What is Hanna Diyab’s memoir?
Hanna Diyab’s memoir is an Arabic account, written in Aleppo in 1763–64, of his travels with the French collector Paul Lucas and his journey home from Paris. The manuscript, whose opening pages are missing, is in the Vatican Library, where the historian Jérôme Lentin identified it in 1993 (as Time reported in 2019). A French translation, D’Alep à Paris, edited and translated by Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger and Jérôme Lentin, was published by Sindbad in 2015. The English edition is a separate project: The Book of Travels (Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, 2021), a new edition of the Arabic by Johannes Stephan with a translation by Elias Muhanna, which Paulo Lemos Horta brought to the press and for which he wrote the Afterword. In Marvellous Thieves (2017) Horta was the first to read the memoir closely against the tales Diyab told.
“The memoir that Diyab left behind provides ample evidence of his narrative skills: he deploys frame tales and embedded stories, captures colorful characters from a variety of social milieus, and exhibits psychological insight in capturing the emotional states of both his younger and his more mature self.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), pp. 32–33
“As such, the reader becomes familiar with Diyab, a Syrian Maronite who had influence on Galland’s translation, through Horta’s elucidation of Diyab’s memoir, a source “long neglected in the collections of the Vatican Library” (2). … Marvellous Thieves is a major contribution to the study of the Arabian Nights as it makes use of overlooked primary sources such as Diyab’s memoir.”
More in Horta’s words (1)
“… an engaging account of a life composed of stories.”
Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels (2021), pp. 322–23
More from critics and scholars (4)
“One of the biggest reasons experts believe they’ve found their Aladdin is due to the recent analysis of a travelogue that Diyab wrote in the mid-18th century … In it, Diyab describes a number of things that he had seen and experienced while living in France — including how he “marveled” at the jewels and riches of Versailles, Horta says.”
“Diyab was then in his early 20s and Horta recounts Diyab’s story based on the latter’s memoirs recently discovered in the Vatican’s library.”
“It remains difficult to say, as Paulo Horta argues in a fabulous new book, whether Diyab's personal experiences informed the tales he told Galland, or if the tales influenced how he remembered his youthful adventures from over fifty years ago.”
“Horta wrote, in his book Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, of trying to map Diyab’s memoirs to ‘Aladdin’.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 2019Melinda Cohoon, Review of Middle East Studies 53.2
- 2021Horta, Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels (2021)
Global mainstream impact
- 18 February 2017Anu Kumar, The Wire
- 14 September 2017Arafat A. Razzaque, Ajam Media Collective
- 23 May 2019Chris Perez, New York Post
- 27 May 2019ArabLit, “Forthcoming: Translation of Memoir by ‘Aladdin’-teller Hanna Diyab”