Item: 1 copy of The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy
This book was not what I had expected it to be, when I first read it last year. Without sounding too silly, it turned out that it wasn't romantic in the way I had always envisioned it to be.
What I knew about the story was that the heroine, whose name is Scheherazade, was prisoner to a king, and was under a sentence of death. She was clever enough to start telling stories to the king, and the king became so absorbed in the stories that he couldn't bear to have her killed.
What the setup actually is is that the king's wife has been unfaithful to him, from which he concludes that no woman can be trusted. Therefore, he takes a different girl every night and has her killed the next day. He's the king, so he can do this. Shahrazad, as it is spelled in this version, is the vizier's daughter and actually volunteers for this assignment. She starts spinning these tales and then stops at crucial points in the story, so the king keeps deciding that, well, he can wait 1 more day to kill her. She's a heroine not only for saving her own life, but also the lives of the other women who would have been next. Besides, obviously, if you kill all the women, the population eventually comes to a standstill.
What I always imagined was sort of the equivalent of her and the king staying up late talking every night, and I thought the stories, over time, would change and reveal something about who they were, personally. I thought it would be this slow unrolling of a relationship as the king becomes ever more entranced by these alluring, mysterious tales and the woman who tells them.
Instead, the narration between the tales is just filler, consisting of a few identical sentences each time (basically, "the following night, Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, 'please continue your story'"). Did I mention that Shahrazad's sister is there with her and the king the whole time? That's not to say I didn't like The Arabian Nights, because I did, but more for the historical and cultural things I learned from it. The plot still plays in my imagination the same as it ever did.
What I knew about the story was that the heroine, whose name is Scheherazade, was prisoner to a king, and was under a sentence of death. She was clever enough to start telling stories to the king, and the king became so absorbed in the stories that he couldn't bear to have her killed.
What the setup actually is is that the king's wife has been unfaithful to him, from which he concludes that no woman can be trusted. Therefore, he takes a different girl every night and has her killed the next day. He's the king, so he can do this. Shahrazad, as it is spelled in this version, is the vizier's daughter and actually volunteers for this assignment. She starts spinning these tales and then stops at crucial points in the story, so the king keeps deciding that, well, he can wait 1 more day to kill her. She's a heroine not only for saving her own life, but also the lives of the other women who would have been next. Besides, obviously, if you kill all the women, the population eventually comes to a standstill.
What I always imagined was sort of the equivalent of her and the king staying up late talking every night, and I thought the stories, over time, would change and reveal something about who they were, personally. I thought it would be this slow unrolling of a relationship as the king becomes ever more entranced by these alluring, mysterious tales and the woman who tells them.
Instead, the narration between the tales is just filler, consisting of a few identical sentences each time (basically, "the following night, Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, 'please continue your story'"). Did I mention that Shahrazad's sister is there with her and the king the whole time? That's not to say I didn't like The Arabian Nights, because I did, but more for the historical and cultural things I learned from it. The plot still plays in my imagination the same as it ever did.
posted by Karen at 7:13 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home