Abstract
Despite the shoreless output of scholarly publications on the Thousand and One Nights in general, research on the textual history is comparatively limited. Given the small number of early Arabic manuscripts, evidence from early translations is crucial for any reconstruction of the Mamluk version of the Thousand and One Nights, written approximately between 1425 and 1500 CE. For some time, the existence of an early Turkish translation, extant in two manuscripts and dated to the fifteenth century CE on linguistic grounds, has been known. The two manuscripts cover the first 56 nights of the work. A later Turkish version, written in the seventeenth century CE, extant in a nine volume manuscript, has been known for a long time too. In this contribution, the discovery of further parts of the oldest Turkish translation is indicated for the first time. Text samples are edited, translated and compared to the oldest Arabic version of the Thousand and One Nights. A collation with the nine volume manuscript has shown that parts of it contain the earlier translation of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, some Turkish versions of single stories also belonging to the Thousand and One Nights are discussed. Among these are the story of the Queen of the serpents (Cāmaspnāme) and the story of Sayf al-Mulūk. Based on the new evidence from Turkish manuscripts and their numbering of the nights, an overall view on the puzzle of fragments is given. The same is done for the early Arabic manuscripts. As a result, it has turned out that both groups show the same sequence of stories. There are inserted stories, but no reversed order of stories is found. This suggests that a stable tradition of the overall structure of the work existed. Finally, the contribution contains an inventory of 62 Turkish manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights and of single stories.
Thomann, Johannes