Among nineteenth-century writers, Charles Dickens probably comes first to mind (even Ebenezer Scrooge once dreamed of Ali Baba), but he had plenty of company. Or, more commonly, never opened it past childhood yet retained ever after the most vivid-which is not always to say the most accurate-memories of it. Like those other great narrative miscellanies from the eastern Mediterranean, the Bible and the Odyssey, The Arabian Nights was known to many who never opened it. As Jorge Luis Borges, a passionate admirer, observed, “it is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it” (“Thousand” 57). Editions of The Arabian Nights, almost too numerous to count, circulated in the two centuries following the first English translations in 1706, but the stories’ hold on the collective imagination was never due entirely to print. From Rasselas to Finnegans Wake, the stories associated with the name of Shahrazad permeate British literature so thoroughly that the difficult task is to identify authors who don’t allude to them. 1829As everyone knows, The Arabian Nights comprises a body of tales that, once upon a time, everyone knew.
Lane also took the unconventional view that The Arabian Nights were to be read not for their literary or entertainment value but for the historical and ethnographic light they throw on Arabic, specifically Egyptian, “life and customs and manners.” His copious and often quite lengthy annotations of the tales and his modernized system of transliteration, as well as his unapologetic pedantry, impressed and alienated his first readers in about equal measure.įigure 1: Edward William Lane, c. Lane presented his edition as the first in English to be based on the recent Arabic editions rather than on Galland.
The first efforts to produce a definitive Arabic edition of Alf Layla wa Layla date to the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Galland had drawn from numerous sources-oral, manuscript, and print-and the provenance of many of the tales he translated was murky at best. English translations of portions of Galland’s edition appear as early as 1706, and tales designated as belonging to the Arabian Nights circulated in close to one hundred separate editions published in Great Britain before 1800, all of them derived in some way from Galland. The sequence of tales called in Arabic Alf Layla wa Layla was introduced to European readers by way of Antoine Galland’s enormously popular twelve-volume edition of Les mille et une nuits (1704-17).
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