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Ironically, to a considerable extent the book of The Thousand and One Nights owes its tremendous success in world literature and world culture to stories that never belonged to the collection in Arabic. Narrated to Antoine Galland by Syrian Maronite Hannā Diyāb, these stories are today part and parcel of international narrative tradition (Marzolph, "The Arabian Nights"). The present text serves as a short introduction to the complete English translation of Galland's French summaries of the tales, which is published for the first time in the "Texts and Translations" section of the present and the next issues of Marvels & Tales. Galland's French summaries of the tales Diyāb performed for him have been available since Abdel-Halim's (428-470) 1964 publication and have recently been published in the critical edition of Galland's diaries (Le journal, vol. 1). A facsimile of the handwritten diaries is available on the website Gallica, which holds the digital collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.2 As Galland's early eighteenth-century French is not easily accessible to international readers, the hope in making the complete English translation available now is to stimulate further research.
While most of the tales of the Nights did not leave a lasting impression in world memory, even a general public with no detailed knowledge of the collection's complex history and varied content would know at least the tales of "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp" and of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" by name.3 These tales belong to a corpus of eight tales in Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuit4 (The Thousand and One Nights) whose origin until quite recently had been considered "of an uncertain standing" (Gerhardt 14). Beginning with Hermann Zotenberg's systematic attempt to reconstruct the textual history of the Nights, and including a number of detailed studies by scholars such as Mohamed Abdel-Halim, Georges May, Muhsin Mahdi, Sylvette Larzul, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, and most recently, Paulo Lemos Horta (17-54), the peculiar transmission of these "orphan tales," as Mia Gerhardt (13-14) labeled them, has meanwhile been unraveled. Gerhardt obviously was prone to believe in written sources for all texts of the Nights, as her criterion for defining the "orphan tales" was the fact that "either no Arabic text of them has been found at all, or, if...