Did Antoine Galland write Aladdin?
Antoine Galland wrote the French text of “Aladdin” and was long treated as its author, but he did not invent it: he had it from Hanna Diyab in 1709. Paulo Lemos Horta has argued since Marvellous Thieves (2017) that Galland was an unlikely creator of the tale’s marvels and of its sympathetic young hero. Galland disclaimed any gift for fiction, spent his days on coins and classical scholarship, and left journals without the concern for the poor that runs through Diyab’s memoir and the tale. Horta credits Galland with his own additions, such as the morals. Galland’s own diary records the source: on 5 May 1709 “le Maronite Hanna d’Alep, acheva de me faire le recit du Conte de La Lampe” (the Maronite Hanna of Aleppo finished telling me the tale of the Lamp) (Le Journal d’Antoine Galland, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Richard Waller, vol. I (Peeters, 2011), p. 321).
“There is little in the writings of the French Orientalist that would suggest that he was capable of developing a character like Aladdin with sympathy, but Diyab’s memoir reveals a narrator capable of capturing the distinctive psychology of his younger self.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 44
“Essentially, Marvellous Thieves strikes down the commonly held belief that Antoine Galland mostly employed his experiences from the Levant in the story of Aladdin.”
More in Horta’s words (2)
“In the face of this evidence, Galland seems an unlikely candidate to have contributed creatively to a series of tales that strongly engage with the marvellous, in the sense of both material riches and the supernatural.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 32
“That’s a mind-blowing revision of our understanding of where the story came from — the recognition that Aladdin is not just the fantasy of a 60-year-old French scholar and translator, but that it was born through the narrative skills and distinctive experience of a 20-year-old traveler from Aleppo.”
quoted in Time, 23 May 2019
More from critics and scholars (3)
“Horta makes a good case for the Frenchification of ‘Aladdin’ resulting from Diyab’s storytelling embroidery, rather than from the contribution of Galland (who was a scholarly dry old stick).”
“So, twist two [of Horta’s book]: Diyab’s memoirs, in partial form, turn up in the Vatican Library. There is a striking resemblance in his writing style, describing his travels with the French Orientalist adventurer Paul Lucas (and in Lucas’s own three memoirs) to the “orphan stories”. Maybe Galland, a man more inclined to Greece than Baghdad, underplayed the sophistication of Diyab’s recounted yarns.”
“As Paulo Lemos Horta describes in his introduction to Yasmine Seale’s 2018 re-translation of Aladdin, Galland didn’t invent the story.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 2019Melinda Cohoon, Review of Middle East Studies 53.2
Global mainstream impact
- 1 January 2017Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
- February 2017Robert Irwin, Literary Review
- 23 May 2019Horta quoted in Time
- 27 May 2019ArabLit, “Forthcoming: Translation of Memoir by ‘Aladdin’-teller Hanna Diyab”