The Arabian Nights : Tales Of 1001 Nights Volume 1
Common to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryār being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade, with one tale told over each night of storytelling. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained. Some editions contain only a few hundred stories, while others include 1001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.
The Arabian Nights : Tales of 1001 Nights Volume 1
Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name.
Muhsin Mahdi's 1984 Leiden edition, based on the Galland Manuscript, was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[49] This translation has been praised as "very readable" and "strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales."[50] An additional second volume of Arabian nights translated by Haddawy, composed of popular tales not present in the Leiden edition, was published in 1995.[51] Both volumes were the basis for a single-volume reprint of selected tales of Haddawy's translations.[52]
In 2008 a new English translation was published by Penguin Classics in three volumes. It is translated by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons with introduction and annotations by Robert Irwin. This is the first complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition (Egyptian recension) since Burton's. It contains, in addition to the standard text of 1001 Nights, the so-called "orphan stories" of Aladdin and Ali Baba as well as an alternative ending to The seventh journey of Sindbad from Antoine Galland's original French. As the translator himself notes in his preface to the three volumes, "[N]o attempt has been made to superimpose on the translation changes that would be needed to 'rectify' ... accretions, ... repetitions, non sequiturs and confusions that mark the present text," and the work is a "representation of what is primarily oral literature, appealing to the ear rather than the eye."[53] The Lyons translation includes all the poetry (in plain prose paraphrase) but does not attempt to reproduce in English the internal rhyming of some prose sections of the original Arabic. Moreover, it streamlines somewhat and has cuts. In this sense it is not, as claimed, a complete translation.
The One Thousand and One Nights employs an early example of the frame story, or framing device: the character Scheherazade narrates a set of tales (most often fairy tales) to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. Many of Scheherazade's tales are themselves frame stories, such as the Tale of Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman, which is a collection of adventures related by Sinbad the Seaman to Sinbad the Landsman.
In another 1001 Nights tale, "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", the protagonist Abdullah the Fisherman gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, in that the underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist. Other Arabian Nights tales also depict Amazon societies dominated by women, lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them.[90]
The Arabian nights entertainments; with illustrations. Chicago, New York, Rand, McNally & company [c1914]There are in fact several layers of the tales, the earliest manuscript tradition originating in 9th century Baghdad, followed by a Syrian manuscript tradition, and an Egyptian manuscript tradition, not to mention the various oral traditions. The tales were written by different hands and seem to have accrued over the centuries, drawing from the cultural traditions of the Middle East, as well as from those of the various regions with which the Middle East had been in contact through trade, travel, invasions, or war, over the centuries. As a result, the tales themselves contain elements from Persia, India, Greece, Turkey, Central Asia, in addition to references to the Mongol invasions, the Crusades, among others. The tales were then Arabized and adapted for a Middle Eastern and Islamic audience.
"A magnificent, unexpurgated edition of the greatest collection of folk tales in the world . . . The Arabian Nights is not a book to be read in a week. It is an ocean of stories to be dipped into over a lifetime. And this new Penguin edition is the one to have." -The Sunday Times (London) "The translation . . . ought to become the standard one for the present century." -The Times Literary Supplement "These magnificent volumes are the most ambitious and thorough translation into English of The Arabian Nights since the age of Queen Victoria and the British Empire." -The Guardian "This new translation of the world's greatest collection of folk stories restores their colour and verve." -The Sunday Times (London)
In The Enchanted One, Scheherazade ventures beyond the castle to find more stories to tell because she's nearly reached 1,000 nights of storytelling, and has little more to draw from. She encounters a wind genie, a pickpocket, a daft beauty who's fathered nearly all of the island's populace, and then finally her father, who tells her of the strange (and very real) hobbies that he's seen Lisbon's men take up in order to pass their extremely empty and hopeless days: training birds for singing competitions.
Reviewed by: The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights Ulrich Marzolph (bio) The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, with Ursula Lyons. Introduced and annotated by Robert Irwin. London: Penguin, 2008 (paperback 2010). 3 volumes. 992 pp., 800 pp., 800 pp. Do we really need yet another retranslation of the famous Arabic story collection Alf layla wa-layla (A Thousand Nights and a Night, or simply, 1001 Nights), better known in English as the Arabian Nights? After all, readers of English already have access to a wealth of different translations, from the Grub Street prints contemporary with Galland's first-ever French translation at the beginning of the eighteenth century, via the "complete" translations made directly from the Arabic by such eminent scholars as Edward William Lane (1839) and Richard Burton (1885), the latter largely dependent on John Payne's earlier version (1882-84), to Powys Mathers's (1937) still widely read English rendering of Joseph Charles Victor Mardrus's imaginative French version (1899-1904), N. J. Dawood's selection of "the finest and best-known tales in contemporary English" (1973: 10), and Husain Haddawy's English translation (1990) of the (fragmentary) Galland manuscript as edited by Muhsin Mahdi (1992).
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.The original concept is most likely derived from an ancient Sassanid Persian prototype that relied partly on Indian elements,[2] but the work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar (from Persian: شهريار, meaning "king" or "sovereign") and his wife Scheherazade (from Persian: شهرزاده, meaning "townswoman") and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more.Some of the best-known stories of The Nights, particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators.
The most significant translation in one hundred years of one of the greatest works of world literature From Ali Baba and the forty thieves to the voyages of Sinbad, the stories of The Arabian Nights are timeless and unforgettable. Published here in three volumes, this magnificent new edition brings these tales to life for modern readers in the first complete English translation since Richard Burton's of the 1880s.
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, and the next morning puts her to death. To end this brutal pattern, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king enchanting tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, of the Angel of Death and magical spirits, and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps--a sequence of stories that will last 1,001 nights, and that will save her own life. 041b061a72