“The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from the 1001 Nights” edited with an Introduction and Notes by Paulo Lemos Horta, translated by Yasmine Seale. New York and London: Norton, 2021. 732 pages, $45 (hardcover).

A fisherman tricks a jinni (genie) back into his bottle. A husband is magicked into a dog by his corpse-eating wife. A marauding kite steals a turban full of gold coins. Sinbad is saved by a roc (a bird so big it preys on elephants). Three sisters entertain three dervishes who tell three wondrous yarns, each more marvelous than the last. Caliph Harun-al-Rashid and his long-suffering vizier Jaafar roam Baghdad in disguise looking for stories and often get more than they bargained for.

This latest version of a generous collection of stories from the “Arabian Nights” comes to us in a sumptuous, oversize volume featuring abundant notes and hundreds of illustrations by famous figures such as Edmund Dulac and Maxfield Parrish. Even the paper it’s printed on is a palpable treat, creamy and smooth as butter.

Probably everyone knows the frame story that stitches these marvelous tales together. Shahríyar, the king of Persia, having been convinced in striking fashion that all women are unfaithful, resolves to take a new wife every night and have her executed the next morning. Remorseless, he carries out this program until the country is nearly depleted of girls. Shéhérazade, daughter of the king’s vizier, persuades her father to offer her as the next sacrificial bride and convinces Shahríyar to let her sister Dunyazad join them, knowing Dunyazad will ask for a story. Shéhérazade obliges with a yarn about a reluctantly homicidal jinni, which she leaves unfinished so the king will let her live until the narrative is resolved. But then she starts another story, and then, and then, and so on.

The tales themselves are a sprawling accumulation of stories drawn from several Middle Eastern nations, traditions and languages, accreted like a coral reef from the 9th to the 18th century, when a Syrian visitor to Paris provided a final layer of tales, including some of the most famous ones.

As this quick sketch suggests, the stories vary widely, featuring a cascade of merchants, thieves, dervishes, tea sellers, caliphs, lovers, magicians, flesh-eating ghouls and talking animals. Royal figures appear, mixed in with porters and clever slaves, while several jinn (the plural form) happily keep the pot boiling, aided by forbidden chambers, flying carpets, brass automatons and hidden doorways with secret stairs leading to vast underground palaces.

Along the way, the collection spreads a feast of narrative strategies, many of which appear for the first time in the history of written story-telling. We’re treated to Borges-like stories embedded in stories, beast fables, love stories, horror stories, fantasies, crime fiction and folk and fairy tales. While each narrative is rooted in the everyday life of the market or countryside or palace, magic is likely to break out at any moment, as when the wall splits behind a boiling kettle of fish and a beautiful girl pops out to remind the fish of what they have promised her. (We’re never told what that was.)

The very untidiness of this conglomeration poses a challenge and an opportunity to translators. The challenge, of course, is to hit upon a style and tone that will draw the disparate collection together. And the opportunity is for each translator to tailor the stories to fit his vision. (All the previous translators were male.) This has led to some unfortunate developments. Antoine Gallard brought the tales to Europe in his early 18th century French translation but overdid the exotic details, adding many of them himself. In 1885, Richard Burton (obviously not that Richard Burton) produced the most famous English version, but sensationalized the sexual elements so egregiously his translation had to be privately printed for limited circulation.

Various other translations have appeared over the years, some partial, some largely reinvented, many cleaned up for children. One trait that carried over from Gallard and Burton was a de-emphasis on women in the stories. As the first woman to translate the “Arabian Nights” and a native speaker of Arabic, Yasmine Seale set out to give the women of the tales their due while producing the most readable and accurate account yet of their adventures. In her rendition these women have a lot to say for themselves. In her hands the stories abound in dominant wives, girls who unapologetically pursue their own romantic inclinations, female scam artists, intrepid princesses knowing girl slaves, and loving as well as hateful mothers. Even her version of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” focuses less on the merchant himself than on Marjana, the clever slave who is the original protagonist of the story.

Which is not to say there is anything pedantic or agenda-driven about Seale’s translation. Her narratives are remarkably clear and readable, but so, she has said, are the originals. And she is fully equal to reproducing passages of resounding beauty, as when a character enters a secret garden with “birds and rills and apples whose colors were like the cheeks of lovers …, pears sweeter than syrup, headier than musk and amber, quinces too, and plums that caught the eye like polished gems,” or when Sinbad is carried so high by winged men that he “heard the angels praising God beneath the starry dome.”

In short, this new translation will amply reward anyone interested in Middle Eastern culture, the history of narrative or (most of all) a wealth of rollicking good stories. Over the centuries since these tales captivated King Shahríyar, they haven’t lost a bit of their luster.

– Reviewed by Joe Glaser, Western Kentucky University English Department.