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The 1001
Arabian Nights is an old collection of even older
stories. Folk tales that circulated in the Middle East and
South Asia were gathered into this collection during the 8th -
13th centuries AD. Many of these individual stories can be
traced separately. Think of the 1001 Nights as a
building where the stories are individual bricks, and they are
held together by the mortar of the narration. Chaucer is
the most famous English example of this type of collection with
narratives within a larger narrative. Boccaccio's Decameron
is another famous collection; Christine de Pizan's Book
of the City of Ladies has the collection of stories occur
within a dream vision combining the approaches of Boethius and 1001
Nights.
From 1885 - 2008, the dominant English translation
of 1001 Nights was the translation by Sir Richard Burton
(the 19th-century explorer, not the 20th-century actor).
The dirty stories and dirty pictures were beyond the pale for
Victorian England, so Burton released the work (ultimately 16
volumes) as a private subscription that was not on sale to the
general public. Scandalizing England was something of a
habit for Burton, who also published a translation of the Kama
Sutra.
The framing device for the 1001 Nights is
the predicament of Scheherazade, who was slated to be
executed the day after being with Shahryār, a misogynistic ruler
who sleeps with a different woman every night and kills her the
next day because he had been betrayed by his first wife.
Since sex wasn't going to work on a guy with a harem,
Scheherazade tells him a story and leaves it pending when the
night is over. The only way to find out how the story ends
if for Shahryār to have her spared until the next day. So
Scheherazade may well have invented the plot device of the
cliff-hanger.
