The Politics of Translation: Two Stories from the Turkish Ferec baʿde Şidde in Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes

The ninth volume of Antoine Galland's (d. 1715) French translation of Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes, the collection of stories that would later be known in English as the Arabian Niqhts, begins with a one-and-a-half-page Avertissement. Apparently written by Galland or at his behest, the notice announces that the final two stories of the previous volume, which had been published some three years previous, were not actually part of the Arabian Nights. Rather, these stories were "inserted and published" without the knowledge of the translator, who learned about the addition only after the volume appeared on the market. Galland would mention the event in his Journal, calling it "the affair of the eighth volume" (l'affair du huitieme tome des mule et une nuit) in his entry for Dec 20, 1708. Here, Karateke analyzes the translations and contextualizes them within the larger discipline of translation studies.