The Secret of Laughter: Magical Tales from Classical Persia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Secret of Laughter: Magical Tales from Classical Persia Ulrich Marzolph (bio) The Secret of Laughter: Magical Tales from Classical Persia. Compiled by Shusha Guppy . London: I. B. Tauris, 2005. xviii, 209 pp. Ever since the Grub-Street prints of tales from the Arabian Nights at the beginning of the eighteenth century, English-language readers have been fascinated—as have many others—by Oriental tales. While in the eighteenth century the Central European perception of the "Orient" was dominated by the Ottoman Empire and its provinces, the country of Iran (whose denomination as Persia derives from the Greek name of its ancient heartland province of Fârs) entered common [End Page 268] European consciousness somewhat later. Particularly since the beginning of the British Empire's engagement on the Indian subcontinent, Iran's strategic position earned the country attention not only in politics, but also in terms of religion, history, language, and, eventually, culture. English-language collections of "Persian tales" were notably publicized by the indefatigable William Alexander Clouston (1843–96) in books such as The Book of Sindibâd (1884), Flowers from a Persian Garden (1890), and Some Persian Tales, from Various Sources (1892). The first major, and still today the only sizeable, English-language collection of Persian tales from living oral tradition was published by British colonial officer David Lockhart Robinson Lorimer and his wife, Emily Overend, in their Persian Tales, Written Down for the First Time in the Original Kermani and Bakhtiari (1919). Since then, just over half a dozen English-language collections of Persian tales have been published, including L. P. Elwell-Sutton's The Wonderful Sea-Horse (1950), Anne Sinclair Mehdevi's Persian Folk and Fairy Tales (1965), Eleanor Brockett's Persian Fairy Tales (1970), Alan Feinstein's Folk Tales from Persia (1971), and Asha Dhar's Folk Tales of Iran (1978). At the same time, European interest in Persian folk and fairy tales appears to have diminished in reverse proportion to the available knowledge. Particularly since the Iranian revolution of 1978–1979 and the ensuing public perception of Iran as a political reality, the country appears to have lost its appeal as a never-never-land of European fantasy. Meanwhile, this loss of interest outside of Iran is paralleled with a tremendous upsurge in indigenous Persian folklore studies and folk narrative research, and in the past decade alone dozens of new collections of tales collected from living oral tradition have been published. It is against this backdrop that Shusha Guppy's new book has to be seen. Guppy, a well-known writer, singer, and songwriter introduces her tales as retellings from the memories of her childhood in Iran, when her nurse used to tell her tales. Her small collection presents altogether eighteen tales labeled as "classical Persian." While one tale, "The Story of Bijan and Manijeh," is acknowledged as a personal retelling from the Persian national epic, Ferdousi's Shâh-nâmeh, the other tales in Guppy's selection correspond more or less to tales that are still today—or at least were until quite recently—current in Persian oral tradition. European readers might particularly cherish her version of the tale known in European tradition as "The Table, the Donkey, and the Stick" (ATU 563), but many of her tales belong to a particularly Eastern and, sometimes, typically Persian stock. The volume's eponymous tale "The Secret of Laughter" is already known from Sufi poet Farîdaddîn 'Attâr's (died 1221) Elâhi-nâmeh (see Hellmut Ritter's epochal work The Ocean of the Soul [1955], recently published in an English rendering, pp. 640–41), the story of "Soltan Mahmoud and the Band of Robbers" from Jalâloddin Rumi's (died 1273) Masnavi-ye ma'navi (see A. J. Arberry, More Tales from the Masnavi, 1966, no. 191). Most of the other tales have been documented from Persian oral tradition in Ulrich Marzolph's Typologie des persischen [End Page 269] Volksmärchens (1984): "The Padishah and His Three Daughters" (type *986*), "The Thief and the Cunning Bride" (879), "The Talking Skull" (*875D1), "The King and the Prophet Khizr" (*1641 E), "The Cruel Mother-in-Law" (*1407 B), "The...