Tales of the Alhambra

by Washington Irving

Paperback, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

813.2

Collection

Publication

Club Everest (1999), Edition: Second edition, Paperback, 345 pages

Description

Irving's dreamlike description of the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish castle that defined the height of Moorish civilization, and the surrounding territory of Granada remains one of the best guidebooks to the region and one of the most entertaining travelogues ever written. A heady mix of historical fact, medieval myth and mystery, sensual descriptions, and an appreciation for a civilization which valued beauty, philosophy, literature, science and the arts on an equal level with warrior skills. Secret chambers, desperate battles, imprisoned princesses, palace ghosts and fragrant gardens, described in a wistful and dreamlike eloquence will transport the listener to a paradise of his own.

User reviews

LibraryThing member keylawk
Irving visited Granada in 1828, and again the following year. By a chance courtesy of the old Tia Antonia, he was put up in one of the rooms used by Elizabeth of Parma, overlooking the oranges and fountains.
Although he was still recovering from the death of his fiancee and his brother's failures,
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at age 35 Irving was traveling, with delicate health, and no doubt reflecting on a fairly colorless life so far. I cannot help but imagine this trip is what awakened his literary imagination.
His interest in the gentle spaces of Arabic architecture was timely: Orientalism was sweeping Europe -- Hugo was publishing his ORIENTALES. Coleridge wrote The CONQUEST OF GRANADA. __ wrote his classic INTO TUNISIA. Maupassant loved the people and place of Turkey [qv Short Stories 460], and broadcast his affections in many short and long stories. (I mention these other writers because it is such a craven myth to claim that "the West" is ignorant of "the East", when, for 200 years the greatest writers and travelers of the West have been publishing detailed observations which reflect a continuing and meaningful interest in all that Arab culture offers the world.) This work, the ALHAMBRA, is Irving's contribution to the great interest of Europe and America in the Moor, the Middle East, and Arab culture.
The author describes the halls and chambers, and the views. He relates the lore and legends, and takes us on a walk in the adjacent and storied hills. The bulk of the book is devoted to the fabled inhabitants -- highlighting their characters for whom he has obvious affection. For example, the Arabian astrologer, the three princesses, the legendary Arabian prince of love, and the legacies of the Moors. By the time of his visit, the seamless grace of life in Spain was well-met with his need to rediscover his own humanity and connection to history; as do we all.
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LibraryThing member jcbrunner
A perfect little travel book about a marvel of humanity, the Alhambra in Spain, written by the perfect man for the job: An open-minded American writer, familiar with the tradition of German fairy tales and schooled in Spanish history, who combines the fresh look and inquisitiveness of the outsider
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with a deep local knowledge of having lived for an extended time in Spain and for some months in the palace himself.

Before enchanting the reader with tales of love, treasure, knights and princesses, Irving presents a nuanced picture of the country, the city, its people and the palace (in its then sorry state). The tales are a wonderful amalgam of Christian morality, Arab lore and local mysteries. Sometimes. a tale's resolution is too prolonged for modern readers, partially compensated by its charming vignettes.

This edition, printed in Spain, includes a complementing set of gorgeous photographs of the Alhambra. Future editions might benefit from a map of the Alhambra for convenience.
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LibraryThing member deebee1
Irving published this collection in 1832, some time after traveling to Spain and being an actual resident of the Alhambra for several months. Enchanting, dream-like, and with a timeless quality, Irving writes so beautifully and seamlessly in a collection of essays, stories, and legends about the
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Moors in Granada, that form this travelogue. I have never read anything like it which seemed to put me in a kind of wondrous spell each time i sat down to read. The book first took its hold of me when i was in Granada myself just a few weeks back opening the book for the first time seated on a bench under the shadow of the walls of the Alhambra. Being where I was, i felt i was inside the book and was also a spectator of the images and events so vividly described. The feeling just lingered till the last page --- the prose is that magical.
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LibraryThing member phoenixcomet
So I'm hiking the massive hill to the Alhambra and suddenly I see this statue. OK, who's the dude on the statue? Turns out it is none other than Hudson Valley's Washington Irving. In 1829, Irving traveled from Seville to Granada and ended up staying for months at the Alhambra, one of the finest
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examples of Moorish architecture. During his stay, he gathered legends and tales together that surround the Alhambra and ultimately published this book in 1832. The tales are well written, descriptive and bring you back to a different time and place, like all of Irving's tales do.
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LibraryThing member ICANABIBBELG
Washington Irving's dreamlike description of Spain's Granada and the beautiful Moorish castle, the Alhambra, remains one of the most entertaining travelogues ever written. Enhanced here with exquisite Spanish guitar music, the narrative is a heady mix of fact, myth, and depictions of secret
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chambers, desperate battles, imprisoned princesses, palace ghosts, and fragrant gardens, described in a wistful and dreamlike eloquence, will transport listeners to a paradise of their own.
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LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
This had three layers for me, the first layer was some sweet stories told in a folkloric way, almost as if they came out of the translations of the 1001 nights, told of a time when both Muslim and Christian lived in varying degrees of peace and war in Spain. Centered around the Alhambra. I have an
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ambition to some day visit the Alhambra and this made that ambition more marked.

The second layer was a wistfulness for the past, a wishing for a simpler time, a fairytale othertime when things were simpler and less fraught by modern issues. The illustrations, by Theaker and nameless others, were sweet but didn't always mesh all that well with the text.

The third layer is as a historian, the occasional judgements on people and in particular women, show the attitudes of Irving himself up, and his time, which was also interesting, if occasionally jarring.

Overall it's an interesting collection of stories, worth reading, evocative of both a time that never was and Irving's own desires.
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LibraryThing member MrsLee
This was a great tale. Irving jumped between his real time and the Moorish past as he toured the Alhambra. Weaving a tale of horror, suspense and romance, he kept my interest to the point where I had difficulty at times pulling myself out of the tale. My book has photographs of the Alhambra in it.
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It was an edition which my grandmother bought when she went there.
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LibraryThing member ubaidd
I just returned from a trip to Andalusia and one of the books I should have read before I went is Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving (the other is South from Granada by Gerald Brenan). I was too overwhelmed by work and planning to get hold of these but I managed to finish the Tales on my
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way back from Spain. A little history of the book is in order here - Washington Irving was an American writer and diplomat. He wrote a biography of Prophet Mohammed and is also responsible for the short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which was adapted into a movie by Tim Burton. Mr. Irving stayed in the Alhambra in Granada for a few months in the 1820s. Copies of Tales of the Alhambra are on sale everywhere in Granada and the author is much celebrated in that town. I saw a statue, a special exhibitions on Irving's life and explored his living quarters in the Alhambra palace, carefully preserved by the palace management. The reason for Irving's celebrity is this book - widely credited with having put Granada and its beautiful palace on the map. So is the book, and by extension, the writer worthy of such adulation? I think not.

Tales of the Alhambra is a loose collection of legends about the palace and essays by Irving on his experience of living in it. I found two main themes in the legends narrated by Irving, hidden Moorish treasure and forbidden love between the Muslim Moors and the Christian Spaniards. Some of the author's reflections are revealing and his description of the beautiful Palacios Nazaries is precise but the overall perspective is excessively romantic. A worthy read if you are planning to travel to Granada and the Alhambra, not otherwise.
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LibraryThing member richardhobbs
Sangorski and Sutcliffe bindings, exquisite leather, gilt, acid-free paper. A gem!
LibraryThing member SamTekoa
I enjoyed the older style of writing, full of adjectives and sentimental and flowery descriptions of medieval Spain.The tales Washington Irving wrote were the oral tales passed from generation to generation among the common people. I drew comparisons between these tales and Don Quixote. An unusual
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and worthy read.
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LibraryThing member Widsith
This was the book that cemented the Alhambra's romantic reputation in the minds of the Anglophone reading public. Based on Irving's three-month stay in the palace in 1829, Tales of the Alhambra is presented as a series of traveloguish essays and historical sketches, although they really have more
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to do with his grand ideas about lost Moorish glories than any realities of medieval Andalusia. Irving finds it impossible to

contemplate this once favourite abode of Oriental manners without feeling the early associations of Arabian romance, and almost expecting to see the white arm of some mysterious princess beckoning from the balcony or some dark eye sparkling through the lattice. The abode of beauty is here, as if it had been inhabited but yesterday…

Crucial to this ‘Moslem elysium’ is the fact that it's in ruins (otherwise, presumably, he'd have been writing about contemporary Islamic cities). The crumbling stonework and chipped stucco allow Irving to view the Alhambra as a potent symbol of ‘that mutability which is the irrevocable lot of man and all his works’.

Such is the Alhambra—a Moslem pile in the midst of a Christian land, an Oriental palace amidst the Gothic edifices of the West, an elegant memento of a brave, intelligent, and graceful people who conquered, ruled and passed away.

The stories Irving tells are a mixture of traveller's anecdotes about the Spaniards he encountered during his stay at the Alhambra, and legends about the palace's original Moorish inhabitants. Robert Irwin, in The Alhambra, suspects that many of the former were fabricated in the service of Irving's grandstanding, but the latter are quite interesting if you like fairy-stories and folklore as a genre. Most of them involve djinns, spectral warriors, sequestered princesses and that sort of thing, and in these crypto-mythical tales Irving's rather over-egged prose style is shown to its best effect.

If an imagined and mostly fictional Moorish past is one subject of the book, ‘present-day’ Spain, as the site of this glorious history, is a close second. Thanks to its lost Muslim overlords, Spanish culture and people, Irving suggests, ‘have something of the Arabian character’ to them. Consequently, as one of his fantastic characters relates,

all Spain is a country under the power of enchantment. There is not a mountain cave, not a lonely watch-tower in the plains nor ruined castle on the hills, but has some spellbound warriors sleeping from age to age within its vaults, until the sins are expiated for which Allah permitted the dominion to pass for a time out of the hands of the faithful.

This is quite good fun if you like this sort of thing (I do), but it is probably of minor interest to those who are not planning a visit to the actual place themselves. This particular edition is one of at least three that are sold in gift-shops within the Alhambra grounds; it's clearly been converted from a Spanish edition, as there are several odd typos and all the speech is given in guillemets. The editorial notes do not inspire confidence (on the first page, Scottish artist David Wilkie is glossed as an ‘English painter’), but then again, I found in a weird way that it added to the pleasingly alien effect of the whole ensemble.
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LibraryThing member starbox
Purchased some twenty years ago on a Spanish holiday and finally read! This 1832 volume follows the American author's visit to and residence in the ruined Alhambra; a time long before the current legions of tourists, when he could ramble about and pick where he lodged! He's a good writer and
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combines a largely descriptive first third - picturing the palace, its environs and the colourful characters encountered there - with traditional fairy tales and a bit of history.
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Language

Original publication date

1832

Physical description

345 p.; 7.1 inches

ISBN

8424127978 / 9788424127978
Page: 2.3354 seconds