Under a shady tree on the banks of the Lakes in south Calcutta, Ghanashyam Das (or Ghana da) once told his friends the story behind Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Its origins, he claimed, date back to 13th-century China, where Marco Polo had picked it up from San Kao Chi, an editor and writer. Along with material riches, Polo brought back to Venice many such stories, which were written down by his prison-mate in Genoa, Rusticiano. Defoe had found a copy of the tales in Madrid, and made the islander's story (originally about a woman) his own. Ghana da's creator, Premendra Mitra, like his contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, knew that some of the world's most enduring tales are not products of a single author's creative efforts.
In Marvellous Thieves, Paulo Lemos Horta takes the reader across empires and trade routes to discover the hidden networks of textual transmission which produced the Arabian Nights. The title of the book may be an allusion to the tale of Ali Baba, but it also gestures towards the many acts of authorial theft that constitute the history of that great hypertext. The first of the stories begins in Louis XIV's France. Antoine Galland, engaged in translating the series receives on May 8, 1709 a guest from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab. Diyab brings him "orphan tales", hitherto unrecorded in manuscripts, which include the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba.
The scene shifts to late-1830s Calcutta. The Anglicist-Orientalist controversy surrounding colonial education has just been decided in favour of the Anglicists. Henry Torrens, a former student of Fort William College and member of the Asiatic Society begins translating the most comprehensive and 'literary' manuscript of the Nights: "Calcutta II" or the "Macnaghten manuscript" (named after its editor William Macnaghten). Around the same time in London, Edward Lane begins his translations of the stories. Lane had published his Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians in 1836 and his notes to the Arabian Nights locate it within the social and cultural milieu of Egypt, mysteriously conflating the stories' medieval provenance with Egyptian modernity.
In its final chapters, Marvellous Thieves turns to the controversial Orientalist, Richard Burton, colonialist and shape-shifter par excellence. In his Mirza Abdullah avatar, Burton had successfully attempted a Hajj in 1853, and his travels in South Asia had given him a sense of authority over the text at hand. He had hoped that his uncensored translation of the stories would offer an English readership a contrasting view of Harun-al-Rashid's Baghdad, tolerant of varied sexual and religious practices, and stodgy Victorian London.
The stories of these polyglot Orientalists and their zealous translation projects may sound familiar to those who have delved into the many versions of the Arabian Nights, but for Marvellous Thieves that is only the tip of the iceberg. In the last few decades, historians such as Simon Schaffer and Kapil Raj have acknowledged the role of intermediaries in the production of cultural texts and scientific knowledge. Their studies shift focus from the singular importance attached to individual authors to knowledge networks of transmission and translation, where a large number of "knowledge brokers" or "go-betweens" facilitate communication between different cultures. "Different cultures" here would imply not simply the differences between the collective artistic manifestations of one community and another, but, more fundamentally, difference between print cultures, manuscript cultures and oral cultures.
Richard Burton was indebted to his language teachers or munshis, most importantly Dosabhai Sohrabj, for their guidance with the texts. Similarly, Edward Lane's Egypt experience was mediated by a converted Scot, Osman Effendi, and the enigmatic book-seller, Sheikh Ahmed, who offered readings of people (particularly misleading about the "liberties" enjoyed by women) passing by his bookshop in the central Turkish bazaar.
For his translation of the Arabian Nights, Lane had on board a formidable Arabic scholar, Sheikh Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi, who would send explanations of portions of the text from Cairo to London. In Calcutta, even Macnaghten, who had won the highest distinction at Fort William College in Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian, requested the Asiatic Society to allow his "Maulavi" to assist in correcting the manuscript.
Networks are easier to understand when the units of exchange are inanimate objects such as books. Things get tricky when the carriers of stories are auto-mutable beings, that is to say humans, as with the case of Hanna Diyab. The stories he had performed in Aleppo's coffee houses changed with his audience. While historians knew of his contribution to Galland's text, the extent was unknown until recently, when a French translation of his travelogue kept at the Vatican library was published in 2015.
The established belief - that Diyab supplied Galland with a skeletal story, which was fleshed out by the Frenchman - betrays a distinct Western bias, and this is contested by Horta. He juxtaposes the travelogues of Paul Lucas (collector for the French king) and Diyab, to demonstrate how the best-known stories gathered richness in detail as the two undertook an adventurous journey from Aleppo to Paris.
Marvellous Thieves offers glimpses into the evolution of public spheres in Aleppo, Paris, London and Calcutta. Of particular interest to me were the different settings which shaped the stories. Diyab came from a culture of story performing in the bazaar coffee-houses and gardens of Aleppo. Lane sat in a bookstore in Cairo as his friend explained the comings and goings of people. In Calcutta it was informed by immediate academic training and Oriental scholarship. Horta suggests that in these intricate exchanges in the outskirts of Empire, we could be witnessing the "creation of world literature in translation".
Horta's multi-lingual research and his rich narrative style make for exciting reading. There are a couple of digressive passages (such as an elaboration upon Freemasons in India in "The Empire of English") that seem to loosen the book's grip on the reader. These are negligible. The narrative is interesting on several counts, not least because of the exciting lives of the individuals whose movements constitute the textual networks large and small. It would appear that academics have started finding evidence to support the seemingly bizarre stories of literary exchanges and "thefts" that were spun by writers who intuitively knew of the shaky ground on which authorship rests.
