This blog is supposed to be about the craft of writing. Ostensibly, my role is the distribution of pearls of writerly wisdom, but in practice I usually end up raving about videogames, superheroes, the state of the Australian film industry, Grant Morrison’s brain and the weather.
My friends tell me this is a good thing. A consistently on-topic, methodically-updated blog is no fun at all, they say. But every blog must occasionally obey its Prime Directive. Therefore, today’s post will actually contain genuine advice for writers. And here it is:
Read a book. Specifically, the Burton translation of The Arabian Nights (aka Alf Layla Wa Layla, aka The Book Of 1001 Nights, aka One Thousand Nights And A Night). It’s probably the best lesson in storytelling you’ll ever get.
You’ve probably all heard of The Arabian Nights. It’s almost solely responsible for every Western idea about Arab culture and mythology. The roc, Sindbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin, genies, flying carpets and evil viziers all come from this one monumental work. If you buy books, chances are good that you own a stripped-down ‘collection’ of stories from the Nights. But most people know very little about the real thing.
In their original form, the Nights were a collection of roughly one thousand myths and folktales from early medieval Persia. They were later transposed and translated into Arabic after the rise of Islam, becoming the primary story of that culture (just as the Iliad was to ancient Greece). The first manuscripts must have been both incredibly long and incredibly varied in content, containing as they did around a thousand wildly-different stories; from comedies, animal tales and bawdy tales; to epics, tragedies and tales of war.
It was many centuries later (the 1700s) that the Nights finally made their way to the West, courtesy of a French scholar named Antoine Galland. Interestingly, Galland also inserted many of the tales we most commonly associate with the Nights: Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were added at this stage. The Nights became popular, but there was not yet a defining version, a translation that kept the style and tone of the original. The problem was, none of the English translators were particularly well-versed in Arab culture.
Enter Sir Richard Burton. This guy was the Indiana Jones of the scholarly Victorian world. Burton was a soldier, explorer, translator, author and Orientalist par excellence. He spoke 29 different languages, including perfect Persian, Arabic and Hindustani. He discovered Lake Tanganyika and the source of the Nile. He was the first Westerner to visit the capital of Somalia, and the first to enter the Holy City of Mecca without being executed (For this last feat he spent months crafting the perfect Arab disguise, even going so far as to circumcise himself). He wrote over 20 books, including a translation of the Karma Sutra, and was knighted by the Queen. In his free time, he was one of the best swordsmen in all of Europe.
Our man Burton did not think much of the English Nights translations available at the time. Never one to mince words, he called them ‘hideous, hag-like and naked’ and ‘disfigured by childish mistakes’; and despaired that they reduced a work ‘of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present for little boys’. So he damn well did something about it. Burton released his weighty translation (16 volumes) in 1856, and it is still the best English translation available. He preserves the violence, the politics, the religion and, most importantly, the sex. At the time of the book’s release, Burton’s anthropological footnotes were basically considered pornography. I’m pretty sure they’d still raise a few eyebrows today.
For the writer, The Arabian Nights is a firsthand lesson in what it means to be a storyteller. It’s all here: surprising twists, subtle character development, cliff-hangers, complex allegories, flashbacks, role reversals and stories nested within other stories (And as an interesting aside, I’m beginning to see that the Nights was a major influence on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). This book is the perfect toolkit for anyone who aspires to hold their audience’s attention and tell meaningful tales. Aleister Crowley once said: ‘If you want to learn magic, begin by reading The Arabian Nights‘. He could very well have been talking about writing.
And besides, you have to love a book in which characters frequently begin their stories with the line: ‘God forgive me for the lies I am about to tell!’
The writer’s battlecry, if ever there was one. So get thee hence to a second-hand bookstore!