Infinite Nights

I begin my blog with a personal anecdote, a faint memory -  when I was barely four or five years old, and attempting to sit through that awful Walt Disney cartoon, Alladin, I was  unable to make it past the first fifteen minutes - out of sheer terror. Perhaps it was the talking hellmouth that swallowed up men in the desert night, or perhaps it was the turbanned fruit-vendor who threatened to cleave the hands off a hapless Badr ul-Badour, who was referred to in this instance as the Marketable Princess Jasmine. Most likely, it was this world in its entirety, barbaric and cruel, the domes of vaguely Mughal architecture framing the city below, a pit of snakes, demons, and tombstone incisors. Such pandemonium could only exist in contrast to the fair and flaxen haired Occident, a sunburned relic of the primeval age. Behold then, in all its lopsided and splendid cacophony, the Orient!

It was this distaste that would colour my understanding of Alladin, and by extension, One Thousand and One Nights, that essential collection of tales, famously purloined by one nefarious Antoine Galland, those stories which have galvanised the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Marcel Proust, and Clarice Lispector. It is true that my narrative serves to villainise Galland; and yet it is so much more complex than what I now attempt to put forth.

For there is no definitive source, no ideal translation, no interpretation devoid of orientalist underpinnings. To attempt a charting of how these characters journeyed across time and space is to peer into a hall of mirrors. It is this monumental task that Paolo Lemos Horta has taken upon his shoulders. His work is not one of mere editing or reinterpretation, rather he seeks to lay bare the metafictional fabric of One Thousand and One Nights, that is, the Arabian Nights, one of the most indelible yet anomalous works of literature to ever be conceived, if indeed it were ever conceived, as we understand the process today. Allow me to demonstrate the labyrinthine nature of this statement.

Aladdin is nowhere to be found in any manuscripts of One Thousand and One Nights that predate Galland’s translation, despite his insistence that he was provided a version of the tale by one Hanna Diyab! For a great deal of time, it was believed by many that Galland simply conjured the story up himself. This, of course, did the reputation of the story no favours; it was exempted from the canon by many a translator, and seen as nothing more than a somewhat unfortunate afterthought. Yet if we are to speak of authenticity, with regards to the existence of One Thousand and One Nights in the West, where would we begin? 

Without getting ahead of myself, I would like to mention that Diyab’s memoir is discovered by scholars further on in time. The text confirms that he did indeed provide Gallant with the manuscripts for such stories as Aladdin and Ali Baba. And yet, even in this case, Diyab himself is not so much the author of these stories, as much as a sort of transcriber, cobbling the tales together, and stirring them up with his own memories as a Syrian Maronite from the city of Aleppo, drawing perhaps from his journeys alongside French liar and adventurer Paul Lucas, whose character can arguably be seen reflected in Aladdin’s sorcerer. In addition, there is no doubt that Gallant, in the process of adapting the stories, would have added his own patchwork of inventions to the melting pot.  

If such fancies as djinns in lamps, which were once seen as entirely the fabrication of the French orientalist, are instead, at least partially, the product of Diyab’s own writing, might we finally ensconce our understanding of Aladdin upon the bedrock of literary certitude? Absolutely not. According to Lemos Horta, the contemporary existence of these stories lie in direct opposition to any such notions of certainty, with Aladdin in particular standing as the result of a truly confounding lineage. He remarks, “In popular culture, the telling and retelling of “Aladdin” becomes like a game of telephone, in which representations of Middle Eastern cultures and peoples become increasingly garbled.” Of course, this game spans across books, music, moving pictures, mechanically reproduced merchandise, and the very idea of “The Orient” itself. 

When I speak of ‘The Orient’, and Orientalism, I do so with reference to Edward Said, whose work unravelled the means by which western art and academia has, for generations, imitated and essentialised a vague impression of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, leading to such grotesque western stereotypes as found in works belonging to the Chinoiserie and Japonisme styles and so on. When I think of these instances, it is not so much with that aforementioned sense of revulsion which I associate with Walt Disney, but rather with genuine and slightly morbid fascination. This was not just a series of individuals trying to appropriate the architectures of a foreign world, but a definite attempt to coerce  them into something that would mirror the sensibilities of the West. 

This, of course, does not take away from the inherently malicious subtext that defines Orientalism, but it does help us understand the processes that proliferated the aberration across an Occidental public. Furthermore, we can see the act of translating and reinterpreting Aladdin, and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, as a form of discourse in and of itself. Lemos Horta recalls Borges’ remarks on the subject, writing, “Jorge Luis Borges suggested that each weatherworn adventurer who attempted the Nights sought to obliterate his predecessor—giving rise to a line of translators defined by the performance of an aggressive literary masculinity.” Lemos Horta then counters this claim, highlighting the role played by female editors and illustrators in the distribution of the tales, including Diyab’s additions. If One Thousand and One Nights stands as a sort of living literary phenomenon, then what is Aladdin, an unloved tailend, if not something even more intangible?

Paulo Lemos Horta’s newest collaboration with translator Yasmine Seale is nothing short of majestic, an extensively annotated and illustrated hardback edition of Nights that presents the motley collection in all of its paradoxical and messy brilliance. As I behold this indispensable tome, I recall his introduction to Aladdin, which he ends with an ode to the process of reinvention and reinterpretation. Perhaps it is within this frame that I might finally reconcile my complex feelings towards the tale, however odious some of its cinematic adaptations might be. What is storytelling itself if not an inscrutable hall of mirrors, a means by which we continue to simultaneously obfuscate and enhance, till the point of origin is all but invisible? To me, stories are an alchemic and unnerving phenomenon, and I have grown quite obsessed with them. To quote Lemos Horta, as he contends with this very conundrum, "If we cannot strip away the many layers to find some authentic kernel, we can at least get to the heart of the appeal of the story—the fluid boundary between the real and the uncanny that has provided such fertile ground for the visions of so many artists across the world, who together have kept alive, by ceaselessly reinventing it, this story of a boy and a magical lamp."

Paulo Lemos Horta is  at JLF Valladolid Spain 2025, alongside Namita Gokhale and Cristobo de Milio Carrín, as they discuss how folktales and folklore reflect the collective consciousness of communities. Information on registration, sessions, and more is available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jlf-valladolid-spain-2025-tickets-1354846856419?aff=oddtdtcreator