Free Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse Page A

interest in the oriental world that
Alf Laila wa Laila
—that sturdy survivor of a rich eastern literary tradition—stood ready to be uncovered by the West. It was perhaps only a matter of time before the
Nights
found a way into the consciousness of westerners capable of understanding and transmitting its contents to more of the world. This was the situation at the turn of the eighteenth century, on the cusp of what France records as her
Grand Siècle
or “Splendid Century,” when an Arabic copy of the
Nights
fell into the hands of a story-loving French scholar named Antoine Galland.

    As the new century—the Enlightenment century—dawned in Europe, Antoine Galland was in his late fifties; an unassuming, lifelong bachelor who had passed only slightly more than half his adult life in his native France. He had spent the remainder working, studying and travelling in the Levant, where he’d ventured three times between 1670 and 1688 in the service of the French government. Fluent in four eastern languages—five if one counts Modern Greek as eastern—on each of these journeys Galland was commissioned with tasks requiring an awesome amount of industry, whether compiling extensive reports on Eastern Orthodox religious beliefs, accumulating oriental collectibles for French notables or acting as an embassy secretary in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. In what time remained, Galland supplemented these activities by increasing his knowledge of Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Eventually, he became sufficiently well-versed in suchstudies that he was hired as an assistant compiler and editor on one of the West’s first encyclopedias of the eastern world, establishing himself as a pioneering oriental scholar.
    Nevertheless, in another of those ironies that appear to be a continuing feature of
Arabian Nights
history, Galland could never have known that, though considered a notable Enlightenment figure, his posthumous fame is irrevocably tied to the publication of a storybook he translated as little more than a hobby, an amusing recreation following the hard scholastic work of his day. He also could never have conceived that by adapting
The Thousand and One Nights
for his countrymen, Galland was instrumental beyond anyone else in dispensing the
Nights
’ greatest power to the wider world—its extraordinary ability to transform and mould itself to fit the expectations of those entering its imaginary realm. In the centuries to come much longer, more accurate and more heavily annotated translations of the
Nights
would appear from Arabists possessing at least as much knowledge as Antoine Galland, but this feverishly industrious Frenchman placed such a personal stamp on the work’s initial European reception that some observers feel he is not simply the doyen of western
Arabian Nights
translators, but in some important ways, the work’s true author.
    Fittingly, Galland’s own life possesses something of a fairy-tale quality, since little in its beginnings suggest he would one day be counted among Europe’s premier orientalists as well as the originator of an essential piece of world literature. Born on April 4, 1646, in the small village of Rollot (where the cheese originates) in the northern frontier province of Picardy, Antoine Galland belonged to a family of poor peasant artisans who moved to the nearby town of Noyon a few months after his birth. His father’s death four years later left Antoine’s still-young mother, Marie, alone to earn a living, and unlikely to provide her five surviving children with more than the rudiments of an education.
    Fortunately, Galland seems to have been born with that intangible quality of innate luck that can alter existence as much as any outlay of hard work. If he did not lead precisely a charmed life, he appears nonetheless to have had the happy capacity to be in the right place at the right time, as well as the gumption to use