Volume 18, Issue 2 (2004) The Arabian Nights: Past and Present

Preface to the Special Issue on “The Arabian Nights: Past and Present”

Ulrich Marzolph, Guest Editor

As of 2004, three hundred years have passed since the introduction of the most influential work of Oriental fiction to a Western audience. Published in 1704 for the first time in a European language, Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une Nuits presented the adapted French translation of a work that through the centuries of its previous and posterior existence can best be characterized as humanity’s most ingenious device to integrate diversified narrative material into a cohesive whole, as a collection possessing the potential to combine tales and stories from the most diverse origins, sources, and genres, as an omnium gatherum and a true shape-shifter in terms of narrative content. While arching back to ancient Indian tradition, the collection probably originated at some unknown period in Sassanian Iran under the title of Hezâr afsân (A Thousand Stories); it was translated into Arabic as Alf laylah wa-laylah (A Thousand and One Nights) and in English tradition gained popular renown as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or simply the Arabian Nights.