English Travellers and the Arabian Nights

Abstract

In the opening years of the eighteenth century the strange distant East was brought vividly and imaginatively before the eyes of French and English readers with Antoine Galland’s translation of the Nights into French (1704–17). The French version was immediately translated into English and the tales were so popular that they started a literary fashion on both sides of the Channel, the ‘oriental tale’ of the eighteenth century.’ There were so many preposterous imitations of the Nights that some genuine translations such as the Persian Tales (1710) and the New Arabian Nights (1792) were long taken for forgeries. As travelling to the East was difficult and relatively infrequent, readers were very curious about the customs and religion of the infidel inhabitants of those far-off lands. Galland’s translation was from the first advertised as a book where ’the customs of Orientals and the ceremonies of their religion were better traced than in the tales of the travellers… All Orientals, Persians, Tartars and Indians… appear just as they are from sovereigns to people of the lowest condition. Thus the reader will have the pleasure of seeing them and hearing them without taking the trouble of travelling to seek them in their own countries’.