Scheherazade, by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823-1903)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The frame story of King Shahry\u0101r and Shahraz\u0101d was known in Italy in the late Middle Ages.\u00a0 Traces of it linger, for example, in a novel by Giovanni Sercambi (1347-1424).\u00a0 Sometime thereafter, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, clear allusions to the story appear in the tale of Astolfo and Giocondo, which is featured in the 28th canto of Ariosto\u2019s Orlando Furioso<\/em>.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t known how the story reached Italy, but it\u2019s likely that travelers who had been to the Middle East may have brought it back in some form or another.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The whole Alf Layla wa Layla <\/em>came to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the pivotal person in that appears to have been the French scholar Jean Antoine Galland (1646-1715), who published it for first time.\u00a0 Galland had been the secretary to a French ambassador in Near East, which is where he became acquainted with the Nights<\/em>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Galland was fortunate in the materials that came to his attention.\u00a0 These first began with stories of Sindbad the Sailor, which have been favorites among Western audiences ever since.\u00a0 Galland then realized that the Sindbad cycle was part of a larger collection (\u201c1001 Nights\u201d), although it must be noted that some manuscripts don\u2019t contain Sindbad at all.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
So he had four manuscript volumes of the Nights<\/em> sent to him from Syria, and these remain\u2014apart from a fragment discovered by the modern scholar Nabia Abbot\u2014the oldest and best surviving text of the stories.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Galland began to publish his version of the Nights<\/em> in 1704, and publication continued until 1717, two years after his death.\u00a0 He was a born story-teller, often re-arranging and paraphrasing his materials.\u00a0 Later, in fact, a Syrian Maronite Christian came to Paris and told him stories orally, which he transcribed and translated.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Galland\u2019s version was<\/em> the Nights<\/em> for many generations of Western readers.\u00a0 And, in fact, two of his stories (for which the original Arabic was was unknown) were eventually rendered into Arabic\u2014so that, in part but in a very real sense, Jean Antoine Galland provided the Nights<\/em> for an Arabic audience, as well.\u00a0 For a time, indeed, some were willing to attach to the Nights<\/em> any sufficiently riveting story that was found in Arabic.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll mention two significant nineteenth-century English versions of the Thousand and One Nights<\/em>.\u00a0 The first, by Edward William Lane, began to appear in parts in 1839 and was finished in 1841.\u00a0 It\u2019s an incomplete production in many ways, but it features a valuable and full commentary.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The second was done by the colorful Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton. \u00a0It is, in some ways, the polar opposite of Lane\u2019s rendition.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Jasper, Alberta, Canada<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 The frame story of King Shahry\u0101r and Shahraz\u0101d was known in Italy in the late Middle Ages.\u00a0 Traces of it linger, for example, in a novel by Giovanni Sercambi (1347-1424).\u00a0 Sometime thereafter, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, clear allusions to the story appear in the tale of Astolfo and Giocondo, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Anderson's](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2019\/07\/Scheherazade.tif_-1.jpg\")
<\/a>