The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Volume 11

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.5
Word count
649K words
Chapters
65

Tags

English Originals Folk LiteratureWorld Classics Fantasy JourneyDesire and RedemptionMoral AllegorySatirical StyleThe StorytellerForeign Court

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Volume 11 [Supplement] by BurtonAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PJ: Language and Literatures: Oriental languages and literatures, Release Date: Sep 1, 2002

Editor's review

As a supplement volume to Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights, this volume's value lies not in retelling the main stories but in presenting the translation's annotation system, variant readings, and supplementary material. Readers can see how a nineteenth-century Orientalist translator handled dialect, customs, and textual discrepancies in folk narratives, and can appreciate the Victorian translator's trade-offs between fidelity and readability. It is very helpful for understanding the textual transmission history of The Thousand Nights and a Night, translation comparison, and annotation traditions, and is suitable for slow reading with research or edition-comparison aims. If you are merely looking for a coherent story-reading experience, this volume will seem fragmentary and is better used as a reference book or extended reading material for consultation. The English original has a high density of notes, and readers need a certain patience with English reading and background knowledge to connect the supplementary content with the stories in the main volumes.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read representative stories in the main volumes first, then return to the supplements in this volume to establish correspondences.
  2. Keep a notebook to record recurring terms and folklore entries in the notes.
  3. Read alongside other English translations and note Burton's additions, omissions, and wording.
  4. There is no need to read every page; searching for relevant supplementary material by theme or story title is more efficient.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65

FAQ

Is this volume a complete story collection of The Thousand Nights and a Night? No. It is a supplement volume within Burton's complete translation, mainly collecting supplementary material, notes, and related variant readings rather than standalone complete stories, so it is better used alongside the main volumes.
Can I read this volume without having read the earlier ones? You can browse it, but there will be obstacles to understanding. Supplementary content often corresponds to specific stories and notes in the main volumes, and without that background it is hard to grasp what it refers to. It is advisable to first become familiar with the main body of Burton's translation.
What should I pay attention to when reading the electronic edition? This edition comes from a public-domain eBook project, and the layout is mainly plain text; the hierarchy between notes and main text may be less clear than in a printed book. When reading, use search functions to locate entries and pay attention to chapter markers.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.