Page "One Thousand and One Nights" Paragraph 111

The modern fame of the Nights derives from the first known European translation by Antoine Galland, which appeared in 1704.

According to Robert Irwin, Galland " played so large a part in discovering the tales, in popularizing them in Europe and in shaping what would come to be regarded as the canonical collection that, at some risk of hyperbole and paradox, he has been called the real author of the Nights.

" The immediate success of Galland's version with the French public may have been because it coincided with the vogue for contes de fées (" fairy stories ").

This fashion began with the publication of Madame d ' Aulnoy's Histoire d ' Hypolite in 1690.

D ' Aulnoy's book has a remarkably similar structure to the Nights, with the tales told by a female narrator.

The success of the Nights spread across Europe and by the end of the century there were translations of Galland into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Flemish and Yiddish.

Galland's version provoked a spate of pseudo-Oriental imitations.

At the same time, some French writers began to parody the style and concoct far-fetched stories in superficially Oriental settings.

These tongue-in-cheek pastiches include Anthony Hamilton's Les quatre Facardins ( 1730 ), Crébillon's Le sopha ( 1742 ) and Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets ( 1748 ).

They often contained veiled allusions to contemporary French society.

The most famous example is Voltaire's Zadig ( 1748 ), an attack on religious bigotry set against a vague pre-Islamic Middle Eastern background.

The English versions of the " Oriental Tale " generally contained a heavy moralising element, with the notable exception of William Beckford's fantasy Vathek ( 1786 ), which had a decisive influence on the development of the Gothic novel.

The Polish nobleman Jan Potocki's novel Saragossa Manuscript ( begun 1797 ) owes a deep debt to the Nights with its Oriental flavour and labyrinthine series of embedded tales.