of gold i come back to that famous line of dante dolce color d oriental zaffiro the word oriental here has two meanings the oriental sapphire which comes from the east and also the gold of morning the gold of that first morning in purgatory what is the orient if we attempt to define it in a geographical way we encounter something quiet strange part of the orient north africa is in the west or what for the greeks and romans was the west egypt is also the orient and the lands of israel asia monor and bactria persia india all of those countries that stretch further and further and have little in common with one another thus for example tartary china japan all that is our orient hearing the word orient i think we all think first of all of the islamic orient and by extension the orient of northern india such is the primary meaning it has for us and this is the product of the thousand and one nights there is something we feel as the orient something i have not felt in israel but have felt in granada and in córdoba i have felt the presence of the east and i don t know if i can define it perhaps it s not worth it to define something we feel so instinctively the connotations of that word we owe to the thousand and one nights it is our first thought only later do we think of marco polo or the legends of prester john of those rivers of sand with fishes of gold first we think of islam let us look at the history of the book and then at the translations the origin of the book is obscure we may think of the cathedrals miscalled gothic that are the works of generations of men but there is an essential difference the artisans and craftsmen of the cathedrals knew what they were making in contrast the thousand and one nights appears in a mysterious way it is the work of thousands of authors and none of them knew that he was helping to construct this illustrous book one of the most illustrious books in all literature and one more appreciated in the west than in the east so they tell me now a curious note that was transcribed by the baron von hammer purgstall an orientalist cited with admiration by both lane and burton the two most famous english translators of the thousand and one nights he speaks of certain men he calls confabulatores nocturni men of the night who tell stories men whose profession it is to tell stories during the night he cites an ancient persian text which states that the first person to hear such stories told who gathered the men of the night to tell stories in order to ease his insomnia was alexander of macedon those stories must have been fables i suspect that the enchantment of fables is not in their morals what enchanted aesop or the hindu fabulists was to imagine animals that were like little men with their comedies and tragedies the idea of the moral proposition was added later what was important was the fact that the wolf spoke with the sheep and the ox with the ass or the lion with the nightingale we have alexander of macedon hearing the stories told by these anonymous men of the night and this profession lasted for a long time lane in his book account of the manners and customs of the modern egyptians says that as late as 1850 storytellers were common in cairo there were some fifty of them and they often told stories from the thousand and one nights we have a series of tales those from india which form the central core according to burton and to cansinos asséns author of an excellent spanish version pass on to persia in persia they are modified enriched and arabized they finally reach egypt at the end of the fifteenth century and the first compilation is made this one leads to another apparently a persian version hazar afsana the thousand tales why were there first a thousand and later a thousand and one i think there are two reasons first there was the superstition and superstition is very important in this case that even numbers are evil omens they then sought an odd number and luckily added and one if they had made it nine hundred and ninety nine we would have felt that there was a night missing this way we feel that we have been given something infinite that we have received a bonus another night we know that chronology and history exist but they are primarily western discoveries there are no persian histories of literature or indian histories of philosophy nor are there chinese histories of chinese liberature because they are not interested in the succession of facts they believe that literature and poetry are eternal processes i think they are basically right for example the title the thousand and one nights would be beautiful even if it were invented this morning if it had been made today we would think what a lovely title and it is lovely not only because it is beautiful as beautiful as lugones los crepúsculos del jardín the twilights of the garden but because it makes you want to read the book one feels like getting lost in the thousand and one nights one knows that entering that book one can forget one s own poor human fate one can enter a world a world made up of archetypal figures but also of individuals in the title the thousand and one nights there is something very important the suggestion of an infinite book it practically is the arabs say that no one can read the thousand and one nights to the end not for reasons of boredom one feels the book is infinite at home i have the seventeen volumes of burton s version i know i ll never read all of them but i know that there the nights are waiting for me that my life may be wretched but the seventeen volumes will be there there will be that species of eternity the thousand and one nights of the orient how does one define the orient not the real orient which does not exist i would say that the notions of east and west are generalizations but that no individual can feel himself to be oriental i suppose that a man feels himself to be persian or hindu or malaysian but not oriental in the same way no one feels himself to be latin american we feel ourselves to be argentines or chileans it doesn t matter the concept does not exist what is the orient then it is above all a world of extremes in which people are very unhappy or very happy very rich or very poor a world of kings of kings who do not have to explain what they do of kings who are we might say as irresponsible as gods there is moreover the notion of hidden treasures anybody may discover one and the notion of magic which is very important what is magic magic is unique causality it is the belief that besides the causal relations we know there is another causal relation that relationship may be due to accidents to a ring to a lamp we rub a ring a lamp and a genie appears that genie is a slave who is also omnipotent and who will fulfill our wishes it can happen at any moment let us recall the story of the fisherman and the genie the fisherman has four children and is poor every morning he casts his net from the banks of a sea already the expression a sea is magical placing us in a world of undefined geography the fisherman doesn t go down the the sea he goes down to a sea and casts his net one morning he casts and hauls it in three times he hauls in a dead donkey he hauls in broken pots in short useless things he casts his net a fourth time each time he recites a poem and the net is very heavy he hopes it will be full of fish but what he hauls in is a jar of yellow copper sealed with the seal of suleiman solomon he opens the jar and a thick smoke emerges he thinks of selling the jar to the hardware merchants the smoke rises to the sky condenses and forms the figure of a genie what are these genies they are related to a pre adamite creation before adam inferior to men but they can be gigantic according to the moslems they inhabit all of space and are invisible and impalpable the genie says all praises to god and solomon his prophet the fisherman asks why he speaks of solomon who died so long ago today his prophet is mohammed he also asks him why he is closed up in the jar the genie tells him that he is one of those who rebelled against solomon and that solomon enclosed him in the jar sealed it and threw it to the bottom of the sea four hundred years passed and the genie pledged that whoever liberated him would be given all the gold in the world nothing happened he swore that whoever liberated him he would teach the song of the birds the centuries passed and the promises multiplied finally he swore that he would kill whoever freed him now i must fulfill my promise prepare to die my savior that flash of rage makes the genie strangely human and perhaps likable the fisherman is terrified he pretends to disbelieve the story and he says what you have told me cannot be true how could you whose head touches the sky and whose feet touch the earth fit into that tiny jar the genie answers man of little faith you will see he shrinks goes back into the jar and the fisherman seals it up the story continues and the protagonist becomes not a fisherman but a king then the king of the black islands and at the end everything comes together it is typical of the thousand and one nights we may think of those chinese spheres in which there are other spheres or of russian dolls we encounter something similar in don quixote but not taken to the extremes of the thousand and one nights moreover all of this is inside a vast central tale which you all know that of the sultan who has been deceived by his wife and who in order never to be deceived again resolves to marry every night and kill the woman the following morning until scheherazade pledges to save the others and stays alive by telling stories that remain unfinished they spend a thousand and one nights together and in the end she produces a son stories within stories create a strange effect almost infinite a sort of vertigo this has been imitated by writers ever since the alice books of lewis carroll or his novel sylvia and bruno where there are dreams that branch out and multiply the subject of dreams is a favorite of the thousand and one nights for example the story of the two dreamers a man in cairo dreams that a voice orders him to go to isfahan in persia where a treasure awaits him he undertakes the long and difficult voyage and finally reaches isfahan exhausted he stretches out in the patio of a mosque to rest without knowing it he is among thieves they are all arrested and the cadi asks him why he has come to the city the egyptian tells him the cadi laughs until he shows the back of his teeth and says to him foolish and gullible man three times i have dreamed of a house in cairo behind which is a garden and in the garden a sundial and then a fountain and a fig tree and beneath the fountain there is a treasure i have never given the least credit to this lie never return to isfahan take this money and go the man returns to cairo he has recognized his own house in the cadi s dream he digs beneath the fountain and finds the treasure in the thousand and one nights there are echoes of the west we encounter the adventures of ulysses except that ulysses is called sinbad the sailor the adventures are at times identical for example the story of polyphemus to erect the palace of the thousand and one nights it took generations of men and those men are our benefactors as we have inherited this inexhaustible book this book capable of so much metamorphosis i say so much metamorphosis because the first translation that of galland is quite simple and is perhaps the most enchanting of them all the least demanding on the reader without this first text as captain burton said the later versions could not have been written galland publishes his first volume in 1704 it produces a sort of scandal but at the same time it enchants the rational france of louis xiv when we think of the romantic movement we usually think of dates that are much later but it might be said that the romantic movement begins at that moment when someone in normandy or in paris reads the thousand and one nights he leaves the world legislated by boileau and enters the world of romantic freedom the other events come later the discovery of the picaresque novel by the frenchman le sage the scots and english ballads published by percy around 1750 and around 1798 the romantic movement beginning in england with coleridge who dreams of kublai khan the protector of marco polo we see how marvelous the world is and how interconnected things are then come the other translations the one by lane is accompanied by an encyclopedia of the customs of the moslems the anthropological and obscene translation by burton is written in a curious english partly derived from the fourteenth century an english full of archaisms and neologisms an english not devoid of beauty but which at times is difficult to read then the licensed in both senses of the word version of doctor mardrus and a german version literal but without literary charm by littmann now happily we have a spanish version by my teacher rafael cansinos asséns the book has been published in mexico it is perhaps the best of all the versions and it is accompanied by notes the most famous tale of the thousand and one nights is not found in the original version it is the story of aladdin and the magic lamp it appears in galland s version and burton searched in vain for an arabic or persian text some have suspected galland forged the tale i think the word forged is unjust and malign galland had as much right to invent a story as did those confabulatores nocturni why shouldn t we suppose that after having translated so many tales he wanted to invent one himself and did the story does not end with galland in his autobiography de quincey says that for him there was one story in the thousand and one nights that was incomparably superior to the others and that was the story of aladdin he speaks of the magician of magrab who comes to china because he knows that there is the one person capable of exhuming the marvelous lamp galland tells us that the magician was an astrologer and that the stars told him he had to go to china to find the boy de quincey who had a wonderfully inventive memory records a completely different fact according to him the magician had put his ear to the ground and had heard the innumerable footsteps of men and he had distinguished from among the footsteps those of the boy destined to discover the lamp this said de quincey brought him to the idea that the world is made of correspondences is full of magic mirrors that in small things is the cipher of the large the fact of the magician putti...