Vários - As Mil e Uma Noites (2º Volume)

The first translation made in Portugal from the oldest existing Arabic manuscripts. Unlike anything I knew.
Between 1704 and 1717, the French orientalist Antoine Galland published "One Thousand and One Nights" in 12 volumes for the first time in a European language. Although Galland based the first part of his translation on the oldest known (almost) complete manuscript (14th century), he significantly changed the text, drastically altering several stories, making additions to his liking, introducing narratives that had never been part of the manuscript versions, and purging all the immodest parts.

"One Thousand and One Nights" is a collection of popular stories gathered by an anonymous author that were supposedly written in Persian and later translated into Arabic. Of the Persian manuscripts, if they actually existed, nothing survived, but several documents survive from the Arabic manuscripts, possibly copied from the same primordial Arabic version, which was also eventually lost. Each document has variations and discrepancies—each copyist would have added or misinterpreted at will—although there is a surprisingly similar common core among the various versions, especially the oldest ones.Whoever wrote and copied these stories would not have been versed in the canons of Arabic literature. Everything suggests that this book would not have appealed to cultured readers, its stories most likely intended to be told publicly, near markets, as still happens today, for example, in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square in Marrakech, and at domestic gatherings.

Its colloquial tone is reminiscent of traditional Portuguese tales, but without having been collected by intellectuals and without constraints: the stories are fantastic, erotic, violent, captivating and passionate, full of moral lessons and philosophical problems, advice for better living and better loving. Within the everyday stories meant to entertain lies the age-old wisdom of various peoples and an antiquity that is, nevertheless, simultaneously strange and close to us. Perhaps that is why the stories of "One Thousand and One Nights" are at the foundation of much of the great universal literature, as they offered us the imagery of Eastern fantasy literature. Hugo Maia, translator and anthropologist, studied Arabic language, history, and culture, and prepared the first translation made in Portugal, based on the oldest Arabic manuscripts, less embellished and filtered by the Western imagination, purer, and above all, more faithful. This book is, therefore, a landmark in the history of publishing in our country and a fundamental text of universal literature. This second volume will conclude the translation, presenting the remaining nights, as well as a series of appendices where some alternative versions are presented, as well as some passages that are illegible or whose pages are missing in the original document but which are completed by later manuscripts.