Читать книгу The Book of Travels - Hannā Diyāb - Страница 11

By the time Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, the latter’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights was already enjoying immense popularity in Parisian court society. The prospect of discovering new material to add to his translation must have excited the French Orientalist. Even so, Galland was scrupulous in his choice of what to publish, preferring to rely on written rather than oral sources whenever possible. At his disposal was a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Nights that he had received from Syria some time before meeting Diyāb. Using it and a few other written sources, he had completed eight volumes of his translation, at which point he ran out of stories. His first encounter with Diyāb, which took place on March 25, 1709, at the house of Paul Lucas, a colleague with whom he shared an interest in antiquity and numismatics, seemed promising.²¹

After this first meeting, Galland recorded in his journal a description of the young man from Aleppo as a learned person who spoke several languages and possessed a knowledge of “Oriental” books. Diyāb told Galland about the existence of other tales, including those collected in The Book of the Ten Viziers,²² and promised to put some stories into writing. In a note written six weeks later, on May 5, Galland reports that Diyāb had “finished the story of the lamp.”²³ Titled “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp,” this would come to be the most famous story in the Nights. It was only in November of the following year, however, that Galland explicitly refers to a written version of the story.²⁴ Whether Diyāb had written it down himself while in Paris, dictated it to a commissioned scribe, or even sent it to Galland at a later stage remains an open question. Yet there is good reason to doubt that Diyāb wrote it down himself, at least during his time in Paris in 1709. He makes no mention of writing anything during his meetings with Galland, even though he stresses his ability to write single words, letters, and also, of course, his own Book of Travels. As for the Nights, he mentions only his oral contribution to the collection of stories, and that the old man was very appreciative of his service (Volume Two, §10.9).

From Galland’s Journal we learn that after Diyāb performed or wrote down the story of “Aladdin,” the two met several more times. During their meetings, Galland took notes on stories recounted for him by Diyāb. These stories would become the basis of volumes nine through twelve of the French translation (published between 1712 and 1717), marking a break with Galland’s previous practice of relying exclusively on written sources. One might envision these meetings between Diyāb and Galland as collaborative sessions in which the former used both Arabic and French to convey the stories to the French Orientalist. Of these stories, only the tale of “The Ebony Horse” has an attested written origin beyond Galland’s notes. All the others can be identified only to the extent that they contain well-known motifs from oral folk narratives.²⁵ As they do not have a written source, they have been referred to by scholars as “orphan stories.”²⁶ Of the sixteen tales he heard from Diyāb, Galland chose to publish ten. These include “ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn,” the equally famous “ʿAlī Bābā and the Forty Thieves,” and “Prince Aḥmad and the Fairy Perī Bānū.”

A further link between Diyāb’s Book of Travels and the Thousand and One Nights emerges from the narrative mode Diyāb adopts in his own book, one that makes ample use of embedded narratives—the central structural paradigm of the Nights and The Book of the Ten Viziers, as well as The Book of Sindbad the Sailor. Diyāb’s travelogue contains almost forty secondary stories, most of them diegetically independent of the main narrative. Some consist of only a few lines, whereas others extend over three or more manuscript pages. The stories are a mix of historical and hagiographical anecdotes, although they also include a few tales of crime and horror. The narratives seem to stem mainly from oral sources, but a few have well-attested written origins. Among the popular early-modern motifs that make an appearance are the figure of a person buried alive, the legend of the philosopher’s stone and the water of life, and reports of wonders such as the hydraulic Machine de Marly in Versailles and the Astronomical Clock in Lyon. Many of the stories are told at the point in the journey at which they were supposed to have taken place, while others are grouped according to theme.

Diyāb uses the classical Arabic categories of khabar (“report” or “account”) and ḥikāyah (“story”) as generic frames to indicate independent narrative units. These units are also highlighted through the use of colored ink and textual indentions. As is typical of classical frame narratives, about one third of the inserted stories are introduced not by the primary narrator, Diyāb himself, but by the characters from the story world—that is, by the people Diyāb meets during his voyages. This telling of a secondary tale by direct quotation, though common in Diyāb’s narrative, is unusual in early-modern travelogues. A skilled storyteller, Diyāb drew upon a repertoire of narratives he had probably acquired from collective reading sessions in coffeehouses and elsewhere, as well as spontaneous oral accounts, and fashioned these along recognizable plotlines. It is likely that, standing in front of Galland, he performed in a manner similar to that described by Scottish doctor Patrick Russell:

The recitation of Eastern fables and tales, partakes somewhat of a dramatic performance. It is not merely a simple narrative; the story is animated by the manner, and action of the speaker. A variety of other story books, besides the Arabian Nights Entertainments, (which, under that title, are little known at Aleppo) furnish materials for the storyteller, who, by combining the incidents of different tales, and varying the catastrophe of such as he has related before, gives them an air of novelty even to persons who at first imagine they are listening to tales with which they are acquainted.²⁷

The way Diyāb employed the skills Russell describes becomes clear when we examine how he combines plotlines and details known from other narratives.²⁸ For example, in one passage in The Book of Travels, he enters the home of a nobleman and sees a stunning trompe l'oeil painting of a man holding a bird that seems to jut out of the wall it is painted on (Volume Two, §9.41). He proceeds to elaborate on the theme by providing a biography of the artist (who may have been a Fontainebleau painter of the Renaissance school) in three episodes. In the first episode, a shoemaker’s apprentice falls in love with a princess. Her father laughs at the apprentice’s proposal but says he will give him his daughter’s hand in marriage if he can paint her portrait. The suitor agrees, and succeeds in painting a beautiful portrait that deeply impresses the prince. But the latter refuses to give his daughter to the apprentice, offering his second daughter instead. This breaks the young artist’s heart. He leaves the prince’s service, goes insane, and becomes a famous painter wandering the world. More than any other story in The Book of Travels, this episode exudes the spirit of the Thousand and One Nights.²⁹ The prominent role of the image recalls the motif of falling in love with a portrait, which appears in Diyāb’s story of “Qamar al-Dīn and Badr al-Budūr” (omitted by Galland from his translation). Second, the motif of becoming an artist out of lovesickness appears in the Majnūn Laylā story cycle, which may have been familiar to Diyāb from Khosrow and Shīrīn, a Persian retelling popular during Ottoman times. Finally, demanding an impossible or difficult task of a suitor is a motif known from the fifth tale told during the tenth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a book that itself is believed to have been inspired by “Oriental” models of frame-narrative storytelling.

In the second episode, Diyāb reports that the apprentice painter once painted on one of his master’s portraits a fly so realistic that the master tries to shoo it away. Though Diyāb presents this as part of the biography of the painter whose work he had seen, the same story is told by Giorgio Vasari (d. 1574) about Giotto di Bondone (d. 1276). To this episode Diyāb adds a third episode in which the painter, now named Nīkūlā, challenges his master to a contest of realism. The master creates an image of fruits so lifelike that birds come to peck them. But Nīkūlā wins by painting a curtain so realistic that his master tries to draw it aside to see the painting behind it. This story evidently stems from the one told by Pliny the Elder (d. 79) about the contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Both tales include a variant of the line attributed by Pliny to Parrhasius and given by Diyāb as follows: “It doesn’t take much skill to fool a few birds [. . .] Fooling a master painter like you? That takes some doing,” (Volume Two, §9.51). Although the motif is attested in traditions other than the Greek, it may have come to Diyāb’s attention in France, since it was deployed by eighteenth-century European intellectuals in their theorizations of art.³⁰ In his account of Paris, Diyāb mentions in passing that he had taken painting classes there.

Diyāb produces these episodes and combines them into a whole at a moment in his travelogue when he has just narrated his confrontation with the trompe l’oeil painting in Paris. He is as amazed by this painting as he is by a realistic depiction of Jesus Christ in Livorno, and by the Paris opera stage, which is populated by real animals, convincing landscapes, and royal chambers. The common theme is art that can be easily confused with reality, but Diyāb’s accounts of such works appear in different places in the travelogue. Creating his own piece of art as a narrative, both in the Thousand and One Nights and in his Book of Travels, Diyāb combines motifs and known episodes, and adds new names and details to them, giving them “an air of novelty,” as Russell puts it. The orphan tales, most prominently “ʿAlī Bābā,” are novelistic and complex. “ʿAlī Bābā,” as Aboubakr Chraïbi has shown, consists of a parallel structure in which two plot lines converge.³¹ Admittedly, as Chraïbi notes, Diyāb may have modeled the orphan tales on originals that were already complex. Still, tales like “The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette” and “Prince Aḥmad and the Fairy Perī Bānū” have the additional feature of combining tales of two different types into one. The story of “Aladdin” may be the result of a similar process.³²

The frame narrative structure, the modeling of new tales on old ones, and the compositional style are all features that Diyāb’s Book of Travels shares with the Thousand and One Nights. Structurally, the parallels between the two books are grounded in the way the storyteller’s memory functions and in his manner of refashioning existing narratives and motifs. Although some features may be unintended, in general Diyāb’s storytelling in The Book of Travels reflects an oral practice mostly based on oral accounts. Yet, we know that Diyāb did not tell stories only from memory—he also owned books, and contributed to a new practice of travel writing that emerged in the 1750s and ’60s.