Эротические рассказы

The Book of Travels. Hannā DiyābЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Book of Travels - Hannā Diyāb


Скачать книгу
recitation of Eastern fables and tales, partakes somewhat of a dramatic performance. It is not merely a simple narrative; the story is animated by the manner, and action of the speaker. A variety of other story books, besides the Arabian Nights Entertainments, (which, under that title, are little known at Aleppo) furnish materials for the storyteller, who, by combining the incidents of different tales, and varying the catastrophe of such as he has related before, gives them an air of novelty even to persons who at first imagine they are listening to tales with which they are acquainted.27

      The frame narrative structure, the modeling of new tales on old ones, and the compositional style are all features that Diyāb’s Book of Travels shares with the Thousand and One Nights. Structurally, the parallels between the two books are grounded in the way the storyteller’s memory functions and in his manner of refashioning existing narratives and motifs. Although some features may be unintended, in general Diyāb’s storytelling in The Book of Travels reflects an oral practice mostly based on oral accounts. Yet, we know that Diyāb did not tell stories only from memory—he also owned books, and contributed to a new practice of travel writing that emerged in the 1750s and ’60s.

      Writing an Autobiography in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Aleppo

      Diyāb was one of several Maronites and other catholicized Christians who composed accounts of their experiences in the Western Catholic world. Though interested in travelogues, he composed his Book of Travels very much as a personal narrative, and it consequently exhibits, both in plot and the perspective, specific features characteristic of autobiography.

      We can get some idea of the literary models available to Diyāb by looking at his library. Besides his own Book of Travels, written at the end of his life, Diyāb owned at least six other books. Four are handwritten copies of devotional works:

      1 a Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues (Sharḥ mukhtaṣar fī al-sabʿ al-radhāyil wa-mā yuqābiluhā aʿnī al-sabʿ faḍāyil), translated from Latin, and bound in a volume dated July 1753;

      2 A Useful Book on Knowing One’s Will (Kitāb Mufīd fī ʿilm al-niyyah), another treatise on moral theology;33

      3 The Precious Pearl on the Holy Life of Saint Francis (al-Durr al-nafīs fī sīrat al-qiddīs Fransīs),34 a vita of Saint Francis Xavier (d. 1552), the founder of the Jesuit order, based on the account by Dominique Bouhours (d. 1702), and translated into Arabic by a Jesuit missionary in Aleppo, dated December 1753; and

      4 a four-volume collection of hagiographic tales (Kitāb Akhbār al-qiddīsīn) translated into Arabic by Pierre Fromage (d. 1740), dated between 1755 and 1757. The owner’s name, being partially struck out, is not entirely legible, but the handwriting of this codex resembles that of the works above, as well as that of The Book of Travels.

      The two other books are travelogues, probably copied in the 1750s or ’60s, and bound in a single volume:

      1 a copy of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah) by Ilyās al-Mawṣilī (d. after 1692). A struck-off name deciphered by Antoine Rabbath (d. 1913) as “Ḥannā son of Diyāb” appears as a former owner.35

      2 an Arabic translation of the Turkish sefâretnâmeh


Скачать книгу
Яндекс.Метрика