While Arab scholars were not enthusiastically drawn to popular culture, many in Europe showed interest in the tales of the Arabian Nights as manifestations of Arab-Islamic culture. The Europeans were interested in questions of authorship and origin. Were the tales written by a single author, or were they a collection of tales from a variety of sources—Persian, Indian, Greek, Bedouin, and others?

The Search for a Genealogy of the Arabian Nights

Some nineteenth-century European scholars believed remarks made in 947 by al-Mas’udi—a tenth-century historian and geographer known as the Herodotus of the Arabs; in his Muruj al-dhahab (Meadows of Gold), he argued for the collectivist origin of the tales, a point debated by the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy in 1817, 1829, and 1833.¹

European interest in the tales and their origin grew in the nineteenth century when Edward William Lane produced a heavily annotated translation from Arabic sources that attributed the work to a single author who wrote between 1475 and 1525.² Austrian Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) held the opposite view.³ He built his argument on al-Mas’udi, who argued for a non-Arab origin for the tales. Late in the nineteenth century, Michael de Goeje resumed the discussion of origin;⁴ reflecting an increasing interest in matters biblical and mythical, he tried to demonstrate that the framework story was connected to the story of Esther, the daughter of King Bahman. August Müller, no less involved in myth, went beyond philology to study the layers of the whole;⁵ he assumed that the book had a Baghdadi and Egyptian origin. Theodore Nöldeke and Johannes Østrup built their opinions on careful analysis of texts.⁶ The latter’s views, severely criticized by Muhsin Mahdi⁷ for their racist predilections, were popular in the early twentieth century; they were translated by Krymski into Russian in 1905,⁸ into German by Rescher (1925),⁹ and into French by Galtier (1912).

The origin of the tales was further discussed by Josef Horovitz, for example in his article “Die Entstehung von Tausendundeine Nacht,”¹⁰ ¹¹ and by Enno Littmann, in his Tausendundeine Nacht in der arabischen Literatur ¹² and his “Die Entstehung und Geschichte von Tausendundeiner Nacht,” which accompanied his translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Littmann, who did extensive scholarship on the Nights in Arabic literature, thought highly of the work of both Nöldeke and Østrup. The search for origins received impetus when in 1949 Nabia Abbott from the University of Chicago published her findings, based on a ninth-century papyrus that mentions the names of the alleged narrator of the tales, Scheherazade, and her sister, Dinarzade, and includes a fragmentary manuscript of some tales. Scholars since then have had something substantial to refer to apart from scattered historical reference.

On the other hand, interest in the source manuscript used by Antoine Galland for his 1704 translation, Les Mille et une nuits, which took France and Europe by surprise, continued unabated. Interest in Galland’s original goes back to Hermann Zotenberg¹³ and, later, D. B. Macdonald,¹⁴ to culminate in Muhsin Mahdi’s meticulous reading of genealogy in his book The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources. Philologists were aware of the discrepancy between the actual number of available tales under the heading “Thousand and One” (in other words, an unlimited number) and the desire of redactors to meet that actual number. Zotenberg drew attention to the 300 core stories, which had reached that number only because of the attempt to reach one thousand and one.¹⁵ The source manuscript that once belonged to Galland, now held in the French Bibliothéque National library—it is the core text for Zotenberg—could have been from the fourteenth century and was different from another seventeenth-century Bibliotheque National manuscript (1491A) comprising 870 nights. The later manuscript, obtained by the French consul-general Benoît de Maillet, contains all of Galland’s core stories. These, along with other manuscripts, led Zotenberg to conclude that the original core or nucleus as made available in Galland’s manuscript was the culmination of early Arabic modification and elaboration on the frame of Hazar Afsanah, the Indo-Persian story book that was mentioned by al-Mas‘udi. Later D. B. Macdonald used this argument to develop a genealogy for Galland’s version with a root in the framing story and a number of descendants since the fourteenth century. These culminate in a late-eighteenth-century text, produced under an Egyptian sheikh’s supervision, that includes a total of 1001 nights; it is usually cited as the Zotenberg Egyptian Recension (ZER).

An earlier mention of a collection in Jean-Louis Asselin’s (1772-1822) diary of July, 10, 1807, did not materialize in an edition, and the sheikh who was working on this collection could be any among the Cairene sheikhs in late-eighteenth-century Egypt. On the other hand, a later recension could have been by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabart (1754-1822), whom Edward William Lane described as “so delighted in their perusal that he took the trouble of refining the language of a copy of them which he possessed, expurgating or altering whatever was grossly offensive to morality without the somewhat redeeming quality of wit, and adding many facetiae of his own, and of other literati.”¹⁶ This led to the Bulaq and Macnaghten, or Calcutta II, editions. Calcutta II, from an Egyptian manuscript brought to India by Major Turner, editor of the Shah-Nameh, was edited by W. H. Macnaghten and published in four volumes in Calcutta during the years 1839-1842. According to Muhsin Mahdi, Galland’s core Nights belongs to a Syrian family, whose presence is central to all subsequent descendants, including the late-eighteenth-century ZER and its Bulaq and Macnaghten, or Calcutta II, descendants. D. B. Macdonald was keen on producing The Thousand and One Nights in a reliable version with the core stories as its text.¹⁷ Muhsin Mahdi used Galland’s for his 1984 Leiden edition (of 282 nights), and provided a survey and exhaustive analysis of the family of the text and its descendants.¹⁸

In the West

In more than one sense, the history of the Arabian Nights in European cultures is the history of empires and the history of the East-West encounter. Beginning in 1704 with Antoine Galland’s first two volumes of Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes and concluding in 1717 with the twelfth volume—a translation and appropriation of the available twenty-one cycles of tales with their Arabic core of nine—Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments underwent adaptation to meet the expectations, needs, and reading habits of the European public. It was not by chance that Edward William Lane, along with a large number of scholars and travelers, settled in the East and came back with annotations, accounts, and surveys of manners and customs. Lane’s text provoked further response, reviews, translations, and studies of Muslims and of Arab communities. Upon its first appearance, it gave impetus to various interests and agendas.

In a discussion of translations and translators, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes the interest in offering so many versions of the tales as a show of restlessness regarding the impact of precursors: “Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; and to understand Burton we must understand his hostile dynasty.”¹⁹ As early as the mid-1930s, Borges looked upon the translation mania as no more than an attempt to beat the precursor: “To be different: this is the rule the precursor imposes: Lane will follow the rule: he needs only to abstain from abridging the original.”²⁰ Burton’s “Terminal Essay” attempts to vindicate his translation against all precursors, but also against the immediate ghost of John Payne’s 1882-1884 translation. J. C. Mardrus deliberately chose the full title The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Livre des mille nuits et une nuit (1899) to compete with Galland, who eliminated the “original’s repetition.” However, Mardrus was only following Macnaghten, with his Book of the Thousand and One Nights (1839), John Payne, with his Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night and finally Burton, with his Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Nevertheless, no matter how hard Mardrus tried to use “rhymed prose and moral predictions,” argues Borges, “it is his infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity that must matter to us.”²¹

Four translations appeared in Germany: by Gustav Weil (1839-1842), Max Henning (1895-1897), Felix Paul Greve (1912-1913), and Enno Littmann (1923-1928). All these have their merits, but Littmann’s has the advantage of common sense, and the style “is always lucid, readable, and mediocre,” concludes the brilliant Argentine writer and critic.²² And they all build on Galland. While the anxiety of influence does exist as a creative impulse in all translators and redactors, as Borges argues, this should not blind us to the fact that each version betrays a literary taste, and a different interest. Both reflect the temper of a specific period in the history of European literature and the concerns and ambitions of colonial powers.²³

In his Miscellanies (vol. 3; 1795), William Beloe published Arabic stories orally translated by Patrick Russell, the author of The Natural History of Aleppo (1794). Jonathan Scott translated, in his Tales, Anecdotes and Letters (1800), certain stories from James Anderson’s Indian manuscript of the Nights. He added to his 1811 English version of Galland a volume of more stories from the Wortley Montague manuscript. In 1806 Caussin de Perceval had already supplemented his edition of Galland with two more volumes. Edouard Gauttier went further to supplement his professed edition of Galland (1822-1825) not only with scattered tales available in various redactions and versions, but also with others that he freely inserted. Littmann credits Von Hammer with a real recension in his Die noch nicht übersetzten Erzaehlungen der Tausend und einen Nacht,²⁴ which became the Zotenberg Egyptian Recension and the “Vulgate text of the Nights.” Although Von Hammer’s French translation of tales not in Galland’s was lost, Zinserling (1823) translated these into German, and they made their way into an English translation by George Lamb (1826) and a French one by G.-S. Trebutien (1828). In 1825 M. Habicht made his claim to a new translation from Arabic, in fifteen volumes, which was no more than Galland’s supplemented from Caussin, Gauttier, Scott, and a disputed Tunisian manuscript. D. B. Macdonald discussed Habicht’s recension in 1909 in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and in his article “A Preliminary Classification of Some MSS of the Arabian Nights,” where he writes that he thinks Habicht created a literary myth and enormously confused the history of the Nights because there was no Tunisian recension of the work. However, Macdonald accredited Habicht’s texts with verbatim vulgarity, as they were not grammatically and lexicographically “improved” by learned sheikhs. Between 1837 and 1867, Weil made his translation from Galland, Gotha manuscripts, and an Egyptian text.

Arabic Editions

The main Arabic-language editions of Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) are as follows:

The first Calcutta Edition: The Arabian Nights Entertainments in the original Arabic, published under the patronage of the College of Fort William; by Shuekh Uhmud bin Moohummud Shirwanee ul Yumunee [sic], Calcutta, vol. 1, 1814; vol. 2, 1818. This edition contains the first 200 nights and Sindbad the Sailor.

The first Bulaq Edition: Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, printed in 1835 (from manuscripts found in Egypt) in the State Printing Office at Bulaq, near Cairo. This press was founded by Muhammad Ali.

The second Calcutta Edition: The Alif Laila; or, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, commonly known as The Arabian Nights Entertainments , for the first time, published complete in the original Arabic, from an Egyptian manuscript brought to India by the late Major Turner, editor of the Shah-Nameh. Edited by W. H. Macnaghten, Esq. In four volumes, Calcutta 1839-1842.

The Breslau Edition: Tausend und Eine Nacht Arabisch. Nach einer Handschrift aus Tunis herausgegeben von Dr. Maximilian Habicht, Professor at Königliche Universität in Breslau (etc.). Heinrich Leberecht Fleische continued the publication of the compiled text after Habicht’s death ( 1839), Breslau 1825-1843.

Later Bulaq and Cairo Editions: The first Bulaq edition was reprinted many times. These fall within the Zotenberg Egyptian Recension, as compiled by a sheikh in Cairo in the eighteenth century. Littmann and later Muhsin Mahdi relate the text to a note by U. J. Seetzen, Reisen durch Syrien, Palaestina, Phönicien, die Transjordan-Laender, Arabia Petraea und Unter-Aegypten (Berlin, 1854-1855), iii, p. 188. Muhsin Mahdi did not credit the note with great scholarly significance. The Jesuit Press at Beirut published an independent but expurgated edition from another manuscript of the same recension (1888-1890).

Muhsin Mahdi’s edition of Galland’s core: This edition is Galland’s core stories, already described in reference to Galland’s translation. Brill published it in 1984 with the editor’s extensive textual assessments and annotations.

Translations as Cultural Manifestations

Modern Western translations, exempting Muhsin Mahdi’s, came from the Egyptian recension. Lane’s translation, made from the first Bulaq edition, appeared in parts between 1838 and 1840. Payne’s translation, which appeared in nine volumes, between 1882 and 1884, descended from the Macnaghten edition. Three additional volumes borrowed tales from the Breslau and the first Calcutta editions (1884), while the thirteenth vol.(1889) contained Aladdin and Zayn al-Asnam. Following Payne’s death in 1916, a number of complete reprints have appeared. Sir Richard Burton’s edition in ten volumes (1885) and six supplementary ones (1886-1888) descended also from the Macnaghten edition, and it is heavily indebted to Payne’s. Aside from the complete edition that was reprinted many times, there are the Smithers edition (12 vols., 1894) and Lady Burton’s edition (6 vols., 1886-1888). Max Henning published a German translation in twenty-four small volumes, seven from Bulaq and the rest from other editions in Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek (1895-1897); Littmann describes this as “somewhat expurgated and rather prosaic” and complains that it “gives only half the verses.” J. C. Mardrus began in 1899 a French translation of the Nights that was mostly based on the Bulaq edition of 1835.

To answer needs and desires in times of rising aspirations in Europe, translations from Arabic and Eastern lore can be seen in relation to the rise of the novel, as it also answers to the predilections, obsessions, and hankerings of the rising middle classes and the dilettante infatuations of a decaying nobility. In a broader context, this transformation on cultural, social, and political levels was in keeping with a mercantile drive to expand and make use of commercial routes and commodities. The endeavor was part of the whole colonial conquest to take over lands, islands, routes, and whole countries. Everything was looked upon as an opportunity for manipulation and exploitation, and the royal emphasis in the seventeenth century on the need to bring back manuscripts from the Levant indicates a firm association between knowledge and power. The decree of the King of England in 1634 to bring back manuscripts from the Levant should be seen in this context.²⁵ Translation is not innocent, not only in the sense that it answers to needs and aspirations of the translator and his audience, but also in its annotations, appropriations, and change. In these translations, the translator imposes the recipient’s color, knowledge, and power on the original. The original text gradually loses selfhood and identity and becomes the property of the translator, who, no longer an individual self, identifies with a new site of power, with its empowered discourse that speaks for the imperial and the colonial. The Thousand and One Nights evolves as a site of a dependent East that is assumed to be subordinate and in need of a caretaker who will annotate, explain, compare, and comment. It had to pass through this process of analysis, dissection, and anthropological surveying. The surgical analysis of the tales, and their appended annotations, were identical with the drive to append the land to empire. In that act of supplementation, the tales were made to yearn for understanding, very much like the East itself in its so-called need for British domination. In Balfour’s justifications for a British control of “what is called, broadly speaking, the East,” Great Britain should take over, because in the history of the East, “you never find traces of self-government.” ²⁶ As much as Scheherazade’s tales were in need of documentation and explanatory appendages for the receiving milieu, so were the lands of the East, in the case of Egypt “not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.”²⁷

The Arabian Nights would become, henceforth, another terrain for joy, use, and misuse, and the claim behind the scholarly drive could at times echo Balfour’s, for the Arabian Nights has to be useful to itself and to its European recipient.

Writing on the Arabian Nights

In an early reading of the scene,²⁸ I mentioned some trends and attitudes in twentieth-century interest in the Arabian Nights. Since then other assessments have appeared. Peter Heath has suggested three approaches: the historical, which deals with the textual and literary development of the collection; the panoramic, with its “holistic perspective, combining historical, philological, folkloristic, literary, and, occasionally, sociological concerns;” and a third, which focuses primarily on individual stories.²⁹

While the first approach can be easily classified, the panoramic is not as easily dealt with, and Heath puts Burton’s “Terminal Essay,” Gerhardt’s study, and N. Elisseef’s reading of themes and motifs under this heading. We know that John Payne (and his descendants, like Burton) has already offered a classification of the genres that make up the color ful and highly entertaining body of the collection. In his study of the history and character of the work, Payne divides the tales into four main categories: histories and romances partly founded on historical data; anecdotes and short accounts concerned with historical figures and daily adventures; romances and romantic fictions of different proportions; and didactic stories. In the section dealing with romantic fiction, Payne distinguishes between three cycles. Apart from the romantic stories that make free use of supernatural agency, there are narratives in which the fictional blends with the realistic. More entertaining, however, are the “novellas” and tales of roguery, to which Payne traced back many medieval European romances.³⁰ In these classifications, Payne has worked out a basic pattern, which later scholars have continued to appropriate in their descriptive critiques of the generic richness of the Arabian Nights—as, for instance, Littmann has done in an article in The Encyclopedia of Islam.³¹

On the other hand, Heath’s third heading—the one that that deals with specific tales—also poses no problem; this has already been done in the titles and headings of articles and monographs. The effort to classify the different sides and elements in this corpus indicates its multifarious nature. The “growth” of scholarly interest is enormous. Heath also suggests a generic subdivision, to justify his reading of romance in the collection. As was noticed, Payne, Burton, and Gerhardt, at a later stage, realized the need to break the collection into divisions and subdivisions and cycles. The need for further research and criticism of subgenres, as obvious in Heath’s effort, is as urgent as ever. The effort to specify rather than to generalize has the advantage of drawing attention to the literary nature of the collection, but it may downplay the composite nature of the whole. The case invites meticulous analysis, and Heath leans at a later stage on Tzvetan Todorov to classify “internal literary analysis” according to Todorov’s levels—the semantic, the syntactic, and the verbal—covering thereby themes, narrative units and structures, and rhetorical devices. Nevertheless, Peter Heath supplements these with voicing the need for cultural substantiation. The note is worthwhile, as the history and nature of the collection defies mere textual or structural analysis. In tune with Todorov’s insights on the literariness of the text and the generic motivations of narrative, Jonathan Culler’s reading of signs can be useful, especially in matters that relate to openings. Culler divides presuppositions that introduce storytelling into logical and literary or pragmatic. Such openings as “Once upon a time,” he suggests, relate the story to a series of other stories, and also appropriate it within the conventions of a specific genre. The practice, he further explains, implicates the reader or the listener in an attitude that corresponds to the demands of this genre. It is, for this matter, “a powerful intertextual operator,” he writes.³² While unconcerned with the Nights, Culler’s insights are useful for the study of the art in its oral significations. At a later stage, and applying literary analysis to motivations, stylistic features, and techniques, David Pinault wrote his doctoral thesis on some of these. He specifies, first, “repetitive designation”—of gardens and windows, for instance, where the emphasis is laid on a scene, a place that will prove quite functional in the making of narrative disequilibrium. Second, he considers the leitwortstil (“leading-word style”) whereby words assume substantial significance, as they are loaded with religious and cultural connotations, encapsulating themes and techniques. The third topic of his analysis is “thematic techniques and formal patterning,” with emphasis on an idea or an argument, or the very organization of events, which leads to the pleasure of recognition; part of patterning relies on ransom motivations, but the emphasis on this is not new in literary scholarship, especially in Mia Gerhardt’s reading. Pinault’s fourth topic is dramatic visualization, with an emphasis on both the mimetic and the descriptive.³³

These are useful suggestions, especially in Pinault’s detailed analysis. It is good that he titled his work in such a general way, as techniques in this collection are far more numerous than what is listed. There are verbal and nonverbal narratives and genres, and we need to make use of Roland Barthes’s suggestion in his readings of narrative, to account for the multifarious technical nature of this collection. He argues in “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”: “Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances—as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories.” He adds: “Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances, narrative is presenting myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.”³⁴

—Muhsin al-Musawi

Notes

1 For de Sacy’s views on the Syrian origin of the Arabian Nights, see Asiatic Journal 28 (July 1829).

2 Preface to Edward William Lane’s translation, The Thousand and One Nights, London: C. Knight, 1838-1840, edited by Edward Stanley Poole, London: Bickers, 1877.

3 Joseph von Hammer, Wiener Jahrbücher, 1819, p. 236, and Preface to his Die noch nicht übersetzten Erzaehlungen der Tausend und einen Nacht, Stuttgart, 1823.

4 For Michael J. de Goeje’s study of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, see “De Arabische nachtvertellingen,” De Gids (1886) 50:3, pp. 385-413.

5 August Müller, “Zu den märchen der tausend und einen nacht . . . ,” Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen 12 (1886), pp. 222-242, and his article in Die deutsche Rundschau 13 (July 10, 1887), pp. 77-96.

6 See Theodor Nöldeke on the Egyptian tales, “Zu den ägyptischen Märchen,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 42 (1888), pp. 68-72, and Johannes Østrup’s study, in Danish, of The 1001 Nights in Studier over 1001 Nat, Copenhagen, 1891.

7 Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laylah wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources: Part 3: Introduction and Indexes. Leiden: Brill, 1994, p. 4.

8 Johannes Østrup’s views appeared as Izsliedowanie o 1001 no’i, Moscow, 1905.

9 See his translation of Østrup’s study: Studien über 1001 Nacht, Stuttgart: W. Heppeler, 1925.

10 Included in Emile Galtier, “Fragments d’une étude sur les Mille et une Nuits,” Mémoires de L’Institut français du Caire 27, 1912, pp. 135-194.

11 Josef Horovitz, “Die Entstehung von Tausendundeine Nacht,” The Review of Nations 4 (April 1927), pp. 103-104. In English, “The Origins of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ ” Islamic Culture 1 (1927), pp. 36-57.

12 Enno Littmann, Tausendundeine Nacht in der arabischen Literatur, Tübingen: Mohr, 1923.

13 See Hermann Zotenberg, on the Arabic text of the Arabian Nights, Galland’s translation, and the story of Aladdin’s magic lamp, respectively, in: “Communication relative au texte arabe de quelques contes des Mille et une nuits,” Journal Asiatique 9, 8^th series (1887), pp. 300-303; “Notice et quelques manuscripts des Mille et une Nuits et la traduction de Galland,” Notices et extraits des manuscripts de la Bibliothèque National 28 (1887), pp. 167-235; and Histoire d’ ‘Ala al-Dun; ou, La Lampe merveilleuse: Texte arabe publié avec une notice sur quelques manuscrits des Mille et une nuits, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888, pp. 16-23.

14 D. B. Macdonald, “The Early History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1924), pp. 353-397.

15 Enno Littmann also tackled the issue, for “the number was taken in its literal meaning” by later redactors, as opposed to the understanding of Abbasid redactors, to whom the title connotes endlessness. See “Alf Layla wa-Layla,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Leiden: Brill, 1960, vol. 1, p. 362.

16 Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, edited by William Stanley Poole, London: Bickers, 1877, vol. 1, p. 66, note 18. See also my Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981, p. 112, note 3.

17 See D. B. Macdonald, “Lost MSS of the Arabian Nights and a Projected Edition of That of Galland,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1911), pp. 219-221; “A Missing MS of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1913), p. 432; and “A Preliminary Classification of Some MSS of the Arabian Nights,” in A Volume of Oriental Studies, Presented to Edward G. Browne on His 60^th Birthday, edited by T. W. Arnold and R. A. Nicholson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, pp. 304-321. See also C. Knipp, “The Arabian Nights in England: Galland’s Translation and Its Successors,” Journal of Arabic Literature 5 (1974), pp. 44-54.

18 Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources. Part I: Arabic Text; Part II: Critical Apparatus: Description of Manuscripts, Leiden: Brill, 1984; Part III: Introduction and Indexes, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. v-ix, 25-36, for a discussion of the recensions and refutations of some views.

19 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New York: Penguin, 1999, p. 92.

20 Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” p. 95.

21 Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” p. 106.

22 Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” p. 108.

23 See my Scheherazade in England and Edward Said’s Orientalism. New York: Pan theon, 1978.

24 Joseph von Hammer, Die noch nicht übersetzten Erzaehlungen der Tausend und einen Nacht, Stuttgart, 1823.

25 See Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Anglo-Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps, Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2000, p. 32.

26 Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 32-33.

27 Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism, p. 33.

28 Muhsin J. al-Musawi, “The Growth of Scholarly Interest in the Arabian Nights,” Muslim World 70:3 (1980), pp. 196-212.

29 Peter Heath, “Romance as Genre in ‘The Thousand and One Nights,’ ” in Journal of Arabic Literature 18 (1987), pp. 1-21, and 19 (1988), pp. 1-26.

30 John Payne, “The Thousand and One Nights,” New Quarterly Magazine, n.s. 2 (April 1879), pp. 378-380.

31 Enno Littmann, “Alf Layla wa-Layla,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Leiden: Brill, 1960, vol. 1, p. 363.

32 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, London: Routledge, 1981, p. 115.

33 David Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in The Arabian Nights, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 16-30.

34 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text: Essays, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 79.