The Lamp of Translation: Rossetti's Eastern Conceptual Metaphors

Of all the Pre-Raphaelite artists who were deeply affected by the Arabian Nights, Dante Gabriel Rossetti appears to be the most eligible representative of what Said terms ‘latent Orientalism’ (Said 1977: 223), a profoundly conservative manifestation of the Orient dedicated to its self-preservation. Though showing an overt Oriental interest in his formal and personal representations of the East, Rossetti keeps intact the separateness of the Orient, its mystic aura, its criminal underworld and its feminine sensuality, as isolated from mainstream European progress in the sciences, arts and commerce.

Unlike William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who visited the Middle East and promised himself ‘to return in spirit to the Land of good Haroun Alrachid’ (letter to William Bell Scott, February 1860), Rossetti did not directly experience the alien, simple and beautiful world of the Middle East but nevertheless shared Hunt's fascination with the ‘unsophisticated and simple grace’ (Hunt 1905: 377) of the Orient. As George P. Landow maintains, ‘exotic places [were] a logical extension of Pre-Raphaelitism’ (Landow 1982: 650) because, by promoting a simple and archaic form of art, the Pre-Raphaelites identified themselves with the kind of mystical primitivism embodied by the Middle East.

From the pages of Edward William Lane's (1853) highly criticised translation of Alf Layla wa-Layla, literally ‘One Thousand Nights and a Night’, Rossetti undertook the material appropriation of Oriental tropes, creating a personal Oriental mythology in the Nervallian imaginative sense of the word: that is to say, ‘to consume the Orient, to appropriate it, to represent and speak for it, not in history but beyond history, in the timeless dimension of a completely healed world, where men and lands, God and men, are as one’ (Said 1977: 175). Far from a scientific and impersonal vision of the East, Rossetti elaborates an original Oriental aesthetics by projecting such conceptual metaphors as EAST IS CRIME, EAST IS SEX and EAST IS MAGIC.

To him the East as envisioned in the Arabian Nights is a blended space, a ‘labyrinth of labyrinths’ (Borges 1970: 48), a maze of marvels and tortures, of archetypal and individual figures, of sorcerers and virtuous sages.