Quick! Name a story from “The Arabian Nights.” If you answered “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” as most people probably do, you'd be wrong — at least technically speaking. There is no evidence that this beloved classic, now usually encountered in nursery versions, or on film, was ever part of the collection called “Alf Layla wa-Layla” — that is, “A Thousand Nights and a Night.” What's more, no early Arabic original has ever been found. “Aladdin” exists today only because of the 18th-century Orientalist Antoine Galland.
In the early 1700s, Galland acquired a manuscript of “Alf Layla wa-Layla” containing its first 35½ stories, which he loosely translated into French. Readers immediately went wild. The first seven volumes of what he called “Les Mille et Une Nuits” generated Harry Potter levels of mania, in part because of an already established vogue for fairy tales — this was, after all, the same period when Charles Perrault was bringing out “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.”
Read Full Article »
