Mil Y Una Noches

The Arabian Nights is a book of several stories. The tales which were orally transmited and written over the course of various years they have Asian and Arabic origin they have become an important part of the western cultural tradition. The original collection, comprised of legends, fairytales, and romances, stems, and contains fables from various geographical areas and historical periods. Since the 18th century, when it reached Western audiences, The Arabian Nights has been one of the most popular works of world literature, creating numerous adaptations, imitations, and tributes from writers such as Johann Wolfang von Goethe, William Wordsworth Rainer Maria Rilke, and even major Hollywood film adaptations. Since the 20th century The Arabian Nights have also received serious critical attention and teachers have been almost agreeable in their praise of the way in which these tales trespassed cultural and language boundaries.

Textual History

Although they are associated with medieval Arabic culture, the tales of The Arabian Nights are rooted in several oral traditions, containing topics from a variety of geographic areas and historical periods, including ancient Mesopotamia, India, early medieval Persia and Iraq, and Egypt of the Middle Ages. Scholars agree that the frame story is most likely of Indian origin. The first identifiable written version of The Arabian Nights is a book of Persian tales called Hazar Afsanah written between 225 and 250 translated into Arabic around 850. Although the tenth century Arab writer AlMasoodi refers to this Arabic text, noting that it was known as Alf Layla. The stories underwent considerable modification between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries, kept alive by professional storytellers, who would perform them in coffeehouses all over the Middle East. The title “Thousand and One Nights” was known in the twelfth century and likely originated from the Turkish expression bin-bir “thousand and one”, which like the Arabic alf simply indicates a very large number. There is no definitive Arabic textual source of the work, but there are a number of surviving manuscripts containing many of the stories.

The first major European translation of The Arabian Nights was completed by the Frenchman Antoine Galland. The first part The Thousand and One Nights appeared in 1704. The manuscript that he used to work from was acquired from Syria and dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Galland's edition was quickly translated into English, with early editions of the so, called “Grub Street” version first appearing in 1708. Scholars then began searching for a complete original copy of The Arabian Nights, but were unsuccessful. However, in the early nineteenth century four important printed versions of the text known as Calcutta I, Calcutta II appeared. The Many European translations appeared based on the four nineteenth century sources, including those by Dr. Jonathan Scott 1800, Edward Wortley Montague 1811, Henry Torrens 1838, Edward W. Lane 1838-41, John Payne 1882-84, Richard F. Burton 1885, Andrew Lang 1898, and J. C. Mardrus . Payne's is considered the first complete translation, and while it is meticulous and includes copious notes that remain valuable to this day, it was heavily expurgated, suppressing any fragment that the translator deemed offensive to Victorian sensibilities. Burton's translation, in contrast emphasizes the exoticism and eroticism of the stories. There is still no definitive text of The Arabian Nights, but Muhsin Mahdi's The 1001 Nights from the Earliest Known Sources (1984) and Husain Haddawy´s selection of tales (1990) are two English translations that have been very used by students and scholars since the late twentieth century.

Plot and Major Characters

The frame story of The Arabian Nights describes the vindictive fury of King Shahryar who, upon executing his adulterous wife, vows to marry a different virgin every night, only to have her killed the following morning. Scheherazade, the daughter of the King's vizier, or principal officer of state, takes it upon herself to save the women of the kingdom from Shahryar's wrath, and offers herself as a bride to the King. The vizier, her father, tells Scheherazade two stories to try to convince her to change her mind but she remains unconvinced and marries the King. With the help of her younger sister, Dunyazade, she obtains the King's permission to tell him a story just as their wedding night is about to end. This first tale is the story of the merchant

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