The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The story behind the stories is well known: Shahryar, the tyrant-king of Samarkand, demands a new virgin bride every night; every morning, the unfortunate bride of the night before is put to death. When Scheherezade is chosen for the office of bride-for-a-night, she beguiles Shahryar by telling him a story; she is so persuasive a storyteller that he cannot bear to have her killed, but calls her to his bed again the following night. And the next night and the next, until a thousand nights and a night have passed, and Shahryar has lost his taste for new brides, and for murder; he and Scheherezade live happily ever after.

Ali of that, of course, is fiction, simply a framing narrative for a large and diverse collection of tales. Shahryar is a figure of legend, and so far as anyone knows there never was a Scheherezade. Who wrote the stories, and when, is quite mys- terious: Many of them seem to be of Indian origin, others Persian, but ali of them are written in Arabic (hence the book's alternative title, The Arabian Nights), suggesting that the tales were compiled from diverse sources, possibly over a long period of time, by an Arabian literary antiquarian, or more than one. The earliest collections of these stories seem not to have taken the figure "one thousand and one" to mean anything more than "a large number," but the unknown editors of the definitive Arabic edition of the collection that was completed around 1500 were careful to adhere scrupulously to the framing story of Scheherezade by including exactly 1,001 stories.

The compilers of The Thousand and One Nights seem to have east a wide net, searching throughout the Islamic world for material to include. The collected stories then spread beyond the sphere of Arabic literature to become part of world literature with surprising speed. Individual tales apparently became known in Europe (probably via the lively Mediterranean trade of the Ottoman Empire) in the sixteenth century. The first full translation, by Abbй Antoine Galland (into French) appeared in 1704-17. Galland^ translation quickly became famous (it was almost certainly known to Swift [52], for example); such stock figures from the tales as Sinbad and Ali Baba entered the narrative vocabulary of European lit­erature, and helped to define the West's image of Arabia and the Islamic world. Many other translations into European lan- guages followed, most notably Sir Richard Burton^ sixteen- volume unexpurgated version in 1885-88.

The word "unexpurgated" is important in understanding the full significance and appeal of The Thousand and One Nights. Almost ali of us will remember tales like "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" from our childhoods, and indeed heavily cleaned-up and abridged editions of the tales have been pro- duced as children's books for decades. But the originais are not at ali like the Disneyfied versions made for children; some are laced with very bawdy humor, others are frankly and seduc- tively erotic, still others are swashbuckling tales of derring-do, with details that are not for the squeamish. (We are familiar with similarly prettified stories in Western literature; the chil- dren's books sold under the title Grimrris Fairy Tales have lit­tle to do with the earthy and sometimes quite horrifying German folk tales actually collected by the Brothers Grimm.)

The Thousand and One Nights is one of the world's all-time great bestsellers, whether in the original Arabic or in any of dozens of translations, and deservedly so. Its tales can charm a modern reader as they are supposed to have seduced Shahryar. They appeal by their strong narrative force, by the sophisti- cated way in which they have been turned from oral story- tellers tales to well-crafted written stories, and by the sense of magic and wonder that pervades them. The stories in the col- lection support each other; the total is greater than the sum of the parts. But it is important to read them in a translation that is accurate and not bowdlerized; see the Bibliography for our suggestions.

J.S.M.

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NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

1469-1527 The Prince

Machiavelli is commonly linked with Hobbes [43] as one of the two great early modern "realistic" theorists of political power. They would have understood each other, yet they diverge in some ways. Hobbes is by far the greater theorist. Indeed Machiavelli is hardly a theorist at ali; he is an observer, an ana- lyst, and an instructor. Hobbes lays down a doctrine of "legiti- macy"; Machiavelli is interested only in expediency. Finally Hobbes is an absolutist. But Machiavelli (in his Discourses on Livy, a profounder but less influential book than The Prince)