The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night (4 volume set) (Volume 1-4) [Box set] [Paperback]

J.C. Mardrus (Editor), E.P. Mathers (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 1990 | ISBN-10: 0415045436 | ISBN-13: 978-0415045438 | Edition: New edition

An unabashed and accurate translation of the wonderful and enchanting tales of the Arabian Nights, complete in four volumes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Kings and princes and towers, battles and djinni and houris, fables and histories and legends: the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. I unreservedly recommend it.
–Knave

Language Notes

Text: English, French, Arabic (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (December 31, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415045436
• ISBN-13: 978-0415045438
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.8 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,226,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

128 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Acme of Storytelling, October 8, 2002

By 

Brendan Barnwell (Santa Barbara, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (Vol. 1) (Thousand Nights & One Night) (Paperback)

Almost nothing can be said about the Thousand Nights and One Night, except what is obvious to anyone who understands its substance. It is one of the truly essential pieces of world culture, and probably the most extensive universe of stories in history.

Something must be said, however, for those who are NOT aware of the extent of this work. This is not the simple batch of a dozen or so stories -- Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, and the like -- that most people think it is. This is over 2400 pages of narrative, comprising close on 100 stories -- some of which are themselves as long as novels, and many of which contain smaller stories within themselves. The stories range from the profoundly epic to the delightfully whimsical, and there is variation in mood and length throughout the series that it not only serves as a collection of discrete stories but functions as a unified whole.

As such, the attempt to read the Thousand Nights and One Night in its entirety can not be a halfhearted one. The reader must be prepared to invest considerable time in the reading. The rewards, however, are incalculable. The complete experience has few parallels in fiction, because few works of such volume possess such unity. Reading moves from the hasty and immediate to the comfortable and regular. The difference is akin to that between listening to a 3-minute pop song and listening to a 30-minute symphony. The individual stories fade into memory, retaining their own identities but also falling into place within the whole.

I will not attempt to address the individual stories themselves in any detail. Suffice it to say that they narrate love, lust, sex, war, peace, contemplation, action, commerce, politics, art, science, and many other things, in the spheres of the supernatural and the mundane. The Thousand Nights and One Night is a virtually complete panorama of human existence, with each story a component scene.

I will, though, address the issue of translation. I have perused other editions of the tales in varying degrees (although this is the only one I have read completely). In the first place, any translation which omits some stories is not worth consideration. Although there is some controversy over whether Richard Burton (the first to translate the tales into English) corrupted the original text and inserted spurious parts, there is nothing to be gained by being persnickety in this regard. This edition contains more tales than most others I have seen, and therefore is more likely to contain the "right" tales somewhere inside. On a less abstract level, this text is simply more fun to read than most others, and, as mentioned, there is more of that fun text to be read.

Also, it can be plausibly speculated that this translation is particularly likely to have fewer Burton-induced inaccuracies, since it is not in fact a direct translation from Arabic to English. This 4-volume edition is a translation into English, by Powys Mathers, of a French translation, by J. C. Mardrus, of the original Arabic. It is somewhat surprising that an indirect translation such as this should be of such high quality, but I have found it to be so. In particular, this Mardrus & Mathers version includes substantial verse passages (which in other translations are often rendered as prose) and is refreshingly frank in its translation of the more ribald passages (which are numerous).

The Thousand Nights and One Night is not merely a book that can be read; it is a world which can be experienced, and the memories of that experience can mingle almost indistinguishably with memories of reality. Only a work of this size can work on large and small levels, with many intricate details but also many large thematic components. As an added benefit, by the time you have finished reading the fourth volume, your memories of the first will be fading, so you can begin a new reading immediately, and experience the joys of the Thousand Nights and One Night all over again.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful translation, June 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night (4 volume set) (Volume 1-4) (Paperback)

This is a complete English translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Before reading this, I started the Burton translation and never finished it. The language was very awkward, it seemed Burton purposely made it sound antiquated and in the passive voice. Instead of suiting the translation to the preconceptions Europeans had about both old and Eastern writings, Mardrus made a literal translation into French, and Mathers translated that into English. The result is not only a more acurate translation, but it's not the least bit awkward and is a joy to read. This is the only English translation of the book I recommend.

66 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not what it claims, July 8, 2005

By 

Dr. Richard M. Price (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (Vol. 1) (Thousand Nights & One Night) (Paperback)

Having earlier in the year read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I embarked on the 1001 Nights as the nearest equivalent from the Middle East. The Nights proved to be a wonderfully rich text, which evokes with unforgettable vividness the lives of rich and of poor in the great cities of medieval Egypt and the Levant; and the fantastic elements of magic and demons, and of voyages into exotic lands, show great powers of imagination along lines excitingly unfamiliar to us in the west. The version I first embarked on in all innocence was this Madrus-Mathers text; it soon excited my suspicions, and these were confirmed by reading Robert Irwin, `The Arabian Nights: A Companion'. The Mardrus version (in French) that Mathers rendered into English claimed to be an absolutely literal translation of a 'newly discovered' manuscript, but was nothing of the sort: it was a paraphrase which exaggerated and distorted certain elements in the original to make it appeal to the decadent taste of the France of Marcel Proust and André Gide. Mardrus was particularly concerned to make the work more sexy: the stories take on a prurience that is miles away from the spirit of the original. Powys did a very good job in translating this dubious text, but was the job worth doing? Despite the readability of his version and the elegance of his translations of the numerous poems contained in the text (often minimally related to the Arabic originals), the result cannot be preferred to the older version by Richard Burton or the recent one by Husain Haddawy. The trouble, however, is that Burton wrote in an archaizing style that is an acquired taste for a modern reader, while Haddawy has translated only a quarter of the original. I would recommend starting with the first volume of Haddawy, which translates the first and oldest part of the Arabic text (Haddawy's supplementary second volume is a mere selection of a few popular stories), and then sampling Burton, which is available on the internet. This is a fascinating world to explore, but the English reader is singularly poorly served. -- (2009) This is no longer so, since the appearance of a new English translation of the complete text, in clear modern English, by Malcolm C. Lyons. The price is something of a discouragement, it is true, though since you get almost 3,000 pages it is not extortionate. Let us hope that it sells well enough to enable the publication of a paperback version.