Inside the Arabian Nights
Aladdin And The Magic Lamp
The most famous tale, but not an original
Aladdin retrieves an oil lamp from a magic cave, only to be betrayed by the sorcerer who sent him. However, a ring given to him by the sorcerer, when rubbed, releases a genie who helps him escape. When cleaning the lamp another, more powerful genie is released who helps Aladdin become rich, marry a princess and build a palace. The sorcerer returns, steals the lamp and uses the genie to transport the palace to his home. Aladdin and the princess pursue and slay the sorcerer. The sorcerer’s older brother hears of this and attempts to get revenge, but the genie warns Aladdin who kills him preemptively and they live happily ever after.
While it may be the most famous tale from the Arabian Nights, Aladdin is in fact not originally from that collection, but an addition made by French translator Antoine Galland. That being said, the way in which it came to be added is still very interesting. Originating in the coffee houses of the Middle East in the Islamic Golden Age, the Thousand And One Nights were reborn in age of Enlightenment in Western Europe as they were translated for a new audience. As Galland began this process he had only 280 nights worth of stories to tell and he turned to the travel companion of his rival Middle East explorer Paul Lucas. “Lucas wrote these marvellous travelogues of the Middle East and Galland needed his own marvellous stories and he got them from Hanna Diab,” explains Paulo Horta. “These stories include not only Aladdin, but Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves, Ahmed And The Fairy Paribanou and Sinbad. The stories that are most influential happen to have been told by Hanna Diab, this storyteller from Aleppo to Antoine Galland in Paris in 1709.”
The relatively recent discovery of Diab’s own,” he tells us. “Hanna Diab’s memory of his trip to Versailles is actually closer in its details than anything that the French translator wrote about Topkapi palace or Istanbul to . So we imagined that we had French Orientialism, but in fact the fabulous vistas and palaces and the princess and the jewels of are no less likely or perhaps much more likely because they have a closer textual resemblance to Hanna Diab’s memory of having gone up to Versailles.”
