The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

James Morier; Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge (Illustrator)

Editorial: Random House • 1937

• En inglés. Estado: Sin sobrecubierta. Algunas marcas (rayas o dibujos infantiles en cera roja) en las páginas de respeto y en alguna página del interior. Interior de las cubiertas tostado, algo deslucido. Por lo demás, en buen estado. Popular Oriental novel in the English language and a highly influential stereotype of the so-called “Persian national character” in modern times. Morier (1782-1849), a former diplomat who had resided in Persia for nearly six years (1808-1809 and 1810-1814) at a critical juncture during diplomatic entanglements with European powers, fashioned his novel on his personal observations and direct knowledge about Persia, but with a decidedly hostile and satirical overtone. An Orientalist project parexcellence, Hajji Baba lampoons Persians as rascals, cowards, puerile villains, and downright fools, depicting their culture as scandalously dishonest and decadent, and their society as violent. Morier’s satire, a bestseller in England and elsewhere, is an entertaining picaresque novel embellished with Orientalist motifs. To English and other Western readers (Hajji Baba’s French and German translations both appeared as early as 1824), Morier’s display of the Persian vagaries served as a reassurance of Europe’s cultural and moral superiority and the civilizing mission of the imperial powers. Morier depicted the East, not simply through the condescending eyes of a European traveler, like his own accounts of his visits to Persia (published in 1812 and 1818), but in the form of a biography of a “native,” a composite Persian character whose imagined identity was wrapped in deliberate ambiguities. Morier’s success in adopting the picaresque genre for this purpose was in no small measure due to the style and presentation of The Thousand and One Nights, translated into English as the Arabian Nights, which was in vogue at the time. Not only the Europeans, but Persians, too, were impressed by Hajji Baba when it first appeared in print in a free Persian translation in 1905. Bizarre though it may seem, the Persian translation of Hajji Baba was seen as a critical depiction of Persia’s backwardness and moral decadence, a self-image that begged for Westernizing remedies. Encyclopaedia Iranica).