Les mille et une nuits

For the French publisher's imprint, see Fayard.

Illustration from Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuit, Contes Arabes, Vol. 2, by Pierre Husson, The Hague, 1714, by Dutch artist David Coster (1686-1752): Shahrazad tells her story to Shahryār, while her sister Dunyazad listens. Note other stories in the smaller panels (e.g., "The Ebony Horse" and "The Fisherman and the Jinn").

Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français (lit. 'The Thousand and One Nights, Arab stories translated into French'), published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717, was the first European version of The Thousand and One Nights tales.

The French translation by Antoine Galland (1646–1715) derived from an Arabic text of the Syrian recension of the medieval work[1] as well as from other sources. It included stories not found in the original Arabic manuscripts[2] — the so-called "orphan tales" — such as the famous "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", which first appeared in print in Galland's collection. Literary scholars Ruth B. Bottigheimer[3] and Paulo Lemos Horta have argued that Hanna Diyab should be understood as the original author of some of the orphan tales, and even that several of them, including Aladdin, were partly inspired by Diyab's own life.[4][5]

Immensely popular at the time of initial publication by the house of the late Claude Barbin [fr],[6] and enormously influential later, Galland's published tales were supplemented by subsequent volumes, introduced using Galland's name - although some stories were produced by others at the behest of a publisher wanting to capitalize on the popularity of Galland's work.[7]

  1. ^ Bibliothèque nationale manuscript "Supplement Arab. No. 2523"
  2. ^ Horta, Paulo Lemos, ed. (16 November 2021). The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights. The Annotated Books. Translated by Seale, Yasmine. Liveright. ISBN 9781631493645. Retrieved 8 May 2024. After meeting Diyab at Lucas's Paris apartment on March 25, 1709, Galland noted in his diary that the young traveler '[knew] some very beautiful Arabic tales.' He arranged to meet Diyab for a series of storytelling sessions from May 5 to June 6, during which the French translator took shorthand notes on fourteen fantastical stories. [...] Galland's insertion of many of these tales into Les mille et une nuits was arguably his most significant contribution to the development of the story collection [...].
  3. ^ Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “East Meets West” (2014).
  4. ^ Horta, Paulo Lemos (2018). Aladdin: A New Translation. Liveright Publishing. pp. 8–10. ISBN 9781631495175. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  5. ^ Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 24-95.
  6. ^ Razzaque, Arafat Abdur (28 April 2020). "Genie in a Bookshop: Print Culture, Authorship, and 'The Affair of the Eighth Volume' at the Origins of Les Mille et une nuits". In Akel, Ibrahim; Granara, William (eds.). The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science. Studies on Performing Arts & Literature of the Islamicate World, volume 9. Leiden: Brill. p. 102. ISBN 9789004429031. Retrieved 14 May 2024. [...] Galland's Nuits was released from Barbin's after the death of its eponym and under the proprietorship of his widow Marie Cochart.
  7. ^ For example: Horta, Paulo Lemos, ed. (16 November 2021). The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights. The Annotated Books. Translated by Seale, Yasmine. Liveright. ISBN 9781631493645. Retrieved 14 May 2024. [...] as Galland approached volume eight of his translation, he found himself at the end of the 282 nights in his unfinished Arabic manuscript. As other Orientalist translators entered the market with their own offerings of tales translated from Arabic, Persian, or Turkish sources, Galland's publisher did what copyists and scribes of the Arab world had done many times before: She inserted tales that were not part of the original One Thousand and One Nights to complete the eighth volume (published in 1709). [...] Galland initially objected to his publisher's decision to include in this eighth volume translations from Turkish sources done by his rival François Pétis de la Croix, but the authenticity of a text mattered little for early eighteenth-century French publishers [...].