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Arabian Nights

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Re: Arabian Nights

#31

Post by Iv »

riffraff wrote: post #12

> Many of the well-known modern stories, like that of Aladdin, have the more prurient elements removed or are stories that were added much later. I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version and can share what this is about? I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own language also has the same censoring.

I remember reading a story where sailors discovered an island where plant-women were growing. They were friendly and gave fruits growing on them to the sailors, but the few who tried to "embrace" them got absorbed. Yep, there was some vore hentai connoisseurs at the time.

Re: Arabian Nights

#32

Post by Iv »

Always fun to remind people that Aladdin is actually Chinese in the original stories.

But then, let's be fair, their depiction of China sounds like it was just a placeholder for "far away land"

Re: Arabian Nights

#33

Post by bovermyer »

robin_reala wrote: post #25
CAT0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet need something like this for all languages, not only english.

This question comes up a lot. The source to our production pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest part of why we produce good work is that we have a high quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part is very specific to English, and that’s the difficult part to replicate for other languages. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/ [2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/

I'm curious, why xhtml instead of LaTeX?

Re: Arabian Nights

#34

Post by adrian_b »

riffraff wrote: post #12

> Many of the well-known modern stories, like that of Aladdin, have the more prurient elements removed or are stories that were added much later. I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version and can share what this is about? I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own language also has the same censoring.

In the original there were frequent occurrences of the names of various anatomical parts or of various acts that are considered taboo now. Also there were many explicit descriptions of love scenes, even if a poetic language was used for them.

Of the old translations, only the French translation of Mardrus and the uncensored variant of Burton were somewhat close to the original text. Even the "uncensored" variant of Burton was more distant from the original text than the Mardrus translation.

There exists a much more recent French translation which is said to be more faithful to the original text than any of the previous translations (while the Mardrus translation was not censored, there were many places where it was not a word-by-word translation).

I do not remember precisely, because I have read it a long time ago, but I believe that the new good French translation is that by André Miquel et al.; various editions of that may be found at Amazon. I am not aware of any decent English translation.

When I was very young, I have read a translation into my language of the French translation of Mardrus. The first few volumes matched the French text, so they were quite explicit. Then it seems that someone noticed that and ordered the translators to remove any explicit parts, so the following volumes were obviously censored, lacking many words or entire scenes from the French Mardrus text.

Re: Arabian Nights

#35

Post by robin_reala »

0-_-0 wrote: post #26
robin_reala wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arabian Nights has been on my list to produce for SE for a couple of years now, but its sheer size is imposing. I’ll probably do it in the not too distant future though.

Did you produce the Edgar Allan Poe Short Fiction collection? I'm reading it right now, it's great! And huge! https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...

Yep! Glad you’re enjoying it. Here are my share of the SE productions: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/

Biggest so far (and biggest on SE at 1.2m words) has been Samuel Pepys’ Diary: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary

Re: Arabian Nights

#36

Post by fmajid »

Jorge Luis Borges wrote an excellent comparison of translations of the Arabian Nights, notably those of Galland, Burton, Lane and Mardrus. His conclusion was the Lane one was most faithful to the original, despite being prudishly bowdlerized, that Mardrus emphasized the sensual aspects to titillate his readers and Burton on the other hand over-emphasized the violence. I've read the Galland, Mardrus and Burton but not Lane, and can agree on his characterizations of the first three.

It's great to see they have left the footnotes, that are some of the most interesting aspects of the translation (trigger warning: Burton was a Victorian and exhibits all the casual racism of his epoch, despite being very forward-looking in surprising ways).

My favorite one is from volume 1:

[FN#543] Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history.

Re: Arabian Nights

#38

Post by robin_reala »

bovermyer wrote: post #33
robin_reala wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question comes up a lot. The source to our production pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest part of why we produce good work is that we have a high quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part is very specific to English, and that’s the difficult part to replicate for other languages. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/ [2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/

I'm curious, why xhtml instead of LaTeX?

When we edit, we’re literally building a standard ePub3 file, which natively uses XHTML as its document representation. The pipeline then produces alternative versions of the same file. We could work in LaTeX, but it would reduce our contributor count (more people know XHTML than LaTeX) and we’d need to transform it anyway, with the potential of introducing new bugs.

Re: Arabian Nights

#39

Post by [deleted] »

adrian_b wrote: post #34
riffraff wrote: post #12

> Many of the well-known modern stories, like that of Aladdin, have the more prurient elements removed or are stories that were added much later. I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version and can share what this is about? I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own language also has the same censoring.

In the original there were frequent occurrences of the names of various anatomical parts or of various acts that are considered taboo now. Also there were many explicit descriptions of love scenes, even if a poetic language was used for them. Of the old translations, only the French translation of Mardrus and the uncensored variant of Burton were somewhat close to the original text. Even the "uncensored" variant of B…

[deleted]

Re: Arabian Nights

#40

Post by riffraff »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #16
riffraff wrote: post #12

> Many of the well-known modern stories, like that of Aladdin, have the more prurient elements removed or are stories that were added much later. I wonder about the "prurient" bits? Anyone perused this version and can share what this is about? I am quite curious to see if the version I read in my own language also has the same censoring.

Aladdin isn't an example of a story with the prurient elements removed, it's an example of a story that was added much later. Aladdin is not present in Middle Eastern versions of the Arabian Nights at all; it first appears in a book written by a French guy.

oh, I see, thanks.
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