A ring and a lamp in Hanna Diyab
Neither Hanna Diyab’s memoir nor the tale of “Aladdin” presents the ring and the lamp as a pair. In the memoir, on Diyab’s first expedition with Paul Lucas near Kaftin in Syria, both turn up among trinkets of dubious worth dug out of a vault. In the tale, the ring is given to Aladdin by the Maghrebi magician, and the lamp is taken from the vault. The pairing “a ring and a lamp,” in the real expedition and in the fairy-tale one, is Paulo Lemos Horta’s. He first drew attention to both objects in both expeditions in Marvellous Thieves (2017). In his introduction to Aladdin: A New Translation (2018) he put it in the words quoted below, and, since he divided the tale into chapters and titled them, he called its second chapter “A Ring and a Lamp.”
“Strangely enough, the first tomb-raiding expedition that Diyab describes in his account of his time with Lucas yielded both a ring and a lamp.”
Introduction to Aladdin: A New Translation (2018), p. xi
“[Diyab, as Horta shows,] had even witnessed Lucas send a servant into a crypt and come out with a lantern and a ring, and seen a palace disappear and reappear at the Opera in Paris.”
More in Horta’s words (1)
“In “Aladdin,” the older man also needs a nimble youth to descend into a cave to retrieve a precious object, and the Maghrebi magician who impersonates Aladdin’s uncle might be compared to the French traveller who masqueraded as a physician.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 58
More from critics and scholars (1)
“Instead, the story is split into chapters whose titles preview the action to come, like in a modern novel.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
Global mainstream impact
- 1 January 2017Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
- 4 December 2018Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg, Public Books