Antoine Galland
Galland, Antoine (1646–1715), French orientalist, translator, philologist, numismatist, and epigraphist, whose version of the Thousand and One Nights (Les Mille et une nuits, 1704–17) was the first in a Western European language (see The Arabian Nights, and oriental fairy tales).
After studying at the Collège Royal and the Sorbonne, Galland, who was known for his gift with languages, spent 15 years in Constantinople as adviser to Louis XIV's ambassadors. In that capacity he had the opportunity to learn even more languages and to travel extensively throughout the Middle East. Upon his return to France, he devoted his energies to scholarly pursuits, writing extensively on Middle Eastern languages, cultures, and antiquities. Among his most important accomplishments were completing and publishing Herbelot de Molainville's encyclopaedic Bibliothèque orientale (Oriental Library, 1697) and translating the Koran. In 1701 he entered the prestigious Académie des Inscriptions, and in 1709 he was elected the first professor of Arabic at the Collège Royal.
Today Galland is known far less for his scholarly endeavours and much more for his version of the Thousand and One Nights, which he began in 1702 as a gift to a former pupil. He first translated the tales of Sindbad, but withdrew them from publication upon discovering they were part of a larger cycle. Working from a 14th‐century Arabic manuscript, Galland set about to publish eight volumes of the Thousand and One Nights between 1704 and 1709. He completed another four volumes, published between 1712 and 1717, based on notes taken on stories told to him by Hanna, a Maronite from Aleppo.
Galland's translation has often been criticized for taking liberties with the original tales. This, however, oversimplifies the period's conceptions of literature and translation as well as the difficulties entailed in translating the disparate manuscripts that make up the Arabic Alf Layla wa‐Layla (One Thousand Nights and a Night). At a time when the lines between literary creation and translation were not yet clearly drawn, it was hardly unusual for Galland to assert that ‘putting into French’ the Thousand and One Nights required ‘circumspection’ and ‘delicacy’. Indeed, the enormous and immediate success of his translation was in great part due to the changes he made: toning down ‘licentious’ scenes; eliminating poetic interludes, repetitions, and enumerations; amplifying details of plot and decor to explain culture‐specific material; and transposing stylistic registers (from the colloquial of the manuscript to French neo‐classical literary style). It is a testimony to his success that even Galland's harshest critics praise the quality of his prose and acknowledge in him a ‘born storyteller’. While cognizant of the need to adapt the tales, Galland was none the less careful to bring his wide erudition to the task. Many of his additions are explanatory descriptions. Furthermore, his text remains remarkably faithful to the original, even when the latter diverges from standard literary conventions of his day. Thus, for instance, lower‐class characters, who have only rare counterparts in the literature of early 18th‐century France, appear throughout the Thousand and One Nights. And yet faithfulness to the original manuscripts did not keep Galland from imposing a unity of tone and architecture they lacked as collections composed by multiple authors from the 9th to the 14th centuries. Not only does he rearrange the order of the tales found in the Arabic manuscripts, he also links and intercalates otherwise independent tales. Those in the last four volumes, including some of the best‐known of the entire collection such as ‘Aladdin’, ‘Ali Baba’, and ‘Harun ar‐Rashid’, are not translations at all but adaptations of stories told to him orally and hence reflect most clearly his consummate literary skill.
Perhaps the most original aspect of Galland's work is his treatment of the theme of pleasure, which is apparent on many levels. Among the most obvious is the physical, if not erotic pleasure that Galland represents in spite of his tendency to tone down such descriptions. Unlike the predominant literary portrayal of the time, love is not as much a psychological passion as a physical attraction. No less obvious, however, is the pleasure of storytelling. Whereas writers of fairy tales (and in fact all literature) at this time present their works as both pleasurable and morally instructive (following the Horatian injunction dulce et utile), Galland unabashedly proclaims his tales to be ‘pleasing and diverting’, with no other pretence. Yet such a stance does not signify that the Thousand and One Nights are ‘meaningless’, as Voltaire once quipped. The pleasure of storytelling in this collection serves many functions—to allay melancholy, to avert death, to satisfy curiosity, and to defend oneself, among others—and Galland's translation highlights this pleasure in the individual tales as well as the frame story with Scheherazade, Shahryar, and Dinarzade. Moreover, in the denouement that Galland gives to this story it is the pleasure of Scheherazade's storytelling—and not the children she had given birth to—that moves Shahryar to revoke his vow to kill her. In the end, then, it is pleasure that is the most important legacy of Galland's translation, and there is no doubt that it was among the most important influences in creating the Western stereotype of the ‘Orient’ (encompassing the Middle East, South East Asia, and China) as a place of exotic pleasures.
If Galland's tales met with such popular success upon their publication, it is also because they simultaneously resembled and differed from the fairy tales that had enamoured the French reading public since the 1690s. The convergence in Galland's translation of the familiar—many recognizable folkloric plots—and the unfamiliar—‘oriental’ local colour and seemingly gratuitous magic—paved the way for numerous collections of oriental tales by Jean‐Paul Bignon, Thomas‐Simon Gueulette, and Pétis de la Croix (among many others) and for the oriental motif exploited by prominent writers such as Montesquieu (in Les Lettres persanes) and Voltaire (in Zadig). Galland's Thousand and One Nights became a popular best‐seller in many different languages. In the English‐speaking world, the translation of the Galland version was better known than translations based on the original Arabic manuscripts until the mid‐20th century.
Bibliography
- Abdel‐Halim, Mohamed, Antoine Galland: sa vie, son œuvre (1964).
- May, Georges, Les Mille et une nuits d'Antoine Galland ou le chef‐d'œuvre invisible (1986).
— Lewis C. Seifert
