Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights (in Arabic, ألف ليلة وليلة‎, Alf layla wa-layla) is a medieval collection of traditional oriental tales.

The work took shape over the course of several centuries with the contributions of different writers and translators from the Near East. Many stories were originally folktales from the Abbasid and Mamluk periods, while others, especially the one serving as the narrative framework, most likely come from the Persian Pahlavi Hezār Afsān (in Persian, هزار افسان‎, lit. A thousand legends), which in turn contained some Indian elements. The work uses the form of the framed story, that is, stories that are included within other stories.

Synopsis

Scheherezade and Shahriar (1880), Ferdinand Keller.

The first tale, which serves as a framework for all the others, deals with the story of King Shahriar and his brother Shahzamán. Shahriar learns that his brother's wife had a slave as a lover. He later finds out that his wife is unfaithful to him with a slave, even in full view of other slaves and servants, so he decides to leave his kingdom until he finds someone to whom a greater misfortune has happened. Discovering that a powerful genie is being tricked in an even more cunning way, he concludes that all women are equal and returns to his palace, where after taking revenge on the queen, he makes the decision to marry a virgin every night and behead her the next day., to avoid the possibility of being deceived again. When the vizier, who is in charge of getting the wives, can no longer find any, his daughter Scheherazade offers herself with the intention of ending the king's cruelty. On the first night, Shahrazade manages to captivate Shahriar's attention by telling him a story that she interrupts before dawn, promising to tell something more amazing the next night, if the king spares her life. The stratagem is repeated for a thousand and one nights, during which the stories that make up the book are told.

The stories include short stories, both tragic and comic love stories, poems, parodies, and Muslim religious legends. Some of the most famous stories, such as Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor, were added in the 18th century by Antoine Galland. The first two were transmitted orally by the Syrian Maronite Hanna Diyab in Paris. As for the tales of Sinbad, this is an independent set of stories, some of which were already told in ancient Egypt, like the story of the shipwrecked man.

In many stories, genies, fantastic spirits, magicians and legendary places are represented as mixed with real people and places; the historical caliph Haroun al-Rashid appears in many stories.

Stories

• King Shabiar and brother King Schahzaan
• The Visir of King Yunan and Doctor Ruyan
• History of the Prince and the Vampire
• History of the Enchanted Young and Fish
• The errand and the three maidens
• Zobeida, the oldest of the young
• The naked woman, the three blocks and the black Rihán
• The Visir Nureddin, his brother's Visir Chamseddin and Hassan Badreddin
• The hunchback, with the tailor, the Nazarene corridor, the mayor and the Jewish doctor
• The young man took the barber of Baghdad
• History of sweet-friend
• Ghanem Ben-Ayub and his sister Fetnah
• Black Sauab, first Sudanese eunuch
• King Omar Al-Neman and his two sons Scharkan and Daul'Makan
• Aziz and Aziza and the beautiful prince Diadema
• The young Kanmakán, son of Daul-makán
• Lovely stories of animals and birds
• Ali Ben-Bekar and the beautiful Schamsennahar
• Kamaralzaman and Princess Budur, the most beautiful moon among all moons
• Happy-Bello and Happy-Bella
• History of Grano-De-Belleza
• History of docta Sympathy
• Adventures of the poet Abu-Nowas
• Simbad the Marine
• The belle Zumurrud and Alischar, the son of Gloria
• The six young people of different colors
• The prodigious city of bronze
• Ibn Al-Mansur and the two young
• Wardan, the butcher, and the daughter of the Visir
• Queen Yamlika, Underground Princess
• History of Belukia
• History of the beautiful sad young
• History of Rosa-en-el-Cáliz and Delicia-del-Mundo
• The horse of Ebano
• The artifices of Dalila the Taimada and his daughter Zeinab the Embustera with Ahmad-la-Tiña, Hassan-la-Peste and Ali Azogue
• Play the fisherman or the enchanted bag
• Abu-Kir and Abu-Sir
• Abdalah of the land and Abdalah of the sea
• History of the young yellow
• History of Flor-de-Granada and Sonrisa-de-Luna
• History of Califa
• The Adventures of Hassan Al-Bassri
• History of awake sleeping
• History of the young lazy
• Young Nur and Franca Heroica
• Wonderful story of the virgin mirror
• Aladdin and the magic lamp
• Kamar and the expert Halima
• History of the Meat Leg
• The two hatchers
• History of the Kadi Father-of-Cuesso
• Prince Nurennahar and the beautiful Gennia
• History of Sarta-de-Perlas
• Complicated History of the Sexy Adulter
• The young monkey
• The three madmen
• Ali Babah and the forty thieves
• History of the young owner of the white mare
• The schoolteacher crippled and with his mouth cleft
• Princess Suleika
• The goat and daughter of the king
• The son of king with the giant turtle
• The Magic Book
• The two kings and the two labyrinths
• splendid history of the prince diamond
• Baibars and police captains
• The sea rose and the young Chinese
• History of yarn cake with bee honey and the coveted wife of the shoemaker
• The Angel of Death and the King of Israel
• History of Abdula, the blind beggar

Literary themes and techniques

Illustration of A thousand and a nightSani ol Molk, Iran, 1853.

The Arabian Nights make use of many innovative literary techniques used by storytellers to heighten drama, suspense, or other emotions. Some of these techniques date back to the earlier Persian, Indian and Arabic literature, while others were originals from Arabian Nights.^{[citation needed]}

Frame Story

The Arabian Nights employs an early example of the frame story or framing device: the character Scheherazade narrates a series of tales (most often fairy tales) to Sultan Shahriyar during many nights. Many of Scheherazade's tales are themselves frame stories, such as the Tale of Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad the Bearer, which is a collection of adventures related by Sinbad the Sailor to Sinbad the Bearer.^{[citation needed ]}

Embedded narrative

Another technique featured in Arabian Nights is an early example of the "story within a story" or embedded narrative technique: this goes back to earlier Persian and Indian narrative traditions, most notably the Panchatantra of Sanskrit literature. The Nights, however, improved the Panchatantra in several ways, particularly in the way a story is presented. In the Panchatantra, the stories are introduced as didactic analogies in which the frame story refers to these stories with variants of the phrase "If you are not careful, what happened to the louse will happen to you. and the flea". In Las Noches, this didactic framework is the least common way of presenting the story: in them, stories are most commonly presented through subtle means, particularly in response to questions posed in an earlier tale.

The overall story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In most of Scheherazade's narratives there are also narrated stories, and even in some of these there are some other stories as well. This is particularly the case with the story of 'Sinbad the sailor', narrated by Scheherazade in A thousand and one nights. Within the story of & # 34; Sinbad the sailor & # 34;, the protagonist Sinbad the Sailor narrates the stories of the seven trips he made to Sinbad the porter. The device is also used to great effect in stories like "The Three Apples" and "The Seven Viziers". In yet another tale, Scheherazade narrates "The Fisherman and the Genius", within which the "Tale of the Wazir and the Wise Duban" is narrated, within which three more tales are narrated. ^{[citation required]}

Dramatic Visualization

Dramatic visualization is "the representation of an object or character with an abundance of descriptive detail, or the mimetic representation of gestures and dialogue in such a way that a given scene is 'visual' or imaginatively present for an audience". This technique is used in several Arabian Nights tales. An example of this is the tale of " The Three Apples " (see Elements of crime fiction below).

Fate

A common theme in many tales of The Arabian Nights is fate. Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, director of Arabian Nights (1974), observed:

"All the accounts of The thousand and one nights begin with a "apparition of destiny" that manifests itself through an anomaly, and an anomaly always generates another. Then a chain of anomalies is set. And the more logical, narrow and essential this chain is, the more beautiful the story will be. By "beautiful" I mean vital, absorbent and stimulating. The chain of anomalies always tends to return to normal. The end of each story in The Thousand and One Nights consists of the 'disappearance' of destiny, which sinks into the drowsiness of everyday life... The protagonist of stories is, in fact, destiny itself."

Although invisible, fate can be considered a main character in Arabian Nights. Plot devices often used to introduce this theme are coincidence, reverse causality and the self-fulfilling prophecy (see the Omen section below).

Omen

Simbad and the Diamond Valley of the Second Trip.

The earliest examples of the repetitive designation foreshadowing technique, now known as "Chekhov's weapon", occur in Arabian Nights, which contains "repeated references to some character or object that seems insignificant when first mentioned but reappears later to suddenly intrude into the narrative'. A notable example is in the tale of "The Three Apples" (see Elements of crime fiction below).

Another early foreshadowing technique is formal patterning, "the organization of the events, actions, and gestures that constitute a narrative and shape a story; when done well, the formal pattern allows the audience the pleasure of discerning and anticipating the structure of the plot as it unfolds. This technique is also found in The Thousand and One Nights.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

Several tales of Arabian Nights use the self-fulfilling prophecy, as a special form of literary prolepsis, to foreshadow what is going to happen. This literary device goes back to the story of Krishna, in ancient Sanskrit literature, and to Oedipus or the death of Heracles, in the works of Sophocles. A variation of this device is the self-fulfilling dream, which can be found in Arabic literature (or Joseph's dreams and his conflict with his brothers, in the Hebrew Bible). ^{[ citation needed ]}

A notable example is "The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream", in which a man is told in his dream to give up his hometown of Baghdad and travel to Cairo, where he will discover the whereabouts of some hidden treasure. The man travels there and experiences misfortune and ends up in jail, where he tells his dream to a police officer. The officer scoffs at the idea of precognitive dreams, telling the protagonist that he himself had a dream about a house with a courtyard and a fountain in Baghdad where the treasure is buried under the fountain. The man recognizes the place as his own house and, after getting out of prison, returns home and digs up the treasure. In other words, the precognitive dream not only predicted the future, but the dream caused its prediction to come true. A variant of this story appears later in English folklore as the 'Peddler of Swaffham'; and in the novel The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho; In the short story collection Historia universal de la infamia, Jorge Luis Borges presented his Spanish translation of this particular story as "The Story of the Two Dreamers".

"The Tale of Attaf" describes another variation of the self-fulfilling prophecy in which Harun al-Rashid consults his library (the House of Wisdom), reads a book at the chance, 'he laughs and weeps and dismisses the faithful vizier Ja'far ibn Yahya from sight. A disturbed and upset Ja'afar flees Baghdad and plunges into a series of adventures in Damascus, involving Attaf and the woman Attaf eventually marries. After returning to Baghdad, Ja'afar reads the same book that made Harun laugh and cry, and discovers that it describes his own adventures with Attaf. In other words, it was Harun's reading of the book that caused the adventures described in the book Reverse Causality to take place.

Near the end of the story, Attaf receives a death sentence for a crime he did not commit, but Harun, knowing the truth from what he has read in the book, prevents him and releases him from prison. In the 12th century, this tale was translated into Latin by Petrus Alphonsi and included in his Disciplina Clericalis, along with the tale cycle "Sindibad". In the XIV century, a version from "The Tale of Attaf" it also appears in the Gesta Romanorum and in The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Repetition

Illustration of A thousand and a night of Sani ol molk, Iran, 1849–1856

Leitwortstil is "the intentional repetition of words" in a given piece of literature that "generally expresses an important motif or theme for the given story". This device occurs in The Thousand and One Nights, which unites several tales in a cycle of tales. The storytellers drew on this technique "to shape the constituent members of their story cycles into a coherent whole."

Another technique used in Arabian Nights is the thematic pattern, which is:

The distribution of recurrent thematic concepts and moral motives among the various incidents and frames of a history. In a cleverly crafted tale, the thematic patterns can be organized to emphasize the unifying argument or the outstanding idea that they have in common disparate events and frameworks.

Several different variants of the "Cinderella" story, which has its origins in the Egyptian story of Rhodopis, appear in Arabian Nights, including " The Story of the Second Sheikh", "The Old Woman's Tale" and "Abdallah ibn Fadil and his brothers", all of them on the subject of a younger brother harassed by two jealous elders. In some of them, the brothers are women, while in others they are men. One of the stories, & # 34; Judar and his brothers & # 34;, departs from the happy endings of previous variants and reworks the plot to give it a tragic ending, with the younger brother being poisoned by his older brothers.

Sexual humor

Las Noches contains many examples of sexual humor. Some of this borders on satire, as in the tale called "Ali with the Big Dick", which pokes fun at the obsession with penis size.

Unreliable Narrator

The literary device of the unreliable narrator was used in several fictional medieval Arabian tales of Arabian Nights. In a tale, "The Seven Viziers" (also known as "The Trade and Malice of Women or The Tale of the king, his son, his concubine and the seven viziers"), a courtesan accuses a king's son of having assaulted her when in reality, she had failed to seduce him (inspired by the Biblical/Quranic story of Yusuf/Joseph). Seven viziers try to save her life by narrating seven stories to prove the unreliability of the women, and the courtesan responds by narrating a story to prove the unreliability of the viziers. The unreliable storytelling device is also used to build suspense in "The Three Apples" and humor in "The tale of the hunchback" (see Elements of crime fiction below).

Editions

For clarity, editions can be classified based on the text they contain, namely:

• Canonical Editions: corresponds to the printed editions under the current title A thousand and a night on the basis of medieval manuscripts in Bulaq (1835) and Calcutta II (1839-1842).

• Expurgated editions: Rene R. Khawam published, in 1986-1987, a novel translation in which he suppresses stories that he considers to be alien to the primitive tradition (some well known as the Simbad cycle), recovers some that were discarded and presents others recovered.

• Non-Canonical Editions (modified): among those found:

• • Expanded editions: corresponds to the editions with added stories a posteriori and not included in the medieval manuscripts; highlighting the edition of Mardrus and Burton.
  • mutilated editions: corresponds to the editions that present mutilation or censorship of text, etc. This group highlights the editions of Galland.

Non-canonical editions (modified)

The first European version (and the first printed edition) was a French translation (1704 - 1717) by Antoine Galland. This book, Les Mille et une nuit: Contes arabes traduits en français (in 12 volumes), included stories that were not contained in the Arabic manuscript.

Classic Comics cover.

It stands out for being one of the best-known versions and for having popularized orientalism first in France and then throughout Europe.

Perhaps the best-known translation by English speakers is that of Richard Francis Burton, published under the title The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Night). Unlike other editions, the 16-volume translation was not redacted; Furthermore, it exacerbated the erotic nuances of the original in the notes, despite having been published in the Victorian era, albeit by subscription.

The most recent and most legible versions (and which do not present mutilations or censorship) are those of the French J. C. Mardrus, translated into English by Edward Powys Mathers and into Spanish by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; and particularly, an important edition based on the Syrian manuscript of the XIV century at the Bibliotheque Nationale, compiled in Arabic by Muhsin Mahdi and translated into English by Husain Haddawy, considered the most accurate and elegant of all to date.

Translations

Translation of the redacted edition:

• From the French edition of Khawam (1986-1987), Gregorio Cantera translated the work into Edhasa publishing house.

Direct translations from Arabic of canonical editions:

• The edition of Rafael Cansinos Assens, published by M. Aguilar in Mexico (1955), which is the first direct, verbatim and full version of Spanish and which Jorge Luis Borges considered “the best”, as the most “delicate and rigorous version of the famous book”. It is based on Bulaq and Calcutta II.
• Edition of Juan Vernet, considered the most acceptable philologically, published by Planeta (1964). It is based on Bulaq and Calcutta II.
• Edition of the arabists of the University of Barcelona Juan Antonio Gutiérrez-Larraya and Leonor Martínez, published by Argos Vergara (1965) and republished by Ediciones Atalanta (2014). It is based only on Bulaq.
• Edition of Salvador Peña Martín, published by Editorial Verbum (2016). It is based on Bulaq and complements with Calcutta II.

Translations from non-canonical (modified) editions:

• From the French edition of J. C. Mardrus (1889), Vicente Blasco Ibáñez translated and edited the work in the Valencian Editorial Prometheus (6 volumes).

Influence

European literature has tried to imitate the style of the thousand and one nights. For example, Jan Potocki, a Polish nobleman from the late 18th century century, traveled to the East in search of an original copy of the Book of a thousand and one nights, but he never found it. After returning to Europe, he wrote his own version, The Manuscript Found in Zaragoza (1804-1805), of a book with several levels of narration. In addition, the Scottish post-romantic storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a series of short stories influenced by The Thousand and One Nights, entitled The New Arabian Nights (1882). The Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov also composed the famous symphonic suite Scheherazade (1888).

The book has been adapted many times for use by children and adolescents in all Western countries. Generally, stories in which adventures and fantasy prevail, such as the story of Aladdin and the lamp, the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor or the adventures of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, are chosen for dissemination.

Cinema and television

• In 1969, the film Senya Ichiya Monogatari (known in Spanish as The Thousand One Nights) by Eiichi Yamamoto was released, considered as the first animated film for adults in Japan. Designed by Osamu Tezuka, it is part of a trilogy with erotic themes and a style of psychodelic animation.
• In 1974, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made a film adaptation on the work.

• Probably the most successful and recognized adaptation is Aladdin, the Disney cartoon film premiered in 1992, which opened way to various sequelae and a television series.

• The Turkish soap opera of 2006 Binbir Gece, produced by TMC for Kanal D, is freely based on the history of Sherezade and Schariar.

• In 2009 it began to be published in the Shūkan Shōnen Sunday on the sleeve Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic!inspired by A thousand and a night.

• In 2014, the mini-series of animation World Tales, published by Filmin and produced and directed by Pedro Alonso Pablos, includes a chapter dedicated to several stories A thousand and a night.