Thousand and One Nights

THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. In 1704 there ap peared at Paris the first four volumes of a collection of Arabic stories called Les Mille et Une Nuit, translated by Antoine Gal land (1646-1715; q.v.), an orientalist and archaeologist of high reputation in his day, but now remembered chiefly for this translation in which the Nights were first introduced to the West ern world. In 1705 volumes v. and vi. appeared; in 1706 volume vii. ; in 1709 volume viii., only half of which was by Galland or from the Nights; in volumes ix. and x., wholly by Galland; in 1717, two years after Galland's death, volumes xi. and xii. from his papers. The book had an enormous success; pirated editions at once appeared in Holland ; there were many European versions made from it. At least as early as 1707, six of the volumes were rendered into English by an unknown translator, often called "the Grub Street translator," under a long descriptive title beginning with Arabian Nights Entertainments. It is safe to say that the Arabian Nights of the childhood of all of us was some form or other, complete or incomplete, of a version from Galland's French.

At two points the Nights were fortunate in their introduction to Europe. First, Galland was a born story-teller and he was able to adapt these Oriental tales not only to the taste of the France of his time but to the universal story-reading public of all countries and times. Some of his versions have been rendered back even into Oriental languages and received with favour in the East. It cannot be claimed that he was a faithful translator—no one in his time was—and his recasting belongs more to French than to Arabic literature. But he produced a great French story-book and without his genius it is conceivable that the Nights would never have taken the place with us that they have done. And, second, fortune placed in his hands excellent materials.

He had begun with a translation of Sinbad the Sailor; then he learned that this was only part of a larger collection and there were sent to him from Syria three volumes of a manuscript of the Nights which is still the oldest manuscript known and in many respects the best and the most authentic. Later, when in his seventh volume he had exhausted the material in this manuscript, fortune again favoured him and introduced him to a Maronite from Aleppo, named Hanna, brought to France by the traveller Paul Lucas. Hanna related to him in Arabic some of the stories which fill his last four volumes and gave him copies of some of them in writing. The Galland version is thus highly composite. Further details on it should be sought in H. Zotenberg's Histoire d"Alei al-Din 01i la Lampe Merveilleuse, Texte arabe publie avec une notice sur quelques manuscrits des Mille et une Nuits (Paris, 1888). In this volume Zotenberg gave the Arabic text of "Alad

din," known until then only in Galland's translation ; and in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (April 191o; Jan. 1913) the pre;ent writer gave the only known Arabic text of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," discovered by him in the Bodleian. For the place which the Galland manuscript takes among the manuscripts of the Nights, reference may be made to an article by the present writer, "A Preliminary Classification of Some Manuscripts of the Arabian Nights" in the Volume of Oriental Studies presented to E. G. Browne in 1922.

Early History.

But what do we know of the earlier history of this collection of tales? It is unfortunate that the Mohamme dan world has never regarded it as belonging to polite literature; it fell rather into the class of recitations in the coffee-house and indicated an uncultivated, almost depraved taste in those who cared for it. This has had two results. (I) We are thrown back for the history of the collection on stray allusions often difficult to interpret. (2) The collection has never been stable but highly fluid, consisting at different times of different stories; it has been subject to the caprice of different redactors who drew upon the vast reservoir of popular tales to fill out the number of a thousand and one nights ; and it may be said, in short, that the introductory framework story and the division in consequence into nights are about the only certain features in these different recensions. There is thus no such thing as a standard text of the Nights which has existed through its long history. The text, which seems now to have attained to the dignity of a Vulgate and which is known to all through the translations of Lane, Torrens, Payne, Burton and Littmann, is quite modern. It was compiled in Egypt by an unknown redactor toward the end of our i8th century, as Zoten berg has shown in his Notice cited above. There are numerous manuscripts of it in existence and all the printed texts are derived from it except two, the edition of the first 200 nights, known as Calcutta I which is a remote descendant of the Galland manu script (see "Classification" above, pp. 311 ff.), and the Breslau edition (Breslau 1826-38) which is a compilation by the editor Habicht from a number of manuscripts including a large section from the Galland manuscript (see article in Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, July 1909, pp. 635 ff.). Of this modern Egyptian Vulgate the first Bfflaq edition (A.H. 1252; A.D. 1835) gives the most trustworthy text. The generally parallel second Calcutta edition (1839-42), also from an Egyptian manuscript, has been contaminated from Calcutta I. and Breslau.