William Hay MacNaghten's The Alif Laila or Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, commonly known as "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments".
Printed by the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta between 1839 and 1842, this is the celebrated so-called "Calcutta II" edition. 1/
Printed by the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta between 1839 and 1842, this is the celebrated so-called "Calcutta II" edition. 1/
This Calcutta II edition collects for the first time almost all the principal Arabic texts of the famous collection of Oriental tales, and forms the basis of most subsequent translations. 2/
The original scattered Arabic texts were collected in four corpuses: the Calcutta I or the Shirwanee edition (1814-18, 2 vols.), the Bulaq or the Cairo edition (1835, 2 vols.), the Breslau edition (1825-38, 8 vols.), and this, the Calcutta II or the Macnaghten edition. 3/
"Première édition complète du texte arabe. Elle a été donnée d'après un manuscrit égyptien pris dans l'Inde par le major Turner Macan..." (Brunet).
"It was only in 1839-1842 that the Arabic text was edited in its entirety, by Macnaghten" (Fück). 4/
"It was only in 1839-1842 that the Arabic text was edited in its entirety, by Macnaghten" (Fück). 4/
Considered the most comprehensive text of the Arabian Nights, this edition is the basis for English translations by John Payne and Richard F. Burton. 5/
Sir William Hay Macnaghten, 1st Baronet (24 August 1793 – 23 December 1841), was a British civil servant in India, who played a major part in the First Anglo-Afghan War. 6/
He displayed a talent for languages and published several treatises on Hindu and Islamic law, but is today best remembered for this translation. 7/
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