Mirrors of ink and wonderful lamps: The 'Arabian Nights' in Victorian and postmodern literature

Recent scholarship has attributed the popularity of the Arabian Nights tales in the Arabic-speaking world to the fulfillment of expectations of worldly justice and reward rather than to the presence of magic. In contrast, this study finds that the tales' reception in late-imperial and postmodern English letters is governed by a disregard for their possible ethical and historical claims. This unmooring of the practice of translation from notions of fidelity and authenticity is precisely what attracted the postmodern writers Barth and Rushdie to the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent texts of FitzGerald and Burton.;However, current postcolonial scholarship is less useful in understanding Burton and FitzGerald's influence on Barth and Rushdie. Barth's seminal postmodern prose and Rushdie's early postcolonial musings date to the sixties and mid seventies when reissues of Burton and FitzGerald's Eastern translations were in vogue in counter-cultural circles. In his prose Barth sought to rewrite Burton's notes rather than the original tales, and Rushdie privileged FitzGerald's Khayyam as exemplary of a positive conception of the migrant or 'translated man.' The influence of Said's Orientalism would prompt both writers to be more self-conscious about their use of Victorian translations of Eastern texts, but they would not altogether forsake a constructive engagement with this Victorian tradition in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and The Satanic Verses.;This study first situates Victorian translations of the Nights and Khayyam's Rubaiyat with recourse to previously unknown sources, including letters exchanged between the various translators and Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent poets and the 'foul papers' for Burton's Nights. This evidence suggests Lane alone among the translators was attentive to the claims of history and ethics on his material, while FitzGerald, Payne and Burton preferred Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent methods of translation that privileged sound over sense. Yet even Lane's notes to the Nights, which had informed Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot's respective interests in Islam and the occult, would later be gutted to suit the imperialist sentiment that accompanied Britain's invasion of Egypt in 1882. This reception attests to the power of Western institutions to reshape Eastern texts as foreseen by Said in Orientalism.