------- I am back at my favourite secondhand bookstore 😊 ------------
"What do Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Hanan Al-Shaykh have in common? [...] Other than all being great authors who write in English, they were all influenced by One Thousand and One Nights. It’s difficult to overstate the significance of One Thousand and One Nights in our literary tradition, and yet this work of literature historically bore little resemblance to what we might recognize today as the Arabian Nights. ...." ( blog.oup.com/2016/12/arabic-t... )
"Where do the Thousand and One Nights begin? Rather than existing as a definitive text, the Nights have always been an evolving corpus. As products of an oral folkloric tradition, early stories probably changed and shifted to suit their audience's tastes. The oldest extant written text that we have is a Syrian manuscript from the 14th century, the manuscript later used by Galland. [1] But we know that the Nights existed in some form earlier than that: texts from as far back as the 10th century refer to the collection by name. [2] Furthermore, scholars believe that antecedents for many of the tales included in the Nights had been circulating in both oral and written form for centuries before the creation of the Syrian manuscript, even within Europe itself.[3]
It was only after the Frenchman Antoine Galland encountered these stories and decided to translate them that the Nights began to take the more fixed, institutionalized form in which we know them today. And yet, the current corpus of tales making up the Nights is truly a mixed group: as Muhsin Mahdi puts it, "[T]he collections of stories that nowadays are presented under the umbrella of the Nights consist of every possible story of genuine or pretended Arabic origin. They are diverse in form, provenance, and date of composition. It hardly makes any sense to speak of them as a group. How and why this strange circumstance arose is a fascinating, complex, and instructive story that began early in the eighteenth century and was populated by a host of translators and editors responding to changing taste, mood, interest, and expectation." [4] Few texts have been so strongly reshaped, re-appropriated, and rewritten by the continual process of translation as the Nights." ( coursewikis.fas.harvard.edu/a... )
----- There are two more recent translations that I am currently interested in investigating further. One is by Michael Lyons, and the other by Husain Haddawy. Both of which I owned and will chat about in a different video(s).
(Note that Haddawy's Sinbad and Alibaba, which are thought to have been created by Mardrus, and not based on actual corpus, is usually published as a second volume)
(1)
The Arabian Nights II: Sinbad and Other Popular Stories, translated by Husain Haddawy, Everyman's Library, 1998, hardcover with dust jacket
amzn.to/2OcLi9R
(2)
Tales from 1,001 Nights: Aladdin, Ali Baba and Other Favourite Tales By Lyons, Malcolm; Hardcover, Penguin, 2011
amzn.to/302k0sQ
----- The six volume Folio Society's "The Arabian Nights" (2003) that you see here are illustrated by SEVERAL ILLUSTRATORS.
----- VOLUME 1 contains the illustrations of KAY NIELSEN
----- VOLUME 3 that you see here contains illustrations by Debra McFarlane
DEBRA MCFARLANE www.debramcfarlane.co.uk/
KAY NIELSEN
one of the many legendary illustrators of the "The Golden Age of Illustration"
www.pookpress.co.uk/project/k...
----- Folio Society has several editions of The Arabian Nights, and several impressions were made of each edition.
----- Below are some info on the various translations of the Arabian Nights, and this list is not exhaustive:
coursewikis.fas.harvard.edu/a...
mairangibay.blogspot.com/2008/...
translit.ie/blog/the-thousand...
www.kent.ac.uk/ewto/projects/...
blog.oup.com/2016/12/arabic-t...
www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/blogs/T...
www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
www.theguardian.com/books/200...
---- UPDATE (JANUARY 2020) ----
I went back to the store to dropped more books, and I checked out if this set has sold. Someone bought the books before just Christmas 2019. I hope they are getting the love that they so deserve! The price tag was about NZD $250, very reasonable!..!!
#FolioSociety #TheArabianNights #1001Nights
#ASMR #SecondhandBookstore #SecondhandBookshop