LANGLES, Louis-Mathieu (editor and translator). Les Voyages de Sind-Bâd le marin, et la ruse des femmes, contes arabes, traduction littérale, acompagné du texte et de notes.

William Beckford’s Annotated Copy

LANGLES, Louis-Mathieu (editor and translator). Les Voyages de Sind-Bâd le marin, et la ruse des femmes, contes arabes, traduction littérale, acompagné du texte et de notes. Paris: Impremerie Royale. 1814.

12mo. Original bright green paper-covered boards, uncut, flat spine richly tooled in gilt, gilt red morocco lettering-piece; pp. xxx, 161, [١]–١١٣ (i.e. 113, [1]); text printed in French and Arabic, woodcut headpiece; corners bumped, extremities and joints a little worn, boards slightly rubbed, lettering-piece chipped; a few light spots to initial and final leaves, otherwise a very good, crisp copy; annotations in pencil in William Beckford’s hand to front flyleaf ‘Sind-Bad | 37 Bochart, dans son Hierozoïcon […] | 154 fieres tortues ! | 143 assurément très spirituelle […]’ (see below), a cutting from the catalogue of the 1883 Hamilton Palace – Beckford Sale, describing this book as lot 2020, and early twentieth-century bookplate of E. Bernstein, after the 1905 bookplate of German painter Franz Marc (1880–1916), to front pastedown; small ‘x’ in pencil, most likely in Beckford’s hand, at p. 143.

First edition of Langlès’s translation of Sinbad the Sailor, published alongside the Arabic original, and the first separate edition in Arabic of any of the tales from The Thousand and One Nights; this copy from the library of William Beckford (1760–1844), author of Vathek (1786), with his manuscript annotations in French.

Although traditionally incorporated into the corpus of The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa-laylah), Sindbad’s voyages are thought to have older, independent origins. They combine elements from Homer’s Odyssey (notably the Cyclops episode), the Panchatantra, and other Indian, Persian and Arab and Indian literary traditions. Traditionally set during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the tales follow the eponymous hero Sinbad on seven voyages from Baghdad, each bringing encounters with fabulous creatures, gruelling ordeals, and, ultimately, extraordinary riches. Appearing in the same year as the Calcutta edition of the Nights (the first collected edition printed in Arabic, albeit partial), this edition of Sinbad the Sailor was based on ‘several manuscripts’, including two held at the Bibliothèque du Roi. Its editor was the French philologist and Orientalist Louis-Matthieu Langlès (1763–1824), keeper of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque du Roi, and founding director of the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes in Paris.

Our copy was formerly in the library of William Beckford, who has annotated the front free endpaper in pencil in his characteristic manner. He was ‘an ardent Orientalist’, and ‘studied Arabic from 1778 until his departure in June 1780 on the Grand Tour’ (ODNB). At that time, through Lady Elizabeth Craven (1759–1828), he had access to the Wortley-Montagu Arabian Nights, an exceedingly rare multi-volume set brought from the Levant by Edward Wortley Montagu (1678–1761), and now held at the Bodleian (MS Or. 550–556). Between 1780 and 1787, he translated these tales, later adapting and collecting them in his Suite de contes arabes (1788). His knowledge of Arabic also informed Vathek (1786), his Gothic novel presented as a translation from an ancient Arabic manuscript. Beckford was fluent in French by the age of seventeen, and it was in French that he first composed Vathek, although it was first published in English without his permission as Vathek: An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished manuscript; many of his working notes and journal logs and much of his correspondence, including to the Hamiltons, is also in French.

In his first annotation, Beckford compares the episode in which Sindbad encounters the roc, a legendary bird of enormous size, with a passage from Hierozoicon (1663) by the Huguenot scholar Samuel Bochart (1599–1667). This encyclopaedic work examines the animals mentioned in the Bible and, in the passage cited by Beckford, Bochart describes the ‘fabulous birds among the Arabs’, quoting in turn from Ḥayāt al-ḥayawān al-kubrā (The Life of Animals), by the Cairo Shafi‘i scholar Al-Damiri (1341–1405).

In his third annotation, Beckford attributes Histoire de Nader Chah (1770), by the British philologist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), to the prolific French writer Marianne-Agnès Pillement de Falques (1720–1785), also known as ‘La Vaucluse’ or ‘Starck’. The Histoire was the first French translation of a Persian history of Nader Shah (1698–1747), founder of the Afsharid dynasty, written by the historian Mahdī Khān Astarābādī. Beckford knew Pillement de Falques well.

In the early 1780’s, while he was working on the Montagu-Wortley manuscript and ‘translat[ing] Arabic every Night’, Beckford received assistance with his French translations from her (Châtel, p. 136). In the annotation, Beckford not only attributes the Histoire to her, but further remarks that she ‘does not lack spirit’ (trans.). He also rejects the judgement passed on her by the German-born encyclopédiste Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723–1807) in his ‘mordant and often tedious and futile’ Correspondance littéraire, a manuscript cultural newsletter distributed between 1753 and 1790. Beckford’s attribution, to our knowledge, does not appear to be supported by other sources.

This copy of Langlès’s Sind-Bâd was sold as part of the third portion of Beckford’s library in the 1883 sale of the Hamilton Palace Libraries, sixty years after the dispersal of the collection had begun with the sale of the contents of Fonthill Abbey in September and October 1823.

A full transcription of Beckford’s annotations is available upon request.

Chauvin VII, p. 2 ; Brunet III, col. 820. See Châtel, ‘The Lures of Eastern Lore: William Beckford’s Oriental “Dangerous Supplements”’, Revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 67 (2010), pp. 127–144; Sotheby’s, The Hamilton Palace Libraries. Catalogue of the Third Portion of the Beckford Library, Removed from Hamilton Palace (2 July 1883), lot 2020 (‘MS. Notes by Mr. Beckford’).

SKU: 2125161