After offering my cordial thanks to friends and subscribers who have
honoured “THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT” (Kama Shastra Society) with
their patronage and approbation, I would inform them that my
“Anthropological Notes” are by no means exhausted, and that I can
produce a complete work only by means of a somewhat extensive
Supplement. I therefore propose to print (not publish), for private
circulation only, five volumes, bearing title—
_SUPPLEMENTAL NIGHTS_
_TO THE BOOK OF_
_THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT._
This volume and its successor (Nos. i. and ii.) contain Mr. John Payne’s
Tales from the Arabic; his three tomes, being included in my two. The
stories are taken from the Breslau Edition where they are distributed
among the volumes between Nos. iv. and xii., and from the Calcutta
fragment of 1814. I can say little for the style of the story-stuff
contained in this Breslau text, which has been edited with phenomenal
incuriousness. Many parts are hopelessly corrupted, whilst at present we
have no means of amending the commissions and of supplying the omissions
by comparison with other manuscripts. The Arabic is not only faulty, but
dry and jejune, comparing badly with that of the “Thousand Nights and a
Night,” as it appears in the Macnaghten and the abridged Bulak Texts.
Sundry of the tales are futile; the majority has little to recommend it,
and not a few require a diviner rather than a translator. Yet they are
valuable to students as showing the different sources and the
heterogeneous materials from and of which the great Saga-book has been
compounded. Some are, moreover, striking and novel, especially parts of
the series entitled King Shah Bakht and his Wazir Al-Rahwan (pp.
191–355). Interesting also is the Tale of the “Ten Wazirs” (pp. 55–155),
marking the transition of the Persian Bakhtiyár-Námeh into Arabic. In
this text also and in this only is found Galland’s popular tale
“Abou-Hassan; or, the Sleeper Awakened,” which I have entitled “The
Sleeper and the Waker.”
In the ten volumes of “The Nights” proper, I mostly avoided parallels of
folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting and valuable to
scholars, would have over-swollen the bulk of a work especially devoted
to Anthropology. In the “Supplementals,” however it is otherwise; and,
as Mr. W. A. Clouston, the “Storiologist,” has obligingly agreed to
collaborate with me, I shall pay marked attention to this subject, which
will thus form another _raison d’être_ for the additional volumes.