Читать книгу The Book of Travels - Hannā Diyāb - Страница 9

Johannes Stephan

The author of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah),¹ Ḥannā Diyāb,² became known to Western scholarship more than a century after his death, when his name was discovered in the diaries of Antoine Galland, the great French Orientalist and translator of the Thousand and One Nights.³ Since that discovery, Diyāb, a Maronite Christian merchant and storyteller from Aleppo, has become a familiar figure to scholars interested in the textual history of the Nights. He has been described as Galland’s muse: The informant who supplied several famous stories to the French translation of the collection, including “Aladdin” and “ʿAlī Bābā and the Forty Thieves.”

Until the early 1990s, few scholars were aware that in 1764 Diyāb had written his own travelogue.⁴ Because the first pages were missing, his work was catalogued as anonymous by the Catholic priest Paul Sbath, who came into possession of it at some point in the early twentieth century.⁵ After Sbath’s death in 1945, his family gave the manuscript to the Vatican Library, where it remains today. The work is an account of Diyāb’s travels, mostly in the company of a Frenchman named Paul Lucas. Starting in early 1707, from the vicinity of Diyāb’s hometown of Aleppo, the two journeyed through Ottoman Syria, then traveled across the Mediterranean to Paris, passing through Cyprus, Alexandria, Cairo, Fayoum, Tripoli, Djerba, Tunis, Livorno, Genoa, Marseille, Lyon, and the court of Versailles, among many other places. They arrived in Paris in September 1708 and lived there together for several months. In June 1709, Diyāb set out for home. His voyage took him first to Istanbul, where he lived for some time. After crossing Anatolia by caravan, he returned home to Aleppo in June 1710.

Ḥannā Diyāb’s connection to the Thousand and One Nights has long tantalized scholars, and the publication of his travelogue may help shed light on that.⁶ But The Book of Travels is also significant in its own right. Among the topics it allows us to explore are Diyāb’s relationship to his French patron, Paul Lucas; different forms of oral storytelling proper to The Book of Travels; and the culture of Arabic writing in eighteenth-century Aleppo.