Читать книгу Time Bites: Views and Reviews - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

The claim has been made for this book that it has travelled more widely than the Bible, for it has been translated through the centuries everywhere from Ethiopia to China. Yet it is safe to say that most people in the West these days will not have heard of it, while they will certainly at the very least have heard of the Upanishads and the Vedas. Until comparatively recently, it was the other way around. Anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai, or the Tales of Kalila and Dimna – these being the most commonly used titles with us – was a great Eastern classic. There were at least twenty English translations in the hundred years before 1888. Pondering on these facts leads to reflection on the fate of books, as chancy and unpredictable as that of people or nations.

The book’s history is as fascinating as its contents, and would make a pretty volume on its own.

The first English translation was done in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas North – he who translated Plutarch into a work which was the source of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Roman world. North’s Plutarch was popular reading: so was his version of Bidpai. In the introduction to the reissue of this translation in the nineteenth century, Joseph Jacobs of Cambridge (Jews have been prominent in the movement and adaptation of the book) concludes: ‘If I go on further, I foresee a sort of mental dialogue which will pass between my reader and myself: “What,” the reader will exclaim, “the first literary link between India and England, between Buddhism and Christendom, written in racy English with vivacious dialogue and something resembling a plot. Why, you will be trying to make us believe that you have restored to us an English Classic!” “Exactly so,” I should be constrained to reply, and lest I be tempted into this temerity, I will even make a stop here.’

And he did stop, but by then he had written a very great number of pages. I have been handed over by Ramsay Wood a vast heap of many versions of the Fables of Bidpai – some of them rare and precious – to aid me in this task of doing an introduction, and the first thing to be noticed is that the introductions tend to be very long: it is clear that the authors of them have become beguiled and besotted with the book’s history. As I have. For one thing, it has lasted at least two thousand years. But it is hard to say where the beginning was – suitably for a book whose nature it is to accommodate tales within tales and to blur the margins between historical fact and fiction.

One progenitor was the Buddhist cycle of Birth Tales (or Jātaka Stories) where the Buddha appears as a monkey, deer, lion, and so on. Several of the Bidpai tales came from this cycle. Incidents that occur in Bidpai can be seen in sculptures around Buddhist shrines dated before 200bc. The Buddha himself took some of the Birth Tales from earlier folktales about animals. But there is no race or nation from the Egyptians on – or back, for we may surely no longer assume that current information regarding ancient history is all there is to be known, or all that we will come to know – that has not used beast-fables as part of its heritage of instructional material. And so the genre is as ancient as mankind itself. Sir Richard Burton, who like all the other orientalists of the nineteenth century was involved with Bidpai, suggested that man’s use of the beast-fable commemorates our instinctive knowledge of how we emerged from the animal kingdom, on two legs but still with claws and fangs.

Another source or contributor was that extraordinary book, the Arthaṡāstra of Kautilya, which is suspected of dating from about 300 bc. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on a copy, and this is a pity: at a time when we are all, down to the least citizen, absorbed, not to say obsessed, with sociology and the arts of proper government, this book should take its place, not as the earliest manual on the subject, but as the earliest we know of. It describes in exact and even pernickety detail how properly to run a kingdom, from the kind of goods that should be available in the market-place to the choice of kingly advisers; how one should go about creating a new village, and where; the right way to employ artisans to manufacture gold and silver coins; disputes between neighbours about property and boundaries; how to keep accounts; the legal system; the use of spies. It is all here. And to our minds, what a mixture of humanity and brutality! It was forbidden, for instance, to have sex with a woman against her will, even if she was a prostitute, but there are also lengthy instructions about the use of torture as a punishment. Kautilya was a very cool one indeed; surely this book must have influenced Machiavelli when he wrote The Prince. If not, then the books come from the same region of human experience. Candid, unrhetorical, infinitely worldly-wise, the tone is more like that which one imagines must exist, let’s say, between a Begin and a Sadat when sitting together facing the realities of a situation unobserved by slogan-chanting supporters, or between a Churchill and a Roosevelt meeting in the middle of a war. There is nothing in the Arthaṡāstras that minimises the harshness of necessary choices. It was by no means the first of such handy guides to statesmanship, for Kautilya says it is a compendium of ‘almost all the Arthaṡāstras which in view of acquisition and maintenance of the earth have been composed by ancient teachers’. In other words, this to us so ancient book was to him the last in a long line of instructive tracts, stretching back into antiquity. Throughout he quotes the view of this one or that, sometimes up to ten or more, and then adds at the end, ‘My teacher says …’ but usually disagrees with them all, including his teacher, with ‘No, says Kautilya …’ or ‘Not so, says Kautilya …’, setting everything and everyone right, so that the book has about it the air of a young man refusing to be impressed by tradition – rather like students in the sixties bringing their own books to class and insisting on choosing their own curriculum.

The cycle called The Fables of Bidpai came into existence in this manner … but let us choose a version that, typically, tries to set fiction on a base of fact. Alexander the Great, having conquered India, set a disliked and unjust governor over the vanquished ones, who were at last able to overturn this tyrant, and chose a ruler of their own. This was King Dabschelim, but he turned out to be no better than his predecessor. A wise and incorruptible sage named Bidpai, knowing that he risked his life, went to the no-good king to tell him that the heavens were displeased with him because of his depredations, his cruelties, his refusal to be properly responsible for the welfare of the people put in his care. And sure enough, Bidpai found himself cast into the deepest and foulest dungeon; but the king, attracting to himself heavenly influences because of his inner disquiet over this behaviour of his, was caused to think again and … Thereafter the tale unfolds in the characteristic way of the genre, stories within stories, one leading to another. We in the West do not have this kind of literature, except where it has come to us through influences from the East: Boccaccio and Chaucer, for instance. What this method of storytelling, or this design, is supposed to illustrate is the way that in life one thing leads to another, often unexpectedly, and that one may not make neat and tidy containers for ideas and events – or hopes and possibilities – and that it is not easy to decide where anything begins or ends. As the history of the book itself proves. When the ‘frame’ story stops, temporarily, and a cluster of related tales is told, what is happening is that many facets of a situation are being illuminated, before the movement of the main story goes on. There may be even more than one ‘frame’ story, so that we are led gently into realm after realm, doors opening as if one were to push a mirror and find it a door.

Another version of the book’s origin is that there was once a good and honest king who had three stupid and lazy sons. Many educational experts came forward with suggestions as to their proper instruction, but the king was in despair, knowing that to give them the foundation of information they needed would take years, by which time the kingdom would be ruined. And then came a sage who said he would impart to the three princes the essence of statesmanship and sensible conduct in the form of instructive fables, and the process would be accomplished in a very short time, if the princes could be persuaded to pay attention. Thus the book has been known as A Mirror for Princes, and we are told that it was given to princes as part of their training to be monarchs.

The original Sanskrit version vanished, though later the material was translated back into Sanskrit from other languages, and India has produced as many versions ‘as there are stars in the sky’. The ancient Persian King of Kings, Nushirvan, heard of the book, and sent embassies, and it was translated into the ancient Persian tongue of Pahlavi, which event was thought of such importance that Firdausi celebrated it in the Shahnama. The incidents of the tales were infinitely illustrated in this book and in very many others, and anyone at all interested in Persian art will certainly have come across them in miniatures and otherwise. Not only Persian art – I have here a postcard from the British Museum of a turtle being carried through the air on a stick by two geese: the friends who could not bear to be parted. It is from a Turkish manuscript. The British Museum has this and many other ancient manuscripts so precious one may view them only through glass, like jewels, which they resemble.

When the Arabs conquered the old world, after the death of Muhammad, poets and scholars arrived in India, enquiring for the famous book they had heard so much about. The way they tracked it down, like the account of how the old Persian envoys found their copy, makes an attractive story full of suspense, mystery and drama, so that one has to suspect that the storytellers of the time took their opportunity to honour even further this honoured book by copious invention; while some of them made ‘quest tales’ from the material, in which the book becomes a hidden treasure. The most famous translation into Arabic was by a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam. Another was probably by an honoured Jewish scholar. In those comparatively flexible days, scholars were able more easily than now to appreciate each other and work together across boundaries. There were religions then, not nations – a fact it is hard to remember in its dimensions when considering how things were in those days. For instance, to read the biography of Muhammad by ibn-Ishaq, the Muslim equivalent of the New Testament, where nations and national feelings are absent, and men and women are known as Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and there were no Arabs and Jews in our sense, since that is a division of modern times, to read this book is hard for a modern Westerner because of how we see everything in terms of nations and nationalism. So strange is it that the mind keeps seizing up and you have to stop, and start again.

The query has been raised: What was the ‘secret ingredient’ of this Bidpai book, ‘this ocean of tales’, that enabled it to be absorbed without resistance, and to be loved by Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews? One answer was that in all these traditions it is established that tales and parables are for instruction and illustration as well as for entertainment. Medieval Europe rushed to translate the book because its fame was known, and they wanted its aid in learning how to live better. But nowadays we use this phrase in a different sense.

One of the best-known and most influential of the old versions was Anwar-i-Suhaili, or The Lights of Canopus. There had been earlier Persian versions, but these were considered inadequate and even elitist. An emir, or general, called Suhaili (of Canopus) invited one al-Kashifi to make a new version. I was interested that Canopus was being used as a name in a culture and at a time when names were often chosen to describe qualities, or as an indication of qualities a person hoped to acquire. People were expected to regard names as signposts, as it were. Round about that time there came into existence a cluster of Persian classics, all of Sufic origin and inspiration. The Lights of Suhaili is one of these. It is the same in ‘feel’ and format as, for instance, Saadi’s Rose Garden, using the Bidpai tales as a frame, or lattice, around which are woven associated tales, anecdotes, reminiscences, current scientific information, and verse of different kinds. It is worthwhile insisting that this great classic, now regarded with a truly horrible reverence and solemnity, was a popular book, meant for entertainment, as well as instruction. But who was this general or governor whose name became the name of the book, so that he was, in the way of those times and regions, place, person, tradition – all at once – and was able to bring about the creation of a new Sufi classic, using the ancient Bidpai material to do it? And who was al-Kashifi, whose name means ‘that which is manifested’, or ‘shown’, or ‘demonstrated’?

Canopus the star is much embedded in the mythology of ancient times and when you trace it to this country or that it melds and merges into other names, places, personages. To illustrate the remarkable law known to all researchers, but not yet acknowledged by science – that when one is becoming interested in a subject, books formerly unknown and unsuspected fly to your hand from everywhere – while I was speculating about Canopus, and what it could mean in this context, if it meant anything, there came my way Astronomical Curiosities, published in 1909, and one of its main sources of information was one al-Sufi, an Arabian astronomer of the tenth century. Much is said by al-Sufi about Canopus of the constellation Argo. Argo was associated with Noah’s Ark. It represents, too, the first ship ever built, which was in Thessaly, by order of Minerva and Neptune, to go on the expedition for the conquest of the Golden Fleece. The date of this expedition commanded by Jason is usually fixed at 1300 or 1400 BC. Canopus was the ancient name of Aboukir in Egypt, and is said to have derived its name from the pilot of Menelaus, whose name was Kanobus, and who died there ‘from the bite of a snake’. The star is supposed to have been named after him, in some traditions, and it was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians … but Canopus is also the god Osiris, and is in the most remarkable and ever-changing relationship with Isis, who was the star Sirius … and thus is one enticed into all kinds of byways, from which it is hard to extricate oneself, and harder still to resist quoting, and thus joining the immoderate preface-makers whom I can no longer in honesty condemn.

The Iliad and Odyssey are linked with Bidpai in another way too: a Greek called Seth Simeon translated it in the eleventh century, adding to it all kinds of bits and pieces from these two epics – another illustration, if one is needed by now, of the way such material adapts to new backgrounds and new times. In Hebrew, Turkish, Latin, Russian, Malay, Polish – in almost any language you can think of – its naturalisation followed the laws of infinite adaptability. It is not possible to trace its influences: as is always the way when a book’s seminal power has been great, it was absorbed and transformed by local cultures. Certainly the Bidpai tales can be found in the folklore of most European countries, almost as much as they can in the East. Some were adapted by La Fontaine. Beaumont and Fletcher are supposed to have used The Dervish and the Thief as a germ for Women Pleased. Aesop’s fables as we know them are indebted to Bidpai.

There has not been an English version for a long time. The existing ones have become stiff and boring. Many consider Sir Thomas North’s still to be the best, but what for the Elizabethans was a lively new book is for us a museum piece.

This fresh creation by Ramsay Wood follows the more than 2,000-year-old precedent of adapting, collating and arranging the old material in any way that suits present purposes. It is contemporary, racy, vigorous, full of zest. It is also very funny. I defy anyone to sit down with it and not finish it at a sitting: his own enjoyment in doing the book has made it so enjoyable.

And there is another good thing. The original, or perhaps I should say some arrangements of the original, had thirteen sections: The Separation of Friends, The Winning of Friends, War and Peace, The Loss of One’s Gains, The Rewards of Impatience, and so forth. This volume has only the material to do with friends, artfully arranged to make a whole. And so we may look forward – I hope – to the rest.