Aladdin: A New Translation

by Paulo Lemos Horta (Editor), Yasmine Seale (Translator)

Overview

From a dynamic French-Syrian translator comes an authoritative, modern, “glamorous and delightful” (Paris Review) translation of the classic tale of magic lamps and jinn.

Since its first telling in Paris in 1709, “Aladdin” has captured the hearts and minds of readers, authors, illustrators, and filmmakers. For just as long, popular adaptations have exoticized the tale, or else reduced it to a rags-to-riches story for children. With this “smooth, dark, exciting interpretation” (Public Books), acclaimed translator and poet Yasmine Seale and literary scholar Paulo Lemos Horta offer both a corrective and a definitive work: an elegant, faithful rendition of “Aladdin” that is destined to become a classic for decades to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324091110
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	1,019,399
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Paulo Lemos Horta is an associate professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, and the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. He lives in Abu Dhabi and Barcelona.

Yasmine Seale is a writer who works across poetry, translation, criticism, and visual art.

Editorial Reviews

09/17/2018
Seale’s splendid translation introduces readers to the surprising depth of Aladdin’s adventures while maintaining a classical feel. A malevolent North African magician travelling in China lures lazy, impoverished Aladdin into retrieving a magic lamp. The magician leaves Aladdin for dead, but he wishes himself home and discovers the lamp holds a wish-granting jinni who conjures food for him and his mother to eat and silver trays for them to sell. Later, Aladdin furtively ogles the undressed sultan’s daughter, Princess Badr al-Budur, and falls in love. He sends his mother to offer an exorbitant gift of jewels from the lamp’s cave in exchange for permission to wed, but the sultan agrees to marry the princess to the grand vizier’s son instead. Aladdin makes increasingly dubious decisions as he disrupts the princess’s wedding night by wishing the couple into his house and humiliating the groom. After the pair’s dissolution, the jinni creates a sumptuous palace and untold wealth for Aladdin and the princess’s happy marriage until the magician’s return leads to a climax full of scheming and magic. This exhilarating translation will thrill fans of darker, more complex fairy tales and upend readers’ preconceived image of Aladdin. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Elegant... Seale is careful to frame her translation with an account of Shahrazad herself, which not only gives it a sense of urgency, but also reminds us that the narrative voice is a female one—a fact that other adaptations and translations often miss. This world is one in which a woman can use the gift of story-telling to navigate the power of men. And this framing breathes new life into the female cast of Aladdin’s story."

Hetta Howes

"This new translation of the classic tale is, like the lamp at its center, darker, grubbier, and more twisted than its Disneyfied iteration, emphasizing its transgressive qualities.... Seale’s text has a fluidity and an elegance that give even this diet of “dreams, smoke, and visions” a satisfying heft."

The New Yorker

"Sparkling.... Seale’s elegant new translation of Aladdin restores the tale to its roots. Tapping into her own Syrian-French background, Seale has worked from both Arabic and French sources to produce her captivating translation.... steeped in magic and stripped of some of the phony adornments that have diluted its essence over the centuries, [this] is a delightful retelling of the dreams and adventures of the wily young peasant boy who matures to become a beloved ruler."

Robert Weibezahl

"Horta’s contextualizing introduction and Seale’s straightforward translation have convinced me that the joy can be in the telling, rather than the origins, of this story.... Yasmine Seale makes a tale that is almost too familiar new again in her smooth, dark, exciting interpretation of Aladdin.”"

Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg

"In her new translation of Aladdin, Seale provides a scintillating lens through which to view ‘the tale that has never stopped traveling’: the story of a boy and his magical lamp. Paired with a riveting introduction by Paulo Lemos Horta, Seale’s work acknowledges the tangled history of Aladdin, from its initial appearance in French literature in 1709 to its controversial Disney adaptation in 1992.... Instead of severing or distinguishing herself from Aladdin’s complicated origin, Seale approaches her own translation mindful of the story’s Syrian-French hybridity as well as its context in the greater framework of the narratives of Scheherazade. What results is an elaborate poetic tapestry so glamorous and delightful that you can’t help but want to read again."

Madeline Day

"Yasmine Seale's vivacious prose resurrects a classic folktale that we thought we knew, and animates it with deeper meanings. This book is a superb example of translation as an art form. "

Pankaj Mishra

"It's not every day you come across a new translation of The Arabian Nights, but the French Syrian writer, Yasmine Seale, has rendered afresh the 18th-century version of Aladdin by Antoine Galland, and has done a cracking job."

Melanie McDonagh

"Yasmine Seale has brought Aladdin back to life: she captures the grace and the strangeness of the version collected and written down by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century, and has found unexpected riches of fine, sly, parodic humor in a story which has suffered in its long, twisting history from manhandling, truncation, and an excess of pomp and ceremony. This is a fresh, witty, and vigorous retelling. "

Marina Warner

"Yasmine Seale’s new translation of the classic tale reveals its surprising depth."

Wendy Smith

2018-08-21

A late addition to the Thousand and One Nights, this classic tale of magic lamps and jinni is revisited in a fresh translation.

"Majesty, in the capital of one of China's vast and wealthy kingdoms, whose name escapes me at present, there lived a tailor named Mustafa, who had no other distinction but his craft…." So begins one of the most enduring stories in the fairy-tale canon, supposedly conjured up by Shahrazad, whose daily tales delayed her husband, the sultan, from executing her. Aladdin is Mustafa's rebellious son who shows no desire to learn his father's trade and, after the tailor dies, lives in poverty with his mother until a magician arrives claiming to be his uncle. Now Aladdin is swept up into a world of wealth and promises, all part of the magician's plan to get his hands on a magic lamp offering unimaginable power. Protected by a magic ring, Aladdin is sent underground to find the lamp but then refuses to hand it over and is sealed beneath the earth by the enraged magician. Freed by the jinni of the ring, Aladdin returns home to find that an even more powerful and fearsome jinni—of the lamp—is now his to command. Absent from the original Thousand and One Nights, "Aladdin" was added, along with "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and others, in a French translation dating from the 18th century. Yet its themes of wish fulfillment and transformation have granted it infinite life, as fairy story, pantomime, film, and literary touchstone. Aladdin's adventures continue as he tries to win the sultan's daughter as his bride, temporarily loses the lamp ("New lamps for old"), and faces down evil magicians. But all's well that ends well, and Shahrazad lives to narrate another day.

If there are only seven basic stories in the world of literature, this is most probably one of them.

Kirkus Reviews