Thus the letter za is distinguished from the otherwise identical letter ra by having a little dot on top. Moreover, some letters in the written language are distinguished from others by little dots, or diacriticals, placed above or beneath the main form of the letter. At its most obscure, the language has some of the features of a shorthand system.

Translations from Arabic are peculiarly dependent upon judgements about context and plausibility. One of the commonest problems that a translator from Arabic faces is working out whether a particular pronoun belongs to the subject, the object or some other given instrument in the passage – whether, for example, the hu (‘he’ or ‘it’) refers to the sultan, the unlucky porter or the whip with which the porter is being flogged. Yet another feature of written Arabic which makes it easy for readers to lose their way is the relatively heavy use of pronouns. Secondly, the absence of capital letters can lead to proper names being mistranslated as things. A sentence will run on until the end of the paragraph, if not until the end of the book, and there are no inverted commas to signal the opening and closing of direct speech. First, one finds almost no punctuation at all in pre-modern Arabic manuscripts and texts. Only a few of the more serious problems will be listed here.

¹ The alien curlicued and dotted alphabet, which so bemuses the non-Arabist, is the least of the problems which translators of the language have to master. But all translation from Arabic poses a range of problems not encountered in translations from European languages, and translating the Nights poses quite specific difficulties.Īrabic is a difficult language. Earlier English translations have failings which were, to some extent, the product of the times in which they were made and, to some extent, the product of the quirks of the individual translators who made them.

As we shall see, Husain Haddawy’s recent translation is both accurate and fluent, but it is a translation of the first 271 nights only. Yet there is no remotely satisfactory translation of the great bulk of the Nights into either English or French. As Jorge Luis Borges once observed, ‘Nothing is as consubstantial with literature and its modest mystery as the questions raised by a translation.’ Neglected until modern times in the Near East, the Arabian Nights has been so widely and frequently translated into western languages that, despite the Arab antecedents of the tales, it is a little tempting to consider the Nights as primarily a work of European literature.

The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin