"One day, as he strolled the city, Aladdin heard an order from the Sultan proclaiming that all shops and houses were to be blocked, and that everyone was to stay indoors until Princess Badr al-Budur, or Moon of Moons, the Sultan's daughter, had gone to the baths and returned."
Aladdin is perhaps the most well-known fairy tale of all time. Its origin though is a bit foggy. Immortalized by Disney with the animated 1992 film starring Robin Williams as Genie, the tale may have been created in France. Antoine Gallard's fairy tale of Aladdin, or The Wonder Lamp debuted in the early 1900s, and poses as a Syrian bedtime tale, one set in China. But the tale could be much older and a part of the 1001 Arabian Nights, although scholars question this too. All of these different writers, editors, and translators reminds me of Homer's The Odyssey and The Iliad. They too were refined through generations of oral tradition. 21st century hip-hop beats also come to mind, some of which have been sampled thousands of times over. In this sense, Aladdin is still alive in 2022 and will keep growing.
Whatever its true origin, the coming-of-age adventure is full of exotic empires, dangerous travel, deceptive magicians, cursed treasure, wish-fulfilling desert genies (or jinns), and romance with a princess and our poor hero. Yasmine Seale's translation and Paulos Lemos Horta's editing made this a fast, fun afternoon read. Each chapter is ten pages and has a clear sense of story progression, with consequences playing out for the characters based on their choices, which build to a climax and resolution.
As I read it, I thought about story principles too. Sometimes details were planted earlier and cashed in on later for dramatic effect. Other times, details were never mentioned before the story required them, which killed the spell a bit for me. This isn't a translation or editing issue, but probably a fidelity to the original texts. Even these 'Deus ex machina' moments have a charm though, a reassuring quality to me. The type of world constructed in Aladdin is exotic, full of beauty and cunning traps, but the riddles are solvable, the villains not invincible, and true love is just a matter of time and effort. Oh, and storytellers are nearly all-powerful, including Scheherazade, the mythic mother of all stories. She of course begins and ends this one.
I have to note the book's construction too. The cover is beautiful and the pages have just the right amount of words on the page to flow for easy page-turning. This will be a reread for me.
Whatever its true origin, the coming-of-age adventure is full of exotic empires, dangerous travel, deceptive magicians, cursed treasure, wish-fulfilling desert genies (or jinns), and romance with a princess and our poor hero. Yasmine Seale's translation and Paulos Lemos Horta's editing made this a fast, fun afternoon read. Each chapter is ten pages and has a clear sense of story progression, with consequences playing out for the characters based on their choices, which build to a climax and resolution.
As I read it, I thought about story principles too. Sometimes details were planted earlier and cashed in on later for dramatic effect. Other times, details were never mentioned before the story required them, which killed the spell a bit for me. This isn't a translation or editing issue, but probably a fidelity to the original texts. Even these 'Deus ex machina' moments have a charm though, a reassuring quality to me. The type of world constructed in Aladdin is exotic, full of beauty and cunning traps, but the riddles are solvable, the villains not invincible, and true love is just a matter of time and effort. Oh, and storytellers are nearly all-powerful, including Scheherazade, the mythic mother of all stories. She of course begins and ends this one.
I have to note the book's construction too. The cover is beautiful and the pages have just the right amount of words on the page to flow for easy page-turning. This will be a reread for me.
TRANSLATOR & EDITOR
Yasmine Seale is a writer and literary translator from Arabic and French. She's also translated an annotated version of 1001 Arabian Nights with Paulo Lemos Horta as Editor. Horta is a professor of literature and creative writing, and the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of Arabian Nights. I cannot wait to explore both of them.
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