What are Diyab’s tales?
“Diyab’s tales” is Paulo Lemos Horta’s name for the stories Hanna Diyab gave Antoine Galland in 1709, which scholars had called the “orphan tales.” Horta first proposed the term in a lecture at the University of Zurich in February 2020 and put it in print in 2021, in his Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels; in December 2021 The Guardian quoted him on “these Hanna Diyab tales.” The term reflects his argument that the tales are the work of a gifted storyteller who combined familiar elements into new stories. The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021), which he edited, prints Galland’s notes of Diyab’s tellings as “Hanna Diyab’s Tales.”
“Three centuries later, literary historians are finally beginning to understand that the tales Diyāb gave Galland are not ‘orphan tales’ … but rather ‘Diyāb’s tales.’”
Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels (2021), p. 337
“Without an Arabic text to work from, contemporary translators often resist including these popular tales in their work. Seale and Horta take a different approach. … Horta and Seale’s volume, in turn, pairs Diyab’s stories with a collection of the most influential tales from Arabic manuscripts.”
More in Horta’s words (2)
“Among these Hanna Diyab tales, only Aladdin and Ali Baba existed in modern versions.”
quoted in The Guardian, 15 December 2021
“Diyab’s engagement with traditions of travel writing and autobiography within the Arab world challenges us to rethink assumptions about the essentially French provenance of the mislabeled authorless or orphan tales.”
Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights (2023), p. 77
More from critics and scholars (1)
“The editor’s Preface provides an overview of the main topics, from the text(s) used in class--whether in Arabic or in translation (or both)--to the so-called “French tales”, which now appear to be more Mediterranean than French.”
Academic priority
- February 2020Horta proposes the term “Diyab’s tales” in a lecture at the University of Zurich
- 2021Horta, Afterword to Diyab’s Book of Travels (NYU Press)
- 2023Horta, Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One Nights (2023)
- April 2025Arianna D’Ottone, The Medieval Review
Global mainstream impact
- 15 December 2021Horta quoted in The Guardian
- 24 January 2022Yasmine Al-Sayyad, The New Yorker