The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

178 The Translator’s Invisibility
stage, first as a “melodramatic spectacle” in 1802, then as a musical
production in 1813 (Todd 1985:282–284). Having already published
several tales in The Keepsake, Shelley knew that Oriental motifs were in
vogue among its readers, she seems even to have assumed that the
“fabled Nourjahad” was more familiar to them than the rather
learned allusion to the Seven Sleepers, and so she needed merely to
have her “mortal immortal” drop the character’s name to signify
immortality punctuated by “deep sleep.” 4 Yet, for readers who know
The History of Nourjahad, the reference is too abrupt and unqualified to
stop resonating, so that it constitutes a disturbing point of
indeterminancy in Shelley’s text, limited only by the cultural and
social conditions under which it is read.
Sheridan’s Nourjahad is the favorite of the Persian sultan
Schemzeddin, who would like to appoint him as “first minister” but
must establish that he is worthy, innocent of the faults imputed to him
by court advisors: “youth,” “avarice,” “love of pleasure,” and
“irreligion” (Weber 1812:693). Schemzeddin tests Nourjahad by asking
him what he would like if his every desire could be satisfied, and
Nourjahad’s response confirms the advisors’ suspicions:
I should desire to be possessed of inexhaustible riches; and, to
enable me to enjoy them to the utmost, to have my life prolonged to
eternity, [disregarding] hopes of Paradise [in order to] make a
paradise of this earthly globe while it lasted, and take my chance for
the other afterwards.
(Weber 1812:694)
Nourjahad elicits the sultan’s rebuke, and that night he is visited
by his “guardian genius” who fulfills his desire for wealth and
immortality, although with the proviso that any vice he commits
will be “punished by total privation of [his] faculties,” lasting “for
months, years, nay for a whole revolution of Saturn at a time, or
perhaps for a century” (ibid.:695). Nourjahad forgets this
punishment, further alienates Schemzeddin by devoting himself to
“nothing but giving loose to his appetites” (ibid.:698), and
performs three immoral acts which are each punished by long
periods of deep sleep. While indulging himself “with an
unbounded freedom in his most voluptuous wishes,” Nourjahad,
“for the first time, got drunk,” whereupon he sleeps over four years
(ibid.:700); then he invents a “celestial masquerade” in which he
orders “the women of his seraglio to personate the houris,” while