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A review by boxcar
The Arabian Nights by Daniel Heller-Roazen
3.0
Having not read any other translations, I can only assume this one was good. It certainly read well, and I hope it was faithful to the original text. I absolutely see why these stories have transcended time and become ubiquitous! They mirror our modern world and life more than I expected. However, they were repetitive. It felt like I was reading the same story again and again with some changes to the script here and there. Maybe that is a symptom of the portion this edition chose to include, maybe it's a symptom of such storytelling itself. I noticed the same annoyance in Calvino's Italian Folktales. Well written, imaginative stories, but once you get through ~150 pages, you might as well have read them all.
Speaking of Calvino, his great novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveler references and pays homage to the Arabian Nights stories, and I feel that I understand it better as a result of reading. Herein lies a great strength of this work: it is so culturally and literarily (is that a word?) significant that by simply understanding and recognizing the overarching plot and the more lasting tales, I'm able to better understand all literature, modern and classic. Not many texts can say that: Homer's epics, Shakespeare, probably Virgil and Ovid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Grimm, Aesop--you get it.
I was shocked by the very premise. I'm not sure how I wasn't aware of it, but wow! That's fucked up! Kind of a weird experience reading these fairy tales and fantastical stories knowing that looming in the background is that if her story isn't sufficient, or if she finishes a story and goes to sleep without starting a new one, she is as good as dead. The explicit sexual exploitation at the kernel of the plot is unnerving: the king can sleep with whatever woman he likes, and each woman must submit, knowing that they will be both used as an object to satisfy the powerful man's sexual desires and subsequently disposed as an object who's utility has been all used up. Yes, it's a very, very old text. It's still pretty damn disgusting.
Speaking of Calvino, his great novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveler references and pays homage to the Arabian Nights stories, and I feel that I understand it better as a result of reading. Herein lies a great strength of this work: it is so culturally and literarily (is that a word?) significant that by simply understanding and recognizing the overarching plot and the more lasting tales, I'm able to better understand all literature, modern and classic. Not many texts can say that: Homer's epics, Shakespeare, probably Virgil and Ovid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Grimm, Aesop--you get it.
I was shocked by the very premise. I'm not sure how I wasn't aware of it, but wow! That's fucked up! Kind of a weird experience reading these fairy tales and fantastical stories knowing that looming in the background is that if her story isn't sufficient, or if she finishes a story and goes to sleep without starting a new one, she is as good as dead. The explicit sexual exploitation at the kernel of the plot is unnerving: the king can sleep with whatever woman he likes, and each woman must submit, knowing that they will be both used as an object to satisfy the powerful man's sexual desires and subsequently disposed as an object who's utility has been all used up. Yes, it's a very, very old text. It's still pretty damn disgusting.