This translation from Arabic is a reconciliation of the anonymous English translation of Galland's French translation and Edward William Lane's original English translation from the Arabic. This reconciliation was accomplished by scholar and editor H. W. Dulcken for Dalziel's Illustrated Edition.

I’d read excerpts here and there, of course; and seen movies about Aladdin and Sindbad; and read a “companion” (The Arabian Nights: A Companion); but I had never read a full version. (As it turns out, this isn’t a “full” version either, consisting of a couple hundred stories. It seems that there never really were 1001 stories but readers expected that many so various translators squeezed things in). This volume is an 1865 English translation of the 1817 French version of Antoine Galland, with an introduction and text notes by Muhsin al-Musawi. The English version was part of an “illustrated library”, and those illustrations – quaint to modern sensibility – grace the text.

I assume everybody is familiar with the basic idea; after being deceived by the sultana, sultan Shahriar determines to never be cheated again; he’ll wed a girl, spend a night with her, than kill her the next morning. Presumably concerned about the imminent shortage of girlfriends, Scheherazade, daughter of the Shahriar’s vizier, beguiles the sultan by telling him a story that can’t be finished in one night; he lets her live so he can hear the rest, and then she starts another story. A thousand nights and a night later, the sultan finally gives up and everybody lives happily ever after.

It would be pointless to review individual stories, so I’ll just mention arbitrary things that struck me.

A lot of the stories are “second order”; Scheherazade is telling a story about somebody telling a story. The famous Sindbad stories are like that; the wealthy Sindbad befriends a poor porter (Hindbad, presumably no relation) and narrates the stories of his voyages. Movies always show Sindbad as a ship captain – perhaps because that’s what “Sindbad the Sailor” implies to a western ear. In the stories, though, Sindbad is a merchant – he’s got nothing to do with sailing the ship, he’s just embarked on it with a cargo he wants to sell. Scheherazade, or whoever composed the original story, had obviously read Homer; in one adventure Sindbad and his companions are captured by an anthropophagous, one-eyed giant who they escape by blinding him with red-hot iron spits. In fact, the whole Sindbad story might be based on the Middle Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

Another interesting thing was the preponderance of food and drink. Almost every story includes a feast of some sort, and there’s an awful lot of wine drinking by putative Muslims. When Aladdin originally discovers the magic lamp, the he doesn’t ask the genie for wealth or power; he asks for something to eat. It’s a reminder that despite the framing device the original stories were not told by a nervous royal concubine to a wealthy sultan, but by a street storyteller to passers-by, and everybody involved probably had some acquaintance with hunger. I’m strangely reminded of recent reading about the Salem witch trials; when the witches encounter the tall dark man, he doesn’t seduce them with gold but, in monochrome gray New England, colorful clothes and picture books. Food in the Middle East and color in Massachusetts trump all other worldly pleasures.

Continuing with Aladdin, his is one of the stories that seems to have been invented in Europe; there’s no Arabic manuscript original. The Aladdin story is set in China – an imaginary Muslim China, ruled by a Sultan – but the illustrator shows everybody as Chinese, with queues and “Fu Manchu” mustaches, and one scene overlooks a harbor full of junks.

Long (almost 700 pages) and some of the stories drag, but most are fun enough. I’ve got another translation in the “to be read” stack; I’ll have to see how it compares. ( )

I can honestly say that I have read The Arabian Nights. I'm sure that at the time of publication the stories were fascinating, however, in this day and age when many of the individual tales have been adapted to the silver screen, the stories have lost their luster. Some I had never heard before , others far too many times. ( )

General interest. Black and white drawings. Includes a list of films, television series, musical works, literature, and games, both directly and indirectly inspired by the tales.