"One Thousand and One Nights" (Arabic: ?, Persian: ?, also known as "Arabian Nights"), a novel originated from the oriental oral literary tradition and written in Arabic around the 9th century. Book of stories.
"One Thousand and One Nights" has been circulating in the Arab region since it was written, but it was just ordinary folk literature and was not taken seriously. When it was spread to the West in the early 18th century, it became very popular and has endured for a long time. , influenced Western literary creation and shaped the image of the Arab world in Westerners' minds. This work was introduced to China via the West at the beginning of the 20th century. There were two versions directly translated from Arabic by Na Xun and Li Weizhong, as well as countless translations, abbreviations and even self-created versions.
Plot
"One Thousand and One Nights" is based on the story of the king and the prime minister's daughter: the king discovered that the harem was dissolute, so he hated women and vowed to consummate his marriage with a woman every night. She was executed at dawn; the prime minister's daughter couldn't bear to see the woman being harmed, so she voluntarily stayed with the king for the night despite her father's objections. After consummating the marriage, she told the king a story, but the story was not finished at dawn. The king wanted to know what happened after the funeral. Keep her alive; the next night she told the story to the king again, but when it came to the tense point it was dawn again... The story of "One Thousand and One Nights" was told by the prime minister's daughter night after night. .
There are stories within stories. This is the characteristic of "One Thousand and One Nights". Every character in the book has his own story to tell, and every character is willing to listen to other people's stories. "One Thousand and One Nights" emphasizes the power of stories. The king did not kill the prime minister's daughter because he wanted to hear the story. In the first story "The Merchant and the Devil" told by the prime minister's daughter to the king, the devil also because he heard a good story. And spare the life of the businessman.
[edit] Manuscript
The title and backbone of "One Thousand and One Nights" comes from a collection of Persian stories called "A Thousand and One Stories". Later, someone translated it into Arabic and added stories from Arabia, China, and India, forming the prototype of the current "One Thousand and One Nights". The oldest surviving manuscript of "One Thousand and One Nights" was written in Syria in the 14th century and is stored in the National Library of Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France). Due to the unity of content and style, this manuscript is regarded as the "One Thousand and One Nights" by scholars. "Rare book". From this 14th-century Syrian manuscript came three later but similar Syrian manuscripts, and another group of Egyptian manuscripts. The editors of these Egyptian manuscripts arbitrarily revised and updated the original Syrian manuscripts. Although there were more stories (including "The Adventures of Simba"), this caused stylistic differences.
[edit] Publishing and Translation
The first printed version of "One Thousand and One Nights" was not the original Arabic text, but the French orientalist and antiquarian Galland French translation (Mille et une nuits) published by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. Galland based his version mainly on Syrian manuscripts, but he freely modified the original text to suit the literary tastes and moral standards of the time. Galland's version became so popular that publishers from various European countries translated and rewritten it and released "One Thousand and One Nights" in various languages.
It is worth noting that the two famous stories "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" first appeared in Galang's translation and are not found in the Syrian manuscripts or any other Neither story appears in the manuscript. According to Galang, these two stories were dictated and transcribed by an Arab Christian. After the publication of Galland's version, two people claimed to have discovered the manuscript of "Aladdin", but after examination, it was confirmed that they were all fakes "back-translated" from Galland's French into Arabic.
The first Arabic version of "One Thousand and One Nights" was published in Calcutta in 1814 and 1818. The two volumes were published by the local Fort William College and the editor was the author. An Arabic professor at the college, he used the Syrian manuscript as a basis and added some new stories of his own.
In 1824, the second edition was published in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), with a total of 12 volumes. It was published for many years until 1843. The source text of this version is a Syrian manuscript and a modern Egyptian manuscript. This Egyptian manuscript contains a large amount of modern material. Although it contains enough information about One Thousand and One Nights, its style is uneven and far from the oldest Syrian manuscripts from the 14th century.
It was based on this "complete" manuscript that someone published the third version of "One Thousand and One Nights" in the Egyptian city of Bulaq in 1835. From 1839 to 1842, someone else published the fourth edition of "One Thousand and One Nights" in Calcutta based on a copy of the Egyptian manuscript and the previous Calcutta and Breslau editions. 2. Calcutta version”.
Since the "Black Version" and the "Second Calcutta Version" contain the largest number of stories, translators from all over the world have used these two versions as the texts for translation for more than a hundred years.
The more famous Western translation in the 19th century was the 16-volume "The Arabian Nights" by the British explorer and translator Sir Richard Francis Burton. This translation included a large number of even excessive erotic descriptions, as well as The conservative version of the era is quite different. Burton's translation style is very broad, he likes to use ancient characters, and he strives to create an exotic atmosphere between the lines.
Encouraged by Stéphane Mallarmé, the originator of Symbolist poetry, Joseph Charles Mardrus, a French doctor and writer born in Cairo, retranslated "One Thousand and One Nights" in Published between 1898 and 1904, this edition contains many more stories than Galland's, and retains all erotic descriptions, claiming to be the "complete" and "original version".
In 1984, Muhsin Mahdi, a professor of Arabic at Harvard, revised and published the above-mentioned 14th-century Syrian manuscript (Alf Layla wa Layla, Leiden). In order to be faithful to the original manuscript, he even did not Add punctuation and diacritics. In 1990, Husain Haddawy, who was born in Baghdad, translated a new English version (The Arabian Nights, Based on the text of the Fourteen-Century Syrian Manuscript edited by Mushin Mahdi) based on this "ancient version".