#the arabian nights

[lepetitdragonvert]

The Arabian Nights. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

Hodder & Stoughton

Londonien

1924

Artist : E. J. Detmold

[illustratus]

The Sultan orders to cut off Aladdin's head by Albert Robida

[mask131]

Fantasy sights: William Heath Robinson

William Heath Robinson was an English cartoonist and illustrator of the early 20th century.

He did various Shakespearian illustrations - he most notably illustrated Twelfth Night, in such a way to convey its dark, eerie, ghostly and oniric tones beyond the comedy aspects...

And he also did some very famous illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Robinson also did an illustrated version of "The Pantagruel and the Gargantua", sometimes grouped together as William Heath Robinson's The Rabelais.

William Heath Robinson was also very as a fairytale illustrator - but since there's a lot more, I'll place them under a cut.

He illustrated Andersen's fairy tales...

He created an illustrated version of "The Arabian Nights"...

And he also illustrated various children-oriented productions, such as Walter de la Mare's "Peacock Pie" or Charles Kingsley's "The Water-Babies".

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the rollercoaster, the person you’ve only read about or the one next to you in bed?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live, tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

In The Thousand and One Nights, known in English as The Arabian Nights, Scheharazade tells stories in order to keep the sultan in suspense from night to night so he will not kill her. The premise of the vast thicket of stories is that the sultan caught his queen in the embrace of a slave and decided to sleep with a virgin every night and slay her every morning so that he could not be cuckolded again. Scheherazade volunteered to try to end the massacre and did so by telling him stories that carried over from one night to the next for nights that stretched into years.

She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man. In the course of all this telling she bore three sons and delivered a labyrinth of stories within stories, stories of desire and deception and magic, of tranformation and testing, stories in which the action in one freezes as another storyteller opens his mouth, pregnant stories, stories to stop death.

Do you tell your story or does it tell you? Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan’s story; Scheharazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production, and talked her way out.

--The Faraway Nearby (2012)

[Rebecca Solnit]

[careful-disorder]

Maxfield Parrish, Cassim - Wikimedia

The Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the forty thieves - Library of Congress

[tomoleary]

Edmund Dulac 'Taking her hand he led her to the apartment of the Queen Pirouze', from "The Arabian Nights" (1907)

Source

[ownedbybooks]

I'm reading The 1001 Nights and I've just reached Aladin's story and guess what? It's set in Ancient China! I was not expecting this.

[princesssarisa]

What is Scheherazade like?

Well… I mean her hair (👩), her eyes (👀), her body (🚶‍♀️) and some colors of her skin

Well, I tend to imagine her as beautiful, though of course it's not important that she be beautiful, her intelligence and knowledge of stories are what matters.

I picture her of medium height and slender, with light brown skin, deep brown eyes, and long, luxuriant black hair.

[mote-historie]

1910 Leon Bakst, Odalisque Costume design for the ballet Sheherazade. Composers: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Scheherazade is a major character, and the storyteller, of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights).

[thedepartmentofdiscoveries]

The Dar al-Hajar (Arabic: دار الحجر, "Stone House" or "Rock Palace") is a former royal palace located in Wadi Dhar about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Sana'a, Yemen. Built in the 1920s as the summer retreat of Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din, ruler of Yemen from 1904 to 1948, it sits on top of a structure built in 1786 for the scholar al-Imam Mansour. The palace stayed in the royal family until the Yemen revolution of 1962. The palace is now a museum. In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini used the palace as the home of Princess Dunya in his film The Arabian Nights.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Henry Justice Ford 

[stone-cold-groove]

Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp.

[talesfromtheenchantedforest]

so glad being over-educated and unemployable is an issue that resonated with medieval Baghdad:

I stayed with him for three days, and then he asked, “Do you know any craft by which to make your living?” I told him: “I am a lawyer, a scientist, a scribe, a mathematician and a calligrapher.” “There is no market for that kind of thing here,” he replied. “No one in this city has any knowledge of science or of writing and their only concern is making money.” “By God,” I said, “I know nothing apart from what I have told you.” He said, “Tighten your belt, take an axe and a rope and bring in firewood from the countryside. This will give you a livelihood until God brings you relief.”

— The Arabian Nights, Night 12, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons

[butterbeerandlemoncakes]

Books of 2022

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi-- I’m not typically a graphic novel person, but this one was pretty good. It follows the story of a young girl growing up in Iran, and how living in a country going through wars and political movements affected her childhood and her family. 

Animal Farm, George Orwell--For some reason, I never had to read this one in High School, so thought it was high time that I read it. I understand why its a book used in HS literature, it definitely makes you think--who’s way was right? Is there a right way? Not entirely pleasant to think about, especially with the way the world is today, but that’s the point.

Custer’s Fall: The Native American Side of the Story, David Humphreys Miller--This was a really interesting read. It was basically compiled from a bunch of oral histories from Native Americans who either lived through the Battle of Little Bighorn, or were closely related to someone who was, and thus could tell their story. It never really occurred to me before that, even though no White men survived the battle, we never really heard the Native American side of the story. We always see Custer portrayed as a hero, even though he was defeated at the battle. Would definitely recommend if you’re into American history.

May Day, F. Scott Fitzgerald--Didn’t care for this one as much of his other short stories. It portrayed a snippet of a series of intertwining lives, giving us a glimpse of essentially one weekend, one night, really, in the lives of these people, and how they treated each other and how this impacted each of their lives. 

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice--one of the few examples where I actually liked the movie better than the book. Granted, this was one of the first books ever written by Anne Rice (I think), so her writing probably got better with time, and by the movie came out, many of the other books in the series had already been written, so there was much more material to draw off of. However, still a fairly enjoyable book and an easy read.

The Arabian Nights: The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor and Other Stories, edited by Andrew Lang--Although I’d already read one version of the Arabian Nights, this one contained stories--such as those of Sindbad, that I hadn’t read before. This translation didn’t flow as nicely as the other one I had read, with the stories flowing into each other, but was still a fun read.

The Murder of King Tut, James Patterson & Martin Dugard--This was an alright read. It was fun and quick to get through, but overall seemed lacking in plot. I think the title makes it seem like it will be more of a mystery/thriller than it was.

Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry--I got this book from a friend who said it was one of her favorite plays. Its basically a spoof on a lot of the “classic”/shakespearian dramas, and does follow those basic plotlines but in a much more vulgar way. It was an entertaining, if not strange, read. Reminded me a lot of some of the  plays I would write when I was younger.

The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King--Book 2 of the Gunslinger series, I didn’t care for this one as much as the first. Again, it’s a lot of setup for the rest of the series and introduction to more important characters, but I wasn’t as drawn to it as the first book. I’ll still continue to read the rest of the series, though.

London, Edward Rutherford--This is a LONG book, it took me several months to plug through. However, it was a very enjoyable read, detailing the history of London from prehistory to now. It follows a series of families, following their ancestors through time and just seeing how everyday people lived through all these historic times. A very interesting read.

[jessread-s]

✩🧞✨Review:

Ahdieh’s retelling of “The Arabian Nights” is made magical by her prose. 

Unfortunately, I did not love this book as much as I would’ve had I read it in middle school. As someone early in their twenties, I found myself getting frequently frustrated by the rash decisions made by Shahrzad (Shazi)—the novel’s sixteen-year-old protagonist—and how quickly she abandoned her revenge plot even though I likely would have had the same impulsive behavior at that age.  

I also had trouble investing in the romantic relationship between Shazi and Khalid (her love interest and the Caliph of Khorasan) because it developed too quickly for my tastes and did not seem believable as a result. Shazi claimed to hate him so much because of the women he killed, his difficult personality, and the numerous secrets he kept from her, but then fell for him at a moment’s notice citing his dashing appearance. Both characters presented many red flags, Shazi especially for initiating strange sexual encounters that I could not wrap my brain around.

While their romantic connection forms almost instantly, the novel’s main conflict does not present itself until the very end, which is frustrating. I did, however, enjoy Ahdieh’s beautiful, immersive prose. She uses language that is reminiscent of her source material to build a world with magic and deadly curses that the reader explores through alternating points-of-view. 

➤ 4 stars

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[imjustanotherhater]