Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp - The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew LANG (1844 - 1912) With a sorcerer, a Chinese Emperor, a beautiful princess, a magic ring, an enchanted lamp and a powerful genie, it's no wonder that the story of Aladdin has been told time and time again. It has been a popular pantomime for over 100 years and has even been made into a Disney animated blockbusting film in 1992. Here is the original tale of Aladdin, as printed in Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang. No Arabic source has been traced for the tale, which was incorporated into the book Les Mille et Une Nuits by its French translator, Antoine Galland, who heard it from a Syrian storyteller from Aleppo. Galland's diary (March 25, 1709) records that he met the Maronite scholar, by name Youhenna Diab ("Hanna"), who had been brought from Aleppo to Paris by Paul Lucas, a celebrated French traveller. Galland's diary also tells that his translation of "Aladdin" was made in the winter of 1709--10. It was included in his volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710. Although Aladdin is a Middle Eastern tale, the story is set in China, and Aladdin is explicitly Chinese. However, most of the people in the story are Muslims; there is a Jewish merchant who buys Aladdin's wares (and incidentally cheats him), but there is no mention of Buddhists or Confucians. Everybody in this country bears an Arabic name, and its monarch seems much more like a Muslim ruler than a Chinese emperor. For a narrator unaware of the existence of America, Aladdin's "China" would represent "the Utter East" while the sorcerer's homeland in the Maghreb (Northern Africa) represented "the Utter West". In the beginning of the tale, the sorcerer's taking the effort to make such a long journey, the longest conceivable in the narrator's (and his listeners') perception of the world, underlines the sorcerer's determination to gain the lamp and hence the lamp's great value. In the later episodes, the instantaneous transitions from the east to the west and back, performed effortlessly by the Jinn, make their power all the more marvelous. The Arabian Nights is a collection of Perso-Arabic folk tales and other stories. The collection, or at least certain stories drawn from it (or purporting to be drawn from it), became widely known in the West from the 18th century, after it was translated from the Arabic — first into French and then into English and other European languages. The first English language edition, based on Galland's French rather than the original Arabic, rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment - and this, or simply The Arabian Nights, has been the title by which it has been best known to English-speaking people ever since. (Summary from Wikipedia) Sourced from Librivox. Read by Floyd Wilde.

• published: 06 Jan 2014
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