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Galland's The Thousand And One Nights

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The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights or its name in Arabic Alf Layla wa Layla has captivated its audience for hundreds of years and we can still see its influence spilling into our society even till this day in forms such as movies, magazines, and television. Beginning with selected tales for the first time translated into French by Antonio Galland, Western audiences have been captivated and fascinated by the many stories of courage, adventure, comedy, drama and sexual promiscuity. For the first time ever Western audiences had a look into the strange land of the Orient and the collection of stories that have made up The Thousand and One Nights, and ever since it was made available The Nights has greatly shaped the views on Middles …show more content…

The first document that we can trace bearing any physical evidence of the story dates back to 879 C.E. when a Syrian paper was found by a scholar studying in Cairo. The paper contained among other scrawls and jottings, a signature, a date, and a few words from the open lines of the Nights. We then continue to see the mentions of the stories that make up the larger text pop of over the next couple hundred years through catalogues of book dealers and other ancient writers. The first time the title was used in a complete manuscript was in a Syrian text from the fourteenth century titled Alf Layla or Thousand Nights. These separate collections and stories were first put together for a Western audience by the Frenchman Antonio Galland. Historian Pamela Toler at the University of Chicago describes Galland’s translations beginning as a hobby, that he never intended to translate and all encompassing text but rather a collection of stories he found interesting. Galland translated much of his work from manuscripts he had acquired in the early eighteenth century. Toler states that “Scholars have identified two of them: a manuscript version of the “Sinbad the Sailor” tales and a Syrian manuscript of collected tales dating from the 15th century”. In addition to the manuscripts Toler explains Galland had access to another source “Hanna, a Christian Arab from Aleppo who had traveled to Paris in 1709. Hanna told Galland 14 “very beautiful Arabic stories,” including “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba” and “Prince Ahmed and the Peri Banou.” Galland wrote summaries of the tales in his journal, and the fully developed versions that appeared in volumes nine and ten of the Mille et Une Nuits became some of the most popular in the collection”. Galland would pick and choose these tales by how he thought they

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