COULD YOU TELL a good story if your life depended on it? Scheherazade sure could. In the classic The Thousand and One Nights (sometimes published as The Arabian Nights), a king takes a bride each night and has her murdered in the morning. But Scheherazade, his clever new wife, has a plan: early each morning she begins a story but doesn’t finish telling it. Day after day, the king spares her life so that he can hear the ending—talk about a cliffhanger! The story of Scheherazade and the king is what’s called a “frame narrative”—a vehicle for countless other tales—and the first known manuscripts, which date from the fourteenth century, combine Persian, Arab, Indian, and Egyptian lore. Over the years, now-familiar tales like those of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba were incorporated into the frame. Now say “Open Sesame!” and see if you can crack this quick quiz.
TRUE OR FALSE?
1. There are exactly one thousand stories in the definitive edition of The Thousand and One Nights.
2. The tales most familiar to Western audiences—those of Aladdin and Ali Baba—were added by the first European translator of the work.
3. Many of the genies in the Nights are mean and threatening—not the friendly wish-granters of Disney’s Aladdin or television’s I Dream of Jeannie.
4. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Scheherazade begins telling the story of The Thousand and One Nights, creating an infinite loop of the same story-within-a-story.
ANSWERS
1. False. There is no “definitive” text or translation of the Nights, but most contain well under one thousand tales.
2. True. Antoine Galland, who first translated the Nights into French in the early 1700s, added these tales. Their origin is unclear, and some scholars contend that Galland invented the stories himself.
3. True. Genies can be good or evil, and often the wishes they grant lead to unintended misfortune.
4. False. The never-ending Nights loop is a detail of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In Poe’s story, Scheherazade tells the king about nineteenth-century technology—and he executes her for telling such an over-the-top fiction.