This selection of stories from The Arabian Nights (also known as The Thousand and One Nights) is taken from the three-volume Penguin Classics edition (2008), the first complete translation of the Arabic text known as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II since Richard Burton’s famous translation of it in 1885–8.
In addition to Malcolm Lyons’s translations from the Arabic text of Calcutta II, this selection includes Ursula Lyons’s translations of the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba from Antoine Galland’s eighteenth-century French. (For these stories no original Arabic text has survived and consequently they are classed as ‘orphan stories’.)
For this selected edition, the ‘nights’ format has been removed, but the ‘nights’ covered by each story cycle are indicated in a note at the end of each chapter. As the two ‘orphan stories’ are not included within the ‘nights’ structure (and neither are the opening and concluding chapters, which ‘frame’ the stories told by Shahrazad), no notes are given for these.
As often happens in popular narrative, inconsistencies and contradictions abound in the text of the Nights. It would be easy to emend these, and where names have been misplaced this has been done, to avoid confusion. Elsewhere, however, emendations for which there is no textual authority would run counter to the fluid and uncritical spirit of the Arabic narrative. In such circumstances no changes have been made.