Mille et une Nuits, Les. Galland's version of the oriental tales known in English as the Arabian Nights launched the work on its vastly influential European career. Published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1716, it was not the translation of an existing book, but the result of firsthand work on manuscripts and oral sources. Galland himself chose the stories and the order of their telling; his translation is, for its time, quite scrupulous, but he felt free to omit lengthy descriptions, vulgar elements, and the repetitions that characterize oral story-telling. His elegant, rapid style is that of his time, and some readers have thought that he dresses up his Orientals in fashionable French attire—but this no doubt contributed to its success.
Its popularity was phenomenal. Capitalizing on the taste for oriental material witnessed by such works as Racine's Bajazet or the travels of Tavernier, and equally on the recent vogue for fairy-tales [see Short Fiction], Galland's work was much reprinted, imitated, and translated into many languages (the first English version done from Arabic originals only appeared in 1838). To his annoyance, Les Mille et un Jours (tr. Pétis de la Croix with help from Lesage) appeared along with his own work in 1710, and there were many similar collections. A new, more accurate translation entitled Mille nuits et une nuit was published by J.-C.-V. Mardrus in 1898-1904.
Galland's work offered not only a more or less realistic image of a foreign culture (Gobineau later praised its accuracy), but the vision of a world and a world-view that caught the Western imagination. The chance-dominated fatalism of his stories inspired Voltaire, even though the introduction to Zadig sets the seriousness of the conte philosophique against the meaninglessness of oriental tales. The merveilleux element in the Nights offered food to the Romantic dreamer (Stendhal loved them), and their discreet but unembarrassed eroticism was endlessly imitated by novelists and conteurs in the following two centuries.
[Peter France]
