2022/06/07 by Claire Tye
#Thousands and One Nights #literature.
paper · doi:10.5526/esj108
Robert L. Mack, in his own introduction to one of the many translations of this wonderful collection of stories, asserts that: “few works have had such a profound and lasting influence on the English literary tradition as the Thousand and One Nights” (Mack, 1995). This essay seeks to address the possible reasons for such enduring influence and reader enthusiasm for the Nights across time and space, focusing on the Nights after its arrival in Europe in the early eighteenth century. The Nights came to Europe through trade, and it is the trading of stories, both within the Nights and of the Nights itself, which lends to a discussion of what is arguably the underlying reason for the passionate enthusiasm we as readers have for the Nights. It is a question of survival: surviving the silence. Akin to Scheherazade’s battle against silence - the silence of death by which she is threatened if she stops telling her stories - is the battle of the reader, as we trade our own stories with that of the Nights, in our own eternal battle not to be silenced.