Tale
One Thousand and One Nights
ألف ليلة وليلة
Anonymous · 1400
Synopsis
Betrayed by his wife, King Shahriyar takes a virgin each evening and has her put to death at dawn. Scheherazade, the daughter of his vizier, offers herself to him and, with the help of her sister Dinarzade, begins a story each night that she leaves unfinished by morning. There follow, tale within tale, the merchant and the jinni, the porter and the ladies of Baghdad, the hunchback, the voyages of Sindbad the sailor; the French version adds two tales by Galland.
Context
The collection has no fixed original text: as early as the tenth century, Arab authors mention a Persian collection, the Thousand Tales, translated into Arabic, whose frame story it retains, and the manuscripts later divide between a Syrian tradition and a fuller Egyptian one. Antoine Galland translated it from 1704 to 1717 from a Syrian manuscript that came from Aleppo, and added tales told to him in Paris, in 1709, by a Maronite from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab: Aladdin and Ali Baba, absent from every known Arabic manuscript, come from there.
Who it is for
An immense collection, to be read by cycles. In French, besides Galland and Mardrus, there is the translation by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel in three volumes.
Prizes and reception
Translated into many languages since Galland, they have nourished the work of Proust, Pasolini and Rimsky-Korsakov, among others.