Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing

in which the book becomes a hidden treasure. The most famous translation into Arabic was by a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam. Another was probably by an honoured Jewish scholar. In those comparatively flexible days, scholars were able more easily than now to appreciate each other and work together across boundaries. There were religions then, not nations – a fact it is hard to remember in its dimensions when considering how things were in those days. For instance, to read the biography of Muhammad by ibn-Ishaq, the Muslim equivalent of the New Testament, where nations and national feelings are absent, and men and women are known as Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and there were no Arabs and Jews in our sense, since that is a division of modern times, to read this book is hard for a modern Westerner because of how we see everything in terms of nations and nationalism. So strange is it that the mind keeps seizing up and you have to stop, and start again.

      The query has been raised: What was the ‘secret ingredient’ of this Bidpai book, ‘this ocean of tales’, that enabled it to be absorbed without resistance, and to be loved by Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews? One answer was that in all these traditions it is established that tales and parables are for instruction and illustration as well as for entertainment. Medieval Europe rushed to translate the book because its fame was known, and they wanted its aid in learning how to live better. But nowadays we use this phrase in a different sense.

      One of the best-known and most influential of the old versions was Anwar-i-Suhaili, or The Lights of Canopus. There had been earlier Persian versions, but these were considered inadequate and even elitist. An emir, or general, called Suhaili (of Canopus) invited one al-Kashifi to make a new version. I was interested that Canopus was being used as a name in a culture and at a time when names were often chosen to describe qualities, or as an indication of qualities a person hoped to acquire. People were expected to regard names as signposts, as it were. Round about that time there came into existence a cluster of Persian classics, all of Sufic origin and inspiration. The Lights of Suhaili is one of these. It is the same in ‘feel’ and format as, for instance, Saadi’s Rose Garden, using the Bidpai tales as a frame, or lattice, around which are woven associated tales, anecdotes, reminiscences, current scientific information, and verse of different kinds. It is worthwhile insisting that this great classic, now regarded with a truly horrible reverence and solemnity, was a popular book, meant for entertainment, as well as instruction. But who was this general or governor whose name became the name of the book, so that he was, in the way of those times and regions, place, person, tradition – all at once – and was able to bring about the creation of a new Sufi classic, using the ancient Bidpai material to do it? And who was al-Kashifi, whose name means ‘that which is manifested’, or ‘shown’, or ‘demonstrated’?

      Canopus the star is much embedded in the mythology of ancient times and when you trace it to this country or that it melds and merges into other names, places, personages. To illustrate the remarkable law known to all researchers, but not yet acknowledged by science – that when one is becoming interested in a subject, books formerly unknown and unsuspected fly to your hand from everywhere – while I was speculating about Canopus, and what it could mean in this context, if it meant anything, there came my way Astronomical Curiosities, published in 1909, and one of its main sources of information was one al-Sufi, an Arabian astronomer of the tenth century. Much is said by al-Sufi about Canopus of the constellation Argo. Argo was associated with Noah’s Ark. It represents, too, the first ship ever built, which was in Thessaly, by order of Minerva and Neptune, to go on the expedition for the conquest of the Golden Fleece. The date of this expedition commanded by Jason is usually fixed at 1300 or 1400 BC. Canopus was the ancient name of Aboukir in Egypt, and is said to have derived its name from the pilot of Menelaus, whose name was Kanobus, and who died there ‘from the bite of a snake’. The star is supposed to have been named after him, in some traditions, and it was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians … but Canopus is also the god Osiris, and is in the most remarkable and ever-changing relationship with Isis, who was the star Sirius … and thus is one enticed into all kinds of byways, from which it is hard to extricate oneself, and harder still to resist quoting, and thus joining the immoderate preface-makers whom I can no longer in honesty condemn.

      The Iliad and Odyssey are linked with Bidpai in another way too: a Greek called Seth Simeon translated it in the eleventh century, adding to it all kinds of bits and pieces from these two epics – another illustration, if one is needed by now, of the way such material adapts to new backgrounds and new times. In Hebrew, Turkish, Latin, Russian, Malay, Polish – in almost any language you can think of – its naturalisation followed the laws of infinite adaptability. It is not possible to trace its influences: as is always the way when a book’s seminal power has been great, it was absorbed and transformed by local cultures. Certainly the Bidpai tales can be found in the folklore of most European countries, almost as much as they can in the East. Some were adapted by La Fontaine. Beaumont and Fletcher are supposed to have used The Dervish and the Thief as a germ for Women Pleased. Aesop’s fables as we know them are indebted to Bidpai.

      There has not been an English version for a long time. The existing ones have become stiff and boring. Many consider Sir Thomas North’s still to be the best, but what for the Elizabethans was a lively new book is for us a museum piece.

      This fresh creation by Ramsay Wood follows the more than 2,000-year-old precedent of adapting, collating and arranging the old material in any way that suits present purposes. It is contemporary, racy, vigorous, full of zest. It is also very funny. I defy anyone to sit down with it and not finish it at a sitting: his own enjoyment in doing the book has made it so enjoyable.

      And there is another good thing. The original, or perhaps I should say some arrangements of the original, had thirteen sections: The Separation of Friends, The Winning of Friends, War and Peace, The Loss of One’s Gains, The Rewards of Impatience, and so forth. This volume has only the material to do with friends, artfully arranged to make a whole. And so we may look forward – I hope – to the rest.

       Speech at Vigo on getting the Prince of Asturias Prize 2002

      Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, The Educated Person. He – it was usually he, but then increasingly often she – was educated in a way that differed little from country to country – I am of course talking about Europe – but was different from what we know now. William Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century, whose curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school now, a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for granted that this already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development, for the pupils were expected to read, and they did.

      This kind of education, the humanist education, is vanishing. Increasingly, governments – our British government among them – encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.

      The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He – or she – read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best-known writers of other European countries, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from Spain, one from St Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveller from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other, they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind has thought, said, written.

      This has gone.

      Greek and Latin are disappearing. In many countries the Bible, and religion – going. A girl I know, taken to Paris to broaden her mind, which needed it, though she was doing brilliantly in examinations, revealed that she had never heard of Catholics and Protestants, knew nothing of the history of Christianity or any other religion. She was taken to hear mass in Notre Dame, told that this ceremony had been a basis of European culture for centuries,