Album Mille et une nuits: Iconographie choisie et commentée par Margaret Sironval (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Album Mille et une nuits: Iconographie choisie et commentée par Margaret Sironval Ulrich Marzolph (bio) Album Mille et une nuits: Iconographie choisie et commentée par Margaret Sironval. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. 268 pp. As the paper cassette it is housed in states, the little book under review has been put together especially for the fifteenth anniversary of the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade," French publisher Gallimard's prestigious library of canonical European literature. The images it contains have been selected by French researcher Margaret Sironval, whose extensive dissertation on the tale of Aladdin is hopefully to be published soon. Sironval, who also wrote the book's text, has demonstrated her expertise in the field of Arabian Nights research by contributing to the preparations of the large exhibition on the Arabian Nights that took place in late 2004 at the National Museum for Ethnography (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan. On its just over 230 text pages the book contains a wealth of 248 images, most of them in color. The images are accompanied by short, yet informative passages of text. In approaching her subject, Sironval reminds the readers that the Arabian Nights has been introduced from a world without pictures—the Islamic Near and Middle East, where images of living beings are forbidden by religious law—into a European world constituted by images. Consequently, her subject contains only a few illustrations (of texts other than the Arabian Nights) originating from "Oriental" sources. Instead, it consists almost exclusively of images, portraits, and other pictorial renderings of subjects deriving from European inspiration. Sironval starts by discussing the Nights in Antoine Galland's French adaptation (picturing portraits of Galland as well as a specimen of his manuscript diary). She then uses the voyages of Sindbâd (originally a separate book that was only integrated into the Nights by Galland) to lead over to the enlarged Joseph Charles Mardrus translation, whose reception in the Paris belle époque she extensively demonstrates, and continues by presenting various topics: jinnîs, voyages in the air, magicians, and magic. The following passages on performances of tales from the Nights in music and drama contain some of the book's most fascinating details as Sironval convincingly argues how newly invented artificial illumination, first with gas lamps and later by way of electricity, was put to use so as to underline the magic effect of Aladdin's lamp. Next, themes and topics from the Nights toward the turn of the twentieth century are shown to occur in commercial advertisements (particularly for chocolate), in ballet, music, painting (Chagall, Matisse), and, finally, the cinema: in particular, Lotte Reiniger's Adventures of Prince Ahmad (1927) and Douglas Fairbank's The Thief of Baghdad (1924) constitute treatments of the Nights that remain influential in the history of film, [End Page 262] while screen plays such as versions of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves with French comedian Fernandel (1954) or American actors Maria Montez and John Hall (1944) document the lasting popularity of one of the most popular tales from the Nights. In her final passage, Sironval justly praises the Nights as a powerful source of imagination whose transnational appeal has generated innumerable objects of creative expression. The Album's images to a large extent derive from large collections such as those in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale or the Osaka Minpaku, besides various smaller and some unnamed private collections. Its text constitutes highly entertaining and informative reading, and the general reader would hardly notice some minor mistakes—such as when Sironval mentions the "third calender being carried away by the ebony horse," (50) whereas the third calender rides on a flying horse of flesh and blood totally different from the artificially constructed one in the story of the Ebony Horse, or when in a rare touch of Orientalist approach Sironval refers to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il fiore delle Mille e una notte as rendering the "fleur" of the spirit of the Nights (242) when all Pasolini did was to present his selective version of "best" (implying sexually pronounced) tales from the Nights. Beautiful and appealing as the Album is, its publication has two serious drawbacks. First, the pocket-book size...