Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (47 page)

Yes, Rachilde is right. In order to approach even the illusion of happiness, we need the deliciousness of Night and the enchantment of Love. And that is the
ambience
of these magical stories that the European scholar has coaxed from their secret Oriental shelters.

Dr. Mardrus is a noted Orientalist, whatever may be said to the contrary by an emir (a friend of Claretie) who has found “certain imprecisions” in this version, which one feels to be so filled with enchantments. A most conscientious laborer, Dr. Mardrus spoke from the outset of the magnitude of his undertaking. Before him, no one had made a complete, exact, literal translation into French, out of fear that the nakedness of Arabic expression might wound, more than our Western modesty, the universal puritanism of Christian literatures. In English, there are the faithful versions, today extremely rare, of Payne and Burton, but those were limited subscribers’ editions and thus were, so to speak, secret. Mardrus knows, also, of a second edition of Burton, but it is expurgated. The erudite French translator gives the origins of his sources. The basis of
The Thousand Nights and a Night
(for thus its title should be rendered) is a Persian anthology, the
Hazar Afsanah.

There have been several narrators who, taking the original pieces, fantasized at will. Persian stories were mixed with legends from other nations. “The entire Moslem world, from Damascus to Cairo and from Baghdad to Morocco, was reflected in the mirror of
The Thousand Nights and a Night.
” A mixture of dialects, of various idiomatic phrases, which are found in manuscripts produced at different times, prevents us from fixing a date for the marvelous book in which it would seem that all the fantasy of the Orient intermingles. Recent studies, however, have shown that the stories that appear in all the texts date to the tenth century. Those stories are: the story of King Shahryar and his brother King Shahzaman; the story of the merchant and the Ifrit; the story of the fisherman and the Ifrit; the story of the porter and the three young ladies; the story of the woman cut into pieces, the three apples, and the black slave Rayhan; the story of the vizier Nur al-Din; the story of the tailor and of the hunchback; the story of Nur al-Din and Anis al-Jalis; the story of Ghanim ben-Ayyub; the story of Ali ibn Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar; the story of Kamar al-Zaman; the story of the ebony horse; and the story of Jullanar of the sea. The second story of Kamar al-Zaman and the story of the Mearuf date to the sixteenth century; most of the stories are from the tenth to sixteenth centuries, and the stories of Sindbad the Sailor and King Jali’ad are prior to all the others.

According to the note that stands at the beginning of Madrus’ edition (which began to be published by the
Revue Blanche
and has been completed by Fasquelle), there are seven critical editions of the original texts of
Alf Laylah wa Laylah:
the (unfinished) edition of sheik El Yemeni, 2 vols., Calcutta, 1814-1818; the Habitch edition, 12 vols., Breslau, 1825-1843; the Macnaghten edition, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1830-1842; the Bulaq edition, 2 vols., Cairo, 1835; the Ezbekieh editions, Cairo; the cut, corrected, quirky edition by the Jesuits, 4 vols. Beirut; and the four-volume Bombay edition. Doctor Mardrus has preferred the Bulaq, but has had recourse, too, to Macnaghten’s edition, in addition, principally, to the various Arabic manuscripts.

I have no knowledge of any literal German, or Italian, or Spanish translation.
The Thousand and One Nights
that we know in Spanish is translated from the French translation by Galland, “a curious example of the deformation that a text may suffer when it passes through the head of a scholar in the time of Louis XIV.” Galland’s adaptation, done for the Court, was systematically emasculated of all things
risqué
and filtered of all its wit. Even as an adaptation it is incomplete, for it contains barely a quarter of the stories. Before Mardrus, the stories that make up the other three-quarters were unknown in France, or, better, the world.

In order to translate a work of poetry one must be a poet. And in order to translate this peerless work of poetry, what was needed was a poet learned in things of the Orient—a man such as Dr. Mardrus, who has lived the Oriental life in the same places where, in prestigious and abolished imaginations, these extraordinary tales were born.

That the translator is a notable poet will be seen in the pearl of an introduction, a handful of harmonious words that I must set down here as a gift to my readers: “I offer,” it says, “all naked, virginal, intact, innocent, for my own delight and the pleasure of my friends, these Arabian nights—lived, dreamed, and translated, in their native land and on the water. They were sweet to me during the vagaries of long journeys, under distant skies. That is why I offer them. They are innocent, ingenuous, and smiling, and they are filled with ingenuity, like that Moslem Shahrazad, their succulent mother, who bore them in mystery, fermenting uneasily in the bosom of a sublime prince—lascivious and fierce—under the tender eyes of clement, merciful Allah. From the moment of their coming they were caressed by the hands of auroral Dinarzad, their aunt, who engraved their names on golden leaves sparkling with moist jewels, and secreted them under the velvet of her eyes until pure adolescence, when she sprinkled them, voluptuous and free, over the Oriental world, made eternal with her smile. I judge them and I give them as they are, in the freshness of flesh and rose. For . . . there is but a single method, honorable and logical, for translation—‘literalness,’ impersonal, hardly attenuated by one’s quick blink and long savoring. . . . This sort of translation, which is suggestive, produces the greatest literary power. It creates evocative pleasure. It recreates by suggestion. It is the surest guarantee of truth. It sinks, firmly, into the stone’s nakedness. It sniffs the primitive aroma and crystallizes it. It winds and mixes . . . fixes. Of course, if literalness enchains and tames the digressing spirit, then it restrains the infernal facility of the pen. I will not complain of that.

“For where is one to find in a translator the simple, anonymous genius free of
la niaise manie de son nom?
⁵³
Yet the difficulties of the native land—difficulties so very unyielding for the professional—would not, under the fingers of the lover of the Eastern way of speaking, be concentrated in more whorls and knots than those needed for the enjoyment of unbinding them. As for the reception. . . . The mannered West, made pale in the stifling atmosphere of verbal conventions, feigned confusion at hearing the frank, simple, whispered yet sonorous language, and the laughter, of those dark-skinned healthy girls who inhabited those vanished tents.

“Those houris see no harm in that. And the primitive peoples call things by their name, and find in what is natural almost nothing blameworthy, or in the expression of what is natural nothing licentious. (By ‘primitive peoples’ I mean those who do not yet have any defect of flesh or spirit, and who are born into the world under the smile of beauty . . .) Of course pornography, that hateful product of spiritual old age, is utterly unknown to Arabic literature. The Arabs see everything under the aspect of hilarity. Their erotic sense leads only to joy, to gaiety. And they laugh out loud at what the Puritan would think scandalous. Any artist who has wandered through the Orient and lovingly cultivated the sometimes rickety benches of the popular cafés in true Arab, Moslem cities—old Cairo with its cool streets filled with shadows, the
souks
of Damascus, Yemen, Mascata, or Baghdad; who has slept on the bedouin’s immaculate mat in Palmyra, fraternally broken bread and tasted salt in the glory of the desert with sumptuous Ibn-Rachid, that perfect type of the authentic Arab, savored all the exquisite pleasure of a conversation of ancient simplicity with Sharif Hussein-ben Ali ben-Aun, the pure descendant of the Prophet, emir of holy Mecca, will have been able to remark upon the expression on the picturesque physiognomies gathered there. A unique sentiment reigns over all existence: a mad hilarity. It flames up in the vitals shaken by every frank remark of the heroic, gesticulating public narrator, animating all listeners, leaping from one delighted spectator to another. . . . And so the drunkenness rises in one, for one finds oneself aroused by the words, by the sounds, by the perfume or the aphrodisiac of the air, by the soft under-odor of hasheesh, that last gift of Allah! . . . And it floats through the air in the night. . . . Allah is not applauded; that barbaric gesture, inharmonious and fierce, that undeniable vestige of the ancestral Carib races dancing around the post of colors, which Europe has taken as the symbol of the horrid bourgeois delight of men and women crowded together in the gaslight, is essentially unknown. To a song, the notes of reeds and flutes, a complaint from the qanun or oud, a rhythm from the deep darbukkah, a song from the muezzin, or an almeh,
⁵⁴
a piquant story, a poem of cascading alliterations, a subtle fragrance of jasmine, a flower-dance or deep-throated cadence of the bukkah, a song from the muezzin or from a pearl upon the belly of a ripe undulating courtesan with starry eyes—the Arab responds quietly or with his entire voice, with an Aa-a-ah! a-a-ah! . . . long, wise, modulated, ecstatic, architectural. The Arab is intuitive, but refined and exquisitely so. He loves the pure line and the unrealized riddle. But . . . he stretches, wordlessly, infinitely.

“And now, I can promise, without fear of misstating, that the curtain will rise only on the most astonishing, most complicated, and most splendid vision that a narrator’s fragile instrument has ever, upon snowy paper, lighted.”

That is the prologue that opens the mysterious and talismanic portals of those kingdoms of dreams so human yet so divine. Nor does Doctor Mardrus announce his work in vain. Among the strangest and most prestigious decorations, the most unlikely yet magnificent scenes begin to unfold. From the narration emerge the most varied of dews; one hears the most astounding sounds, sees the vastest visions. The joy of a humanity without complications flowers freely, healthily, and freshly, in all its pristine nature.

Bread is called bread, and wine, wine, and the functions of love, as in Moses’ decalogue. There is nothing deformed; neither the sin of our theologies exists there, nor the shame of our guilty modesties, nor the malice of our civilized perversities. There is, however, a superior culture that casts justice and goodness upon souls. And the unknown seems natural, and the prodigious seems usual, and dream enters life and life mingles with dream, as it should. One perfectly understands that wish of Stendhal, who desired to “forget two things,
Don Quixote
and
The Thousand and One Nights,
so that every year I might, as I reread them, experience a new voluptuousness.”

Of myself, I will say that no book has so liberated my spirit from the tediums of our common existence, our daily aches and pains, as this book of pearls and gems, magic spells and enchantments, realities so ungraspable and fantasies so real. Its fragrance is sedative, its effluvia calming, its delights refreshing and comforting. Like any modifier of thought, but without the inconveniences of venoms, alcohols, or alkaloids, it offers the gift of an artificial paradise. To read certain tales is to enter a pool of warm rosewater. And in all, there is delight for the five senses—and for others that we hardly suspect.

In no way shall I recommend that Mardrus’ version be read by any persons save men of letters, men of education,
men.
Unless they be judicious, quiet ladies stuffed with literature, none of our females is prepared for this work, which would undoubtedly scandalize them. The Oriental nude is yet more natural than the nude of classical Greece. As for young unmarried ladies, they simply cannot read it. Suffice it to say that the morality of Mohammedan damsels is quite other than that taught in nuns’ schools, finishing schools, and the like, where the doctrine of Christ is taught.

Happy the person who can with naturalness and simplicity, without irony or evil thoughts, wander through these flowery, perfumed gardens of delights! Fortunate the person who can anoint himself with the exhalations of the poets of the East as though with a fine unguent of poetry. That person will feel that for a moment centuries-old chains will have fallen from the wings of his soul. And as Doctor Mardrus, that new Sindbad who brings us miraculous stories from the lands of wonder, says, the reader will feel himself to be “an aerial sailor through the night.”

MARINETTI AND FUTURISM

Marinetti is an Italian poet writing in French. He is a good poet, a notable poet. The world’s intellectual
élite
know him. I know that personally, he is a kind soul, and he is worldly. In Milan, he publishes a lyrical, polyglot review,
Poesia,
which is luxuriously presented. His poems have been praised by the best lyric poets in France. His major work—so far—
Le roi Bombance,
is Rabelaisian, pompously comic, tragically burlesque, exuberant, and it achieved well-merited success when it was published, though it probably will not when it is performed in Paris under the direction of the very famous actor Lugne-Poe. And Marinetti’s book against D’Annuzio is so well done and filled with such ill will that the Imaginificus must be most pleased with the satirical homage. . . .

Marinetti’s poems are violent, sonorous, and unbridled. They give the effect of the Italian fugue played upon a French organ. And it is curious to see that the author whom he most resembles is the Flemish poet Verhaeren. But the reason for making Marinetti the subject just now is a survey carried out today about a new literary school that he has founded, or whose principles he has proclaimed with all the music of his considerable instrument. This school is called Futurism.

The problem is, Futurism was founded by the great Mallorcan Gabriel Alomar. And I have spoken about this in
Dilucidations,
which prefaces my
Canto errante.

Did Marinetti know the pamphlet in Catalan in which Alomar put forth his
pensées?
I believe he did not, and that this is just another of those coincidences. But however the case may be, one must recognize the priority of the expression, if not altogether the doctrine.