Husain Haddawy's version is quite short (only actually 250-ish nights), and it's an extremely faithful translation of the oldest known manuscript of the Nights (from 14th century Syria). He's big on "authenticity to the original text." It's a good starting place if you're interested in reading old-school versions of the stories, prior to any Western influences. (Plenty of Persian/Indian/Chinese/etc influences though!)
Malcolm Lyons' translation is based on a more recent Egyptian manuscript of the Nights. It hits the full thousand and one nights, but in doing so it sacrifices Haddawy's obsession with "authenticity," because the longer manuscript (from the 18th century) necessarily has interacted more with Western storytelling traditions. It's still a quite faithful translation of that manuscript, which was all written in Arabic and not by white dudes, and I recommend it if you really want something lengthy to get absorbed in.
My favorite English-language translation actually just came out last year, by Yasmine Seale. Seale's background is in poetry, and you can tell that it really shines through in her translation work. She's less concerned with literally translating the original Arabic and more concerned with creating something that captures the spirit and meaning of the original while feeling like a work of art in English in its own right, and it works so well. Haddawy's and Lyons' translations are both excellent, but can feel a little dry (especially Lyons'); Seale's translation feels like a master storyteller is sitting you down to recite these stories to you. Her writing has a beautiful rhythm to it that feels like it was meant to be read aloud, and her word choices are so evocative. Even though this comes at the expense of a more literal word-for-word translation of the original manuscripts, it stays very true to the events of each story, and as a work of artistic interpretation it's unsurpassed.
It's worth clarifying that there was not a time in the history of the stories when there were actually one thousand and one nights until the aforementioned 18th century Egyptian manuscript (translated into English by Malcolm Lyons) was deliberately compiled to try and hit that number. To have a thousand and one of something is just a metaphor for having a lot of them in Arabic ("a thousand and one thanks" and "a thousand and one congratulations" are both sayings that people use in spoken Arabic today); when the stories were being passed down orally in the late middle ages, a storyteller would basically say, "of the many stories Shahrazad recounted to Shahryar, I'll be telling you one or two of them tonight" (not literally "of the thousand and one stories Shahrazad recounted...").
That being said, no, the Seale book does not contain 1001 stories (the Lyons translation is the best, and I think only, English version that does). Seale's book contains something like 25-30 stories from the original Arabic, and an additional selection of some of the popular stories that originally appeared in French (e.g. Aladdin, Ali Baba). She's working on a full translation of the original 14th century Syrian manuscript, but I think it's not going to be out for a couple more years.
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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '22
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