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221 26 Antoine Galland, Thousand and One Nights. Arab Tales Translated into French (1704–1717) A scholar of Near and Middle Eastern languages and culture, Antoine Galland (1646?–1715) lived and traveled in the eastern Mediterranean and in the 1670s served as secretary to Monsieur Gabriel Joseph de la Vergne de Guilleragues (1628–1685), ambassador to the Ottoman empire.1 In Constantinople he also tutored Guilleragues’s gifted daughter, Marie-Anne (1657?–1737). She later married the Marquis d’O and as lady-in-waiting (dame du Palais) to the Duchess of Burgundy, joined the circle of Louis XIV’s son and then heir to the throne, the Duke of Burgundy.2 Expected to become the queen of France, the Duchess of Burgundy was the nation’s most highly placed noblewoman. Thus Galland’s dedication reached into a circle even higher than those approached in the dedications of Charles Perrault, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Mme de Murat. Galland, commissioned by Louis XIV to collect coins, medals, and manuscripts from the Near East for his private collections, also amassed a library of his own, and on his return to France, he began publishing a variety of Arabic-language tale collections in French. In the 1690s, as he worked on translating the Sindbad stories, Galland learned of the existence of an Arabic story collection entitled Thousand and One Nights and obtained an apparently incomplete manuscript copy. He dedicated his translation of it to his former pupil, the Marquise d’O, and began publishing it in 1704 with the Barbin publishing house,3 which had previously published Perrault’s 1. A position Louis XIV gave him to repair his family fortunes. 2. Louis the Duke of Burgundy predeceased his father Louis XIV in 1711, and hence did not himself ascend to the French throne. 3. Volumes 1–7 came out between 1704 and 1706. Claude Barbin’s widow shepherded volumes 1–4 through publication in 1704; her son published volumes 5, 6, and 7 in 1705 and 1706. 222 / Fairy Tales Framed Histories and Mme de Murat’s Tales of the Fairies. Five years later Galland’s publisher deeply offended him by inserting two Turkish stories by François Pétis de la Croix into volume 8 without consulting him.4 Enraged, Galland switched publishers, moving to Delaulne, with whom he published the remaining four volumes. The final four volumes of the twelve-volume series included the allimportant rewritings of tales told to him by Hannâ Diyab. A Maronite Christian brought to Paris from Syria by his friend Paul Lucas, Hannâ Diyab (also called Jean Dippi5 ) was fluent in French, so that the fact that some of his stories resemble tales previously published in Italy and France raises serious questions about their origins. His tales—the Aladdin tales, “The Adventures of Haroun-al-Rashid,” “The Story of the Blind Man,” “The Story of Sidi Numan,” “The Story of Hasan—Abbal,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Ali Kawaja and the Merchant of Baghdad,” “Ahmad and the Fairy Peri Banou,” and “The Two Envious Sisters”—along with the Sindbad stories, immediately became the best known and most popular in the Galland collection all over the world.6 Thousand and One Nights was also distributed in the French language in editions pirated and printed in the Netherlands. Translated into English beginning in 1706, Thousand and One Nights was reprinted in London, in Dublin, and in British provincial print centers through the 1700s. Germany took up Galland’s tales with Leipzig editions (in 1719–1737 and 1759–1761), which were followed by numerous German-language imitations. It was also reprinted in France later in the century by a commercial consortium, the Compagnie des Libraires, as well as appearing in one or more school editions. In France itself, Galland’s collection inspired the composition of Oriental tales with titles such as Les Avenures d’Abdulla (The Adventures of Abdulla, 1712) by Jean-Paul Bignon (1662–1743), Les Mille et un quarts d’heure. Contes tatares (Thousand and One Quarter Hours, 1623) by ThomasSimon Gueulette (1683–1766), as well as Contes Turcs (Turkish Tales, 1707) and Mille et un jours (Thousand and One Days, 1710–1712) by François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713), and finally Zadig (1747) by Voltaire (1694–1778). With Thousand and One Nights, Galland effectively added an exotically rich Oriental branch to the European fairy-tale genre, while with the tales 4. Galland himself had previously inserted...

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