Some Penguin Classics are just eye-openingly beautiful, extravagantly so in the case of the recent hardcover Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the first English translation of a medieval Arabic work called the Hikayat, the manuscript of which was found by a German Arabic scholar in a library in Istanbul and published in 1933. The work is a collection of Arabic folk stories that might very well pre-date the much more famous Thousand and One Nights, and it’s here presented in an English-language translation by Malcolm Lyons, with an Introduction by Robert Irwin in which he follows the age-old Penguin Classics tradition of introducing a work by being fairly stern with it:

Though the Tales of the Marvellous are indeed astounding, they are not flawless. They are written in a vulgar style, and their Arabic is sometimes incorrect. The diacriticals that are used to distinguish some letters from others have often been omitted. Where the words are vowelled, the vowels are sometimes incorrect. Occasionally the scribe has not understood what he was transcribing, and often the odd sentence or two has been skipped.

Anyone who’s familiar with the better-known Arabian Nights will be prepared for the tsunami waves of barbarism and violence they’ll encounter in these pages, but just in case, Irwin is takes pains to issue the appropriate warnings:

Misfortune breeds misfortune. The authors of the tales in Tales of the Marvellous delighted in being cruel to their characters, and Schadenfreude is definitely one of the dark literary pleasures provided by this collection. Hands and feet are lopped off, eyeballs plucked out, lips cut away, penises slit off, people burned alive, women raped, cripples and blind men mocked and robbed, and the ugly have their deformities seized upon and exaggerated. Here political incorrectness has gone mad, and there is ‘Laughter in the Dark’. In fact, as in fiction, public executions were popular entertainments. But the good suffer almost as much has the bad in these ruthless stories.

But there’s an enormous amount of savage and elegant beauty in these stories, where princesses and shopkeepers break into verse with encouraging enthusiasm, extolling their hatreds, their arrogance, and also – in this one example among hundreds – their longings of love and desire, sometimes bristling with exquisitely Catullan agony:

This letter comes to you from hope

That lodges in my ribs and does not leave,

From sleep, which now I seldom taste,

And from a heart not occupied with blame.

I am consumed with passion and with love,

And one of these alone would leave me dead.

By God, if passion could send messengers,

These messengers would be my heartfelt sighs.

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange would be a pearl of a book even if it were “merely” a standard Penguin Classic black-spine paperback. But as I mentioned, Penguin has instead outdone themselves in making this a particularly lovely hardcover volume. Its front and back covers are entwined in branching trees of birds and beasts embossed in gold; the many sections of the text are headed in delicate script; and the whole thing presents this ancient but largely unknown work in just about the prettiest debut volume it could possibly want.