Tales From The Arabian Nights

click here for more details, find new or used items	Outlet Used from £13.47 Pages: 871 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0517261847 Pub: Random House Value Pub Pub date: 1988-12-12 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 604912

Reader Reviews:

Intoxicating (0/0 people found this helpful)

I expected cool fairy stories when I bought this book, knowing little about the Arabian Nights except the story of Scheherezade's predicament, of stretching stories to stay alive another morning. What I found was much more amazing and sophisticated. The stories are extraordinary - by turns fantastic, fanciful, moralistic, fatalistic, delicate, symmetrical, violent and open-ended. They're also quite adult - gory and sexually robust, and not everything in this one-volume selection is really suitable for children.

The stories twist and layer upon one another, as characters in stories are themselves storytellers, spawning glorious tangents and nested tales-within-tales. And the translator himself, Sir Richard Francis Burton, fills the bottom margins with scholarly asides and self-promoting glimpses into his extraordinary life. It was Burton, explorer, linguist and wonder of the Victorian age, that performed the first full translation of the Arabian Nights into English. For this edition, the editors slice the original text by story, rather than diluting it by abridging at the sentence or paragraph level. This choice probably made the book less accessible, but it ensured the stories lost none of their power.

Intoxicating (7/7 people found this helpful)

I expected cool fairy stories when I bought this book, knowing little about the Arabian Nights except the story of Scheherazade's predicament, of stretching stories to stay alive another morning. What I found was much more amazing and sophisticated. The stories are extraordinary - by turns fantastic, fanciful, moralistic, fatalistic, delicate, symmetrical, violent and open-ended. They're also quite adult - gory and sexually robust, and not everything in this one-volume selection is really suitable for children.

The stories twist and layer upon one another, as characters in stories are themselves storytellers, spawning glorious tangents and nested tales-within-tales. And the translator himself, Sir Richard Francis Burton, fills the bottom margins with scholarly asides and self-promoting glimpses into his extraordinary life. It was Burton, explorer, linguist and wonder of the Victorian age, that performed the first full translation of the Arabian Nights into English. For this edition, the editors slice the original text by story, rather than diluting it by abridging at the sentence or paragraph level. This choice probably made the book less accessible, but it ensured the stories lost none of their power.

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