Galland Antoine - Arabian Nights Entertainments

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS

SINCE their initial appearance in Europe in the early eighteenth century, the stories contained in the Arabian Nights Entertainments have proved to be among the most perennially popular and compelling tales ever to have entered the Western literary and artistic tradition. First translated from Arabic into French in twelve volumes by the gifted orientalist Antoine Galland beginning in 1704, the Nights was rendered into English by an anonymous Grub Street translator in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century (c. 170621). Although the taste for such moorish and oriental narratives was quickly derided by some as a fanciful and romantic waste of time suitable only for supposedly weak-minded women and children, it soon became clear that the Nights was destined to become one of the most widely read and influential collections of stories ever to be published in English. Swift, Pope, Johnson, Walpole, Gray, Goldsmith, and Gibbon were to be counted among the collections earliest admirers; the nineteenth century would trace the influence of the Nights in the works of novelists such as Scott, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, and Charlotte Bront. The descendants of the archetypal teller of stories, Scheherazade, have been no less numerous in our own century, and characters first introduced by the Nights such as Sindbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba have long been fixtures of our shared cultural mythology. This edition reproduces the earliest English translation of Gallands Mille et une Nuit, once again making available in its entirety the original version of the Nights enjoyed and imitated by generations of readers both in England and in America.

ROBERT L. MACK is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has edited several eighteenth-century texts, including a collection of Oriental Tales for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

ROBERT L. MACK

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Editorial matter Robert L. Mack 1995
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1995
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Arabian nights entertainments / edited with an introduction by
Robert L. Mack.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
I. Mack, Robert L. II. Title. III. Series.
PJ7715.M27 1995 398.22dc20 9439408

ISBN 0192834797

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

I would like to thank the Princeton University Library for permitting me to reproduce the texts upon which this edition is based; I am grateful too to the librarians of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, for their help and assistance. A generous grant from the University Research Council of Vanderbilt University permitted me to spend two summers of research, writing, and editing in Great Britain in 1992 and 1993. In the course of the long and at times arduous process of preparing this edition for the press, I have naturally incurred more than a few debts of gratitude. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following individuals for providing continued help and support: Misty Anderson, John Bomhoff, Margaret Anne Doody, William E. Engel, Sam B. Girgus, Allan Hepburn, Allegra Huston, Ivo Kamps, Lynn Meloccaro, Judith Luna, Clark Piper, Mark Schoenfield, Florian Stuber, and Sarah Zimmerman.

With the exception of Ovids Metamorphoses andobviouslythe Bible, few works have had such a profound and lasting influence on the English literary tradition as the Thousand and One Nights or, to use the name by which the volumes were more commonly known in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Like Ovids exhaustive compilation of Greek and Roman mythology (and, indeed, to some degree like the Bible itself) the Nights is not a single tale, but a generically diverse and kaleidoscopic collection of tales; like the Metamorphoses, it shuns singularity and revels in multiplicity, never allowing its readers to rest content and inactive on any one narrative shore. Like Ovids collection, too, the