Aladdin
Translated by Yasmine Seale · Edited with an introduction by Paulo Lemos Horta · Liveright, 2018 · Paperback 2021
Horta pitched a stand-alone edition of “Aladdin” to preempt the mishmash Agrabah he could see coming in Disney’s live-action remake of 2019, and to get ahead of the discussion and shape it by recovering the agency of the tale’s Syrian storyteller, Hanna Diyab. The press obliged. In addition to writing the introduction, Horta commissioned and edited the translation, and divided the tale into twelve chapters and an epilogue, which he titled.
Horta’s introduction reads the tale alongside the memoir of Hanna Diyab, the Syrian storyteller who gave it to Galland in 1709, and calls it “not strictly a French invention, but rather Syrian-French in its origin and composition.” Brazilian edition: Aladim (Zahar, 2019), with an added preface.
“Paulo wrote a whole book about this—Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights—and he devotes a chapter to the idea that, rather than see Aladdin as Galland’s projected vision of the East, it’s more plausible to think of it as Diyab’s vision of France.”
“Less well known is the work’s textual history, to which Paulo Lemos Horta gives us a thorough introduction in this edition … The recent discovery of Diyab’s memoir … has therefore been something of a game-changer. It proves that Aladdin is Syrian-French in its origin and composition, thus firmly reuniting the enduring story with its Arabic roots.”
“Darker, grubbier, and more twisted than its Disneyfied iteration”
“A wide-ranging, learned, and insightful introduction to a newly translated classic is followed by a really compelling and readable text.”
“Excellent”
One of Buzzfeed’s best books of 2018
- ArabLit, “Forthcoming: Translation of Memoir by ‘Aladdin’-teller Hanna Diyab,” 27 May 2019
- The Washington Post, Michael Dirda, on the “excellent” Norton edition, 11 June 2019
- The New Yorker, “Wish List,” Anthony Lane, 24 May 2019
- Times Literary Supplement, “Lines of blood and baffled eyes,” Hetta Howes, 21 December 2018
- Buzzfeed, “The Best Books of 2018 for Every Kind of Reader,” 16 December 2018
- The Paris Review, “Staff Picks,” Madeline Day, 14 December 2018
- The Monocle Weekly, interview by Georgina Godwin, 9 December 2018
- The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh, 8 December 2018
- BookPage, “Rethinking a Classic,” Robert Weibezahl, December 2018
- Public Books, “A Thousand and One Translations,” Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg, 4 December 2018
- Dubai Eye 103, author interview, 24 November 2018
- The Guardian, “How Aladdin’s story was forged in Aleppo and Versailles,” Richard Lea, 2 November 2018
- Publishers Weekly, “Yasmine Seale Has Retranslated ‘Aladdin’,” Wendy Smith, 19 October 2018
- Publishers Weekly, review, September 2018
- Kirkus Reviews, review, September 2018
- Public Books, “On Our Nightstands,” Stephen Twilley, July 2018