The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume III

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.6
Word count
719K words
Chapters
72

Tags

English Originals Folk LiteratureWorld Classics Legendary LivesPalace LegendDesire and FateLove StoryFantasy ImaginationAdventure TaleNarrative ArtShort Story CollectionExotic CultureArabian World

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 One Night, Volume III by John PayneAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PJ: Language and Literatures: Oriental languages and literatures, Release Date: Aug 1, 2005

Editor's review

This is the public-domain electronic text of Volume III of Payne's English translation of The Thousand and One Nights, suited to readers who have finished the first two volumes and wish to continue along Payne's translation. Volume III generally picks up the storylines left by the previous volumes and continues to display the nested storytelling within and outside the frame narrative, which is very helpful for understanding how the whole collection is woven from scattered tales into a vast structure. The Project Gutenberg version is free, searchable, and easy for copying passages to take notes, making it suitable as course reading material or a supplement to a private library. Note that this volume is not a standalone introductory reader; characters and narrative threads are connected to the previous volumes, and skipping ahead may lose the context. The translation still bears Victorian written-language features, so the reading pace should be slowed. If the purpose is to study story types or translation style, it is advisable to use it alongside Volume I; if reading merely for leisure, one may start with the shorter tales.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Review the storyline at the end of the previous volume before entering this one, to reduce the sense of broken character relationships.
  2. Use the table of contents to mark the shorter tales as entry points for odd moments.
  3. Take simple notes when encountering recurring motifs, comparing different tellings of the same story type.
  4. If used for a course, select two or three stories for close reading rather than reading the whole volume.

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
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72

FAQ

Can I read Volume III without having read the first two volumes? You can, but it is not ideal. Volume III continues the narrative progression of the previous volumes, and some stories and frame threads are connected. Skipping ahead may leave you unfamiliar with the characters and context. If time is limited, at least learn the frame story of Scheherazade and the main character relationships before entering this volume.
Does this volume repeat the content of Volume I? It does not repeat as a whole. As different volumes of the same translation, Volume III contains subsequent stories, with contents different from Volume I. But The Thousand and One Nights contains story types with similar motifs, and you will encounter familiar-seeming plot patterns; this is a feature of the collection itself, not duplication between editions.
What is the difference between Payne's translation and common English translations? Payne's translation was completed in the late nineteenth century; its language is more literary, its syntax longer, and it retains more traces of literal translation. Compared with later simplified translations for the general public, it is closer to the scholarly and literary translation style of its time. Readers may treat it as material for understanding translation history, not merely as a storybook.
Is this electronic edition suitable for academic citation? It can serve as a source for reading and preliminary citation of the public-domain text, because it is free and easy to search. But it usually lacks a page-number system and scholarly annotations; for formal paper citations, it is advisable to check a authoritative print edition or an annotated scholarly edition and to note the source of the electronic text.

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.