56 pages • 1 hour read
AnonymousOne Thousand and One Nights
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
The introduction to this work is composed by its translator, N.J. Dawood. Dawood notes that these stories are a collection of folk tales produced in the Abbasid period. They incorporate elements of Arab, Indian, and Persian culture. Dawood notes that readers should consider the tales as an “expression of the lay and secular imagination” and “the spontaneous products of untutored minds” (7). In other words, in their time, the tales were not considered as works of high, classical literature but as entertainment for the general public. For that reason, they are written in a simple and colloquial style and meant to be consumed, and sometimes told orally, as short stories. Despite the plethora of classical Arabic literature, Dawood draws our attention to the fact that Tales from the Thousand and One Nights has become the most recognizable throughout the world and can now be considered a universal classic. Despite the tales’ focus on the supernatural, Dawood emphasizes that they reflect everyday life throughout the medieval Islamic world. He also discusses the influence of Indian and Persian fairytales on the tales and how professional storytellers in the Arabian Peninsula adapted these tales. Lastly, Dawood devotes time to discussing the various translations of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, from those in 18th-century France to 20th-century England, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Introduction Analysis
In his introduction, Dawood places Tales from the Thousand and One Nights in its historical context and tells us about its current standing as a work of literature. He notes that, in the medieval Islamic world, particularly during the height of the Abbasid Empire (750-900 CE) and the Golden Age of Islam, the tales were not considered works of high literature for the consumption of the Abbasid elite but were told as stories to the everyday masses. Mirroring the composition of the Abbasid Empire and its bureaucracy, the stories pull from Indian, Persian, and Arab folk tales. Dawood notes that storytellers would continually augment the stories to infuse them with a local flavor, so in that sense, they are layered and pull from multiple other traditions.
Dawood points out that although the stories are not high literature, the collection has still become the most popular and recognizable Abbasid work globally. In other words, the tales in One Thousand and One Nights have become classics. One of Dawood’s major contributions is to track how the tales have been translated to other languages in the early modern and modern periods and the strengths and weaknesses of these numerous translations. Dawood notes that his goal was to stay as faithful to the original Arabic as possible while making it intelligible to English-speakers.
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