Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/414

380 ambition to deck or disfigure (les deux se disent) his pages, and rare indeed is the virtue of the writer who carries self-denial so far as to neglect an opportunity of dragging in this figure, too often at the expense of sense and coherence. The Koran, which in the eyes of every true believer is impeccable and the model of all excellence, from the literary, as well as from the moral and religious point of view, is almost entirely written in this style, and as all post-Mohammedan literature, so far, at least, as the rules of composition are concerned, is modelled upon this all-sufficing volume, the use of the seja has, like a noxious water-weed that checks the current of a stream, overrun the native vigour of Arab prose and has by the sectaries of the style fleuri been carried to such an excess that its abuse has given rise to the irreverent dictum, es seja feja, rhyming prose is vexation of spirit. Happily, however, the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night is written in a so-called vulgar style and is therefore, though not free from the excrescence in question, less universally disfigured by it than works of more pretension to literary merit.

In presence of these difficulties, absolute literality is impossible to the translator who has any regard for style, and he is, therefore, compelled in some sort to remodel his original, phrase by phrase and even page by page, if, with all possible respect for fidelity to word and sense, he desire to spare his reader the weariness of wading through a jungle of phrases and sentences, in which the eye of the scholar alone can discern form and coherence.