Excerpt from Stories From the Thousand and One Nights, Vol. 16: The Arabian Nights" Entertainments
Of a collection of fables, fairy-stories, and anecdotes of historical personages such as this, there can, of course, be no question of a single author. Both before and after they were placed in the mouth of Shahrazad. they were handed down by oral recitation, the usual form of story-telling among the Arabs. As in the case of our own popular ballads, whatever marks of individual authorship any one story may originally have borne, would be obliterated in the course of generations of tradition by word of mouth. Of the personality of an original editor or compiler, even, we have no trace. Long after writing had to some extent fixed their forms, the oral repetition went on; and some of them could be heard in Mohammedan countries almost down to our own times.
In the two hundred years of their currency in the West, the stories of the "Nights" have engrafted themselves upon European culture. They have made the fairy-land of the Oriental imagination and the mode of life of the medieval Arab, his manners and his morals, familiar to young and old; and allusions to their incidents and personages are wrought into the language and literature of all the modern civilized peoples. Their mark is found upon music and painting as well as on letters and the common speech, as is witnessed by such diverse results of their inspiration as the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff, the illustrations of Parrish, and the marvelous idealization of their background and atmosphere in Tennyson"s "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "Barmecide Feast," "Open Sesame," "Old Lamps for New," "Solomon"s Seal," "The Old Man of the Sea," "The Slave of the Lamp," "The Valley of Diamonds," "The Roc"s Egg, Haroun al-Raschid and his Garden of Delight these and many more phrases and allusions of every-day occurrence suggest how pervasive has been the influence of this wonder-book of the mysterious East.
The translation by E. W. Lane used here has been the standard English version for general reading for eighty years. The translations of ""Ali Baba" and ""Ala-ed-Din" are by S. Lane-Poole and for permission to use the latter we are indebted to Messrs. G. P. Putnam"s Sons.
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