TRANSLATION AS LITERARY RECONSTRUCTION: ANTOINE GALLAND, THE GRUB STREET ARABIAN NIGHTS, AND THE EUROPEAN MAKING OF THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

Abstract

This article examines how The Thousand and One Nights became a European literary institution through translation, editorial selection, and cultural reframing. It focuses on Antoine Galland’s French Mille et Une Nuits (1704–1717) and the anonymous English version commonly associated with the Grub Street translator, which began circulating by the early eighteenth century. The study argues that the European Arabian Nights cannot be understood as a transparent transfer of a stable Arabic original. The source corpus was already historically layered, combining Indian, Persian, Baghdadi, Egyptian, oral, and manuscript traditions. Galland then reorganized this heterogeneous material for a French readership through selection, omission, stylistic domestication, and the incorporation of narratives obtained from sources beyond a single manuscript. The English translator mediated Galland’s reconstruction rather than the Arabic corpus directly and established the durable title Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Using comparative-historical, textual, and reception-oriented analysis, the article identifies five operations that shaped the European collection: selection, omission, addition, domestication, and paratextual reframing. These operations altered not only the wording of individual tales but also the implied audience, moral register, generic identity, and cultural image of the East. The findings demonstrate that translation history should be studied as a chain of literary agency. Fidelity remains important, but it is insufficient for explaining why Galland’s version became culturally more influential than many later and more philologically exact translations.