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One Thousand and One Nights opens with a king who marries a new bride each day and has her executed the next morning. Scheherazade marries him and tells a story each night, stopping at dawn at the most gripping point, so he spares her to hear the rest. The tales were gathered over centuries from Persian, Indian and Arabic sources; no single author wrote them.

Anonymous / compiled over centuries (One Thousand and One Nights)

Literature

The story behind the card

The collection's oldest core goes back to a lost Persian book called Hezār Afsān, 'A Thousand Tales', which had been translated into Arabic by the 9th century. Storytellers in Baghdad, Cairo and elsewhere kept adding to it for centuries, and tales such as the voyages of Sinbad were later drawn in. Europe met the Nights through Antoine Galland's French translation of 1704–1717, which added Aladdin and Ali Baba; no earlier Arabic manuscript of either has been found. In the best-known versions the frame story ends happily: after 1,001 nights and three sons, the king gives up his vow and keeps Scheherazade as his queen.

Türkçe oku
Binbir Gece Masalları, her gün yeni bir kadınla evlenip ertesi sabah onu öldürten bir kralın hikâyesiyle açılır. Şehrazat bu kralla evlenir ve her gece bir masal anlatmaya başlar; şafak sökerken hikâyeyi en heyecanlı yerinde keser, kral da devamını duymak için onu bir gün daha yaşatır. Masallar tek bir yazarın eseri değildir; yüzyıllar içinde Fars, Hint ve Arap kaynaklarından derlenmiştir.

Derlemenin en eski çekirdeği, bugün elimizde olmayan Hezâr Efsân (“Bin Masal”) adlı Farsça bir kitaba dayanır; bu kitap en geç 9. yüzyılda Arapçaya çevrilmişti. Bağdat'ta, Kahire'de ve başka kentlerde anlatıcılar yüzyıllar boyunca ona yeni masallar ekledi; Sinbad'ın yolculukları gibi hikâyeler de sonradan derlemeye katıldı. Avrupa, Binbir Gece'yi Antoine Galland'ın 1704–1717 yılları arasında yayımlanan Fransızca çevirisiyle tanıdı. Galland, Alaaddin ile Ali Baba'yı da ekledi; iki masalın da daha eski bir Arapça yazması bulunamamıştır. En bilinen anlatımlarda çerçeve hikâye mutlu biter: 1001 gecenin sonunda Şehrazat'tan üç oğlu olan kral yeminden vazgeçer ve onu kraliçesi olarak yanında tutar.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: One Thousand and One Nights
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