Lyons's version is superior not only because it is simpler but because it respects the delicacy of the original: the reunion is both fantastic and farcical, and the more moving for that. Lyons also preserves one of the most salient aspects of the Nights: all matters, whether ribald or sublime, are treated with the same grave but light-handed equanimity. Human antics are framed, as the stories themselves are, against a backdrop of eternity. And from that illumined perspective, the pettiest of swindlers and the grandest of monarchs stand revealed in all their genial humanity.
In one of the finest essays ever written on the Nights, his Tausendeine Nacht of 1906, the great Austrian poet, playwright and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (who 11 years before had written his own Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two in homage) drew attention to the "exalted sensuality" which holds the huge work together. But he also noted that a certain "intuition, a presence of God, lies over all these sensuous things, which is indescribable". If it is death, "the destroyer of delights and the parter of companions", which quickens the tales, and which impels Shahrazad to weave ever more fantastic narratives out of her inexhaustible imagination, it is God, invisible but always palpable, who presides over every episode.
This Penguin Classics set has been exquisitely designed, from its sleek slip-case to the subtle motifs, derived from Persian miniatures, which adorn the covers, down to the silk ribbon markers which dangle from each plump volume like the tassels on fezzes. In addition to Irwin's introductions, which deal respectively with the Nights themselves, their tangled textual history, and their immense influence on later writers, there are three excellent maps, a glossary, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a detailed index. The Lyons translation appears two years after the new French translation by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel, in the Pléiade series. It's a useful reminder that the Nights came to us first in Gallic trappings. It was the French numismatist and librarian Antoine Galland (1646-1715) who discovered the Arabic originals and translated them, in 12 volumes, over the years 1704 to 1717. In the Lyons version, the three so-called "orphan stories" (such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for which no Arabic original has been found but which Galland included) have been elegantly translated by Ursula Lyons.
The work poses a final puzzle. How can it be that such vivid tales lull us to sleep? In several, the great Harun al-Rashid, fifth caliph in the Abbasid line, finds himself troubled by insomnia and when all else fails, he calls for a story. Perhaps the answer lies in the tales' odd but pleasing combination of unrestrained fantasy and shrewd common sense. The stories, however improbable or grotesque, are underpinned by the homeliest of morals: the good prevail and the wicked are overthrown. The prince is restored to his realm and the merchant recovers his lost fortune. The tales satisfy imaginations famished for wonder. But even more importantly, they stand like fabulous cities against the encroachments of the dark.
