Series:Arabian Nights

This is an ISFDB Bibliographic Comments page for the Arabian Nights series. This page may be used for a list of the titles in the series, bibliographic comments or extended notes about the series, or discussion on how to organize and/or record the works in the series. The link above leads to the ISFDB series record for Arabian Nights. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

The stories that become the Arabian Nights developed during the 8th-12th century. The oldest extant version known is a 14th or 15th Syrian edition in the Bibliothèque National (France). The first translation into a European language was the Galland translation (of this Syrian version) into French in 1704, and is used to give the date listed for this series. The first translation into English was done anonymously in 1706 from the Galland translation. For more details, see the Wikipedia entry for One Thousand and One Nights. For more information on the Galland translation and its importance, see the Wikipedia entry for Antoine Galland. For complete details, see The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia.

Since the Arabian Nights per se has no copyright, it has been published in many variations in many ways, and a complete list of all publications would be excessive, and almost surely incomplete. (The OCLC lists 5,436 entries for this title as of Oct. 2011; 2,753 in English.). This title series attempts to organize those editions which attempt to be reasonably faithful to the "historic original", but does not include the many books that use the "Arabian Nights" as a starting point for original story-telling, such as books that go by titles such as "The New Arabian Nights". It also does not include most books that do very limited extracts from the Arabian Nights (e.g. only "Sinbad"), but does include books with multiple stories, as well as adaptations for younger readers.

We have included all of the documented 18th century English editions, and the more important 19th century editions. In a few cases reprint edition dates may only be listed in the publication notes, and not as separate publications. 20th century editions are included when an editor chooses to add one, and no systematic effort has been taken to be comprehensive here. A good determination (and documentation) of important editions up to about 1880 can be found in an appendix to Sir Richard Burton's translation, p. 416, and we have used that as a source for some of the publications listed herein. We have attempted to include the first known editions in the languages into which this has been translated, but generally have not included later publications in those languages.

For ease of reference, the first known appearances (in publication form, i.e. not in hand-written manuscript form) for the languages into which the Arabian Nights/Thousand and One Nights has been translated, in chronological order, is:

• 1704 French
• 1706 English
• 1719 German
• 1763 Russian
• 1764 Arabic
• 1770 Dutch
• 1803 Greek
• 1816 Italian
• 1824 Danish
• 1825 Tamil
• 1829 Persian
• 1832 Urdu
• 1836 Romanian
• 1842 Polish
• 1846 Spanish
• 1847 Javanese (not included here)
• 1848 Gujarati
• 1850 Portuguese
• 1851 Turkish
• 1852 Icelandic
• 1853 Bengali
• 1861 Hindi (first portion)
• 1866 Hungarian
• 1870 Armenian
• 1875 Japanese
• 1875 Swedish
• 1878 Finnish
• 1878 Malay
• 1880 Slovenian
• 1884 Yiddish
• 1888 Judeo-Arabic (not included here)
• 1889 Thai
• 1890 Czech
• 1897 Scottish Gaelic
• 1897 Tatar (not included here)
• 1890 Hindi (full translation)

(Those listed as "not included here" are because we do not yet support language tags for those languages.)