![]() ![]() He marries a new bride every night and has her beheaded when the first beam of dawn appears in the sky. ![]() The prince, having been betrayed by his first wife, decides that ‘no woman chaste’. ![]() The stories of The Nights are based within the frame of the story of Scheherazade, the wife of Prince Schahriar. Its stories are alluded to in their work, its plot imitated, and its themes and characters adopted and reincarnated. It was even very popular amongst culturally influential figures such as Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli and Charlotte Bronte. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments was published at a time when Europe was reconnecting with its medieval past through an unquenchable thirst for fairy tales, something which massively contributed to the translation’s instantaneous success. This also began a naming tradition of the book that all succeeding nineteenth-century translators have preserved even though each of them claimed to be directly translating from original manuscripts. His choice of title as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, rather than A Thousand and One Nights, is very significant as it from the start represented the book as something very different from what it really was. Antoine Galland, a French scholar well-read in languages, is generally considered the European discoverer of the Arabic manuscript which was itself a translation of combined tales in Persian, Indian and other languages.The English translator, despite producing a superb translation lasting unchallenged for over a century, remains anonymous to this day. It was translated from Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-17) by an anonymous ‘Grub Street’ translator. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1706-21) is the very first translation in English of A Thousand and One Nights. ![]()
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