Orientalism in translation: The one thousand and one nights in 18th century France and 19th century England

Abstract

The objective of this study is to show how translation contributes to the "Orientalist" project and to the past and present knowledge of the Orient as it has been shaped by different disciplines such as anthropology, history and literature. In order to demonstrate this, I have decided to compare the Arabic text Alf Leyla wa Leyla (The One Thousand and One Nights) with the French translation by Antoine Galland (1704-1706) and the English translation by Sir Richard Burton (1885). According to Edward Said, the Orientalist project or Orientalism is mainly a French and British cultural enterprise that has produced a wide-ranging wealth of knowledge about an Orient that has been represented as an undifferenciated entity with despotism, splendour, cruelty, or even sensuality being its main attributes. I have chosen these translations because they come from places with a long Orientalist tradition. In 18th century France, the age of the Belles infideles, Galland is a man of the Enlightenment who appears to be a precursor of Orientalism as embodied in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Votaire's zadig. A century later, Burton's The Arabian Nights, backed by a deep knowledge of Islam, is published. Burton is an official in the service of the British Empire---an empire that takes pride in having the highest number of Muslim subjects. The evolution of Alf Leyla wa Leyla and its translations is followed by an analysis of the shifts applied to the representations of Oriental elements found in it (social and religious practices). These shifts as well as the annotations that refer to Arabo-Islamic culture are related to Galland and Burton's intellectual development and to the socio-historical context of their respective translations.