Who was Hanna Diyab?
Hanna Diyab was a Maronite Christian from Aleppo who, in Paris in the spring of 1709, told the French translator Antoine Galland the stories of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Some fifty years later he wrote a memoir of his travels, now in the Vatican Library. In Marvellous Thieves (2017) Paulo Lemos Horta used that memoir to recover Diyab as a storyteller and author in his own right, rather than a mere informant.
“Before the discovery of this manuscript, Diyab had only a shadowy existence in literary history as the mysterious Maronite who related “beautiful stories” to the more famous French translator. However, Diyab’s memoir now reveals a talented storyteller in his own right.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 2
“Labelled “orphan tales”, these stories seemed to lack any verifiable provenance prior to Galland’s own transcriptions. But in Horta’s research, the shadowy figure of Diyab, this spectral source, is marvellously fleshed out and made real.”
More from critics and scholars (3)
“Horta makes a strong case for the importance of unmasking these hitherto voiceless sources in his study of Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite traveller from Aleppo, whom Galland met in Paris in 1709.”
“Diyab is just one of the many storytellers – unknown, forgotten and now resurrected through Horta’s work – of the Arabian Nights …”
“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)
Global mainstream impact
- 2 February 2017Shahidha Bari, Times Higher Education
- 18 February 2017Anu Kumar, The Wire
- 16 March 2017Clare Dight, The National
- 27 May 2019ArabLit, “Forthcoming: Translation of Memoir by ‘Aladdin’-teller Hanna Diyab”