Les mille et une nuits

Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français ("The Thousand and One Nights, Arab stories translated into French"), published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717, was the first European version of The Thousand and One Nights tales. The French translation by Antoine Galland (1646-1715) derived from an Arabic text of the Syrian recension of the medieval work as well as other sources. It included stories that are not found in the original Arabic manuscripts — the so-called "orphan tales" — such as the famous "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", which first appeared in print in Galland's form. Immensely popular at the time of initial publication, and enormously influential later, subsequent volumes were introduced using Galland's name although the stories were written by unknown persons at the behest of a publisher wanting to capitalize on their popularity.

Galland had come across a manuscript of "The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor" in Constantinople during the 1690s and in 1701 he published his French translation of it. Its success encouraged him to embark on a translation of a 14th-century Syrian manuscript of tales from The Thousand and One Nights. The first two volumes of this work, under the title Les mille et une nuits, appeared in 1704. The twelfth and final volume was published posthumously in 1717.

Galland translated the first part of his work solely from the Syrian manuscript, but in 1709 he was introduced to another source in the form of a Syrian Christian — a Maronite scholar and monk from Aleppo whom he called Youhenna (“Hanna”) Diab. Galland's diary (March 25, 1709) records that he met Hanna through Paul Lucas, a French traveler who had brought him to Paris. Hanna recounted 14 stories to Galland from memory and Galland chose to include seven of them in his books. (For example, Galland's diary tells that his translation of "Aladdin" was made in the winter of 1709–10. It was included in his volumes IX and X, published in 1710.) This mysterious situation has led some scholars to conclude that Galland invented the "orphan tales" himself and that subsequent Arabic versions are merely later renderings of his original French.

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