Like the incorrect title selected by the Grub Street translator, Lane’s heavy annotations also became a tradition kept and exaggerated by successive late Victorian translators - particularly Richard Burton. His translation is highly criticised for its inconsistent and, at times, unjustified expurgation, as well as for its heavy annotations. Nevertheless, Lane still maintained the incorrect title of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Lane, translating an Arabic manuscript he managed to acquire while residing in Cairo, claimed superiority over the Grub Street translator.
![1001 arabian nights stories online 1001 arabian nights stories online](https://cdn2.spiele-umsonst.de/flash_thumb/1001arabiannights2.jpg)
Such uncontested supremacy faded away as the volumes of Edward William Lane’s translation appeared in 1836-40. įrom 1706-21 until 1840, this Grub Street version reigned supreme as the most comprehensive translation in English.
![1001 arabian nights stories online 1001 arabian nights stories online](https://www.iknowmyabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/81qNNvGPmAL.jpg)
Some of the popular stories told by Scheherazade to Schahriar, including Aladdin and Alibaba and the Forty Thieves, are not based on the Arabic manuscript, but are rather pseudo-translations devised by Galland to complete a thousand stories for the thousand nights he appears to have taken literally. Schahriar’s interest in the new story she promises to tell the following night saves Scheherazade’s head from the executioner’s scimitar at every break of dawn. Her stories do not end by the end of the night, but become rather the beginnings of new stories to be told the following nights. When it is Scheherazade’s turn to marry the prince, to avoid a similar fate as her predecessors’, she devises the trick of telling the prince a new story every night.
![1001 arabian nights stories online 1001 arabian nights stories online](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/literature/images/8/87/ThousandAndOneComic.jpg)
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.
![1001 arabian nights stories online 1001 arabian nights stories online](https://game-game.com/gamesimg/17802_big.jpg)
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.