Who first translated the Arabian Nights into English?
The first English Arabian Nights, from the early 1700s, were translated from Antoine Galland’s French. The first English translation from an Arabic manuscript was begun by Henry Torrens, a young official in British India, who published his first volume in Calcutta in 1838. Edward Lane, usually given the credit, began the same project a year later. Paulo Lemos Horta restored Torrens to the history in Marvellous Thieves (2017).
“Most histories of the Arabian Nights credit Edward Lane as the first translator to take on the challenge of producing a full English translation from an Arabic original; however, Torrens had begun the same project in colonial India the year before Lane.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 91
“Although, as Horta tells us, Lane’s translation in Egypt (1838-40) is regarded as the first English translation, Torrens actually began working on his version a year before Lane …”
More in Horta’s words (1)
“Later translators, from Burton in the late nineteenth century to Malcolm Lyons in the twenty-first century, have returned to the Arabic text that Torrens was the first to translate.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 104
More from critics and scholars (3)
“An almost forgotten and unfinished English translation of the Nights by Henry Torrens, a secretary in Britain's Indian empire bureaucracy, is another rich source that Horta mines to give historical context to the colonising nature of European translations. Torrens began his work translating the Macan manuscript, which was held by the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, from 1836-37, a full year before Lane, who is usually credited with producing the first full English translation from an Arabic original (1838-1840).”
“Lemos Horta rend justice à la première traduction originale des Mille et une nuits, publiée en 1838 et due à Henry Torrens.”
Lemos Horta does justice to the first original translation of the Thousand and One Nights, published in 1838 by Henry Torrens.
“Horta introduces readers to the complexities of translation … English translators in the 19th century included Henry Torrens, a linguist in colonial India who captured the stories’ sensuality and poetry.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 2018Xavier Luffin, Recherche littéraire / Literary Research
Global mainstream impact
- 14 November 2016Publishers Weekly
- 16 March 2017Clare Dight, The National
- 3 December 2017Aqsa Ijaz, Dawn