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    The Arabian Nights
    The Arabian Nights
    The Arabian Nights
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    The Arabian Nights

    Written by Richard Francis Burton

    Narrated by Philip Madoc

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Though The Arabian Nights are generally known as stories for children, they were originally tales for adults full of adventure, sexuality, violence and the supernatural. They certainly inspired the imagination of Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, linguist and erotologist who brought all his worldly experience and a superbly expressive prose style to bear on the tales of Sinbad the Seaman and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Scheherazade must keep her king entertained with stories if she is to avoid the promised sentence of death. Philip Madoc’s sonorous performance allows the tales to weave their own enchantment as they have done down the centuries.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateFeb 6, 1995
    ISBN9789629544683
    The Arabian Nights

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    Reviews for The Arabian Nights

    4/5

    56 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The unabridged version is huge, but it comes with a glossary of sorts in the back. No flying carpet anywhere in the entire tome--blast Disney. These stories were handed down long before Islam became a religion backed by the Koran, so this book offers keen insights into the culture it came from. Just as bloody and frightening as the original Grimm's Fairy Tales.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is the selection of tales of The Arabian Nights as translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and published by The Modern Library. The story of Scheherazade's ingenuity is of Persian origin and its origin has been traced back to 944 AD. However the tales are more Arabian than Persian in flavor. Over the centuries the tales multiplied and eventually comprised an convoluted form that has been a source of admiration as a miracle of narrative architecture. While Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are similar to them in construction, in that they are collections of stories within stories, the Arabian tales is infinitely more complicated.The frame of the work consists of a whimsical plot arrangement that depends upon the jealousy of Shahriyar, King of India, for his wife and her wanton ways; after executing her he vows to take his revenge on wall woman-ways. Night after night he marries some beautiful girl, only to order her beheaded the next morning. That is until he meets Scheherazade whose wile and intelligence is more than a match for the King. She manages to spin a bewildering number of yarns and, by suspending the ending of each, eludes the executioner. The tales she tells include such stories as "Aladdin's Lamp" and "Sinbad the Sailor" and many more that, while less famous, are equally entertaining. "the most marvelous article in this Enchanted Treasure was a wonderful Lamp with its might of magical means." (p 712, "Alaeddin; or, The Wonderful Lamp")The resulting compendium of stories has been popular ever since inspiring many translations and different forms. This translation by Richard F. Burton may be the most entertaining of all.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The narration was beautiful. Music between chapters was perfect. wish I could remember the name of it.
    • 5/5
      Great translation of the original material and an amazing performance of the reader!
    • 4/5
      A wide range of fantastics stories many of which I enjoyed and that very effectively took me to the setting.
    • 5/5
      **** The Thousand and One Nights is one of the great story collections of world literature. I fault this volume partly because some of Burton's choices of language are obscure and partly because what I really want is the entire work, not just a selected set of stories.
    • 4/5
      These tales are, in many ways, pretty standard fairy tales--lucky escapes, moral lessons, magic, racism, sexism, and a lot of violence. They also have some fairly graphic sexual moments now and again, which surprised me. With that and the racism and violence, you might not want to listen to this on a road trip with your kids. The narrator has a very "old man reading from a dusty old book" voice, which suits the material.
    • 4/5
      The Arabian Nights are a collection of stories from Asia and the Middle East that were orally passed along. Today, there are many translations and versions of these stories. In English, probably one of the best known versions was compiled and translated from Arabic by Sir Richard Francis Burton. I impulsively decided that since many people consider this the 'unabridged' English version I should read this one. Well after reading about 300 pages of this book and only getting to night 30 out of 1001, I realized that my copy at 407 pages couldn't possibly be complete. It turns out that my copy is complete - it's just that it is volume 1 of 16 volumes and with each book logging in over 400 pages, it would probably take me 1001 nights to read this story. I'm glad that I got a chance to sample Burton's version. The stories are complex and nested - meaning that a character within a story will start telling a new story and that story will spawn off many more. After awhile, I found myself confused about what was the original story, but still wanting to find out what evil djinn or ifrit had changed what princess or sultan into stone. The tone of the book is adventurous and ribald with adultery, beheadings and magic in every tale. But, not wanting to spend 1001 nights reading these stories, I switched to an abridged version that was geared more to children (no more adultery and executions were a little tamer). It was fun to read stories that have become commonplace - Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, The Voyages of Sinbad were some fun examples. I'm not sure if I will ever revisit the Burton volumes again, but it was a good experience to sample them.
    • 4/5
      Sir Richard Burton's translation presents a nice selection of the stories. He's chosen many of the most popular tales, (including Aladdin), plus a large number of lesser-known - but still highly entertaining - stories. His translations are perhaps a tad colonial, but in most cases I found that he managed to capture that Arabian feel pretty nicely.I do have one major complaint with Burton's work, though: he hasn't paragraphed at all. As a result, this book is a very slow read. It doesn't flow nearly as well as it should, and it's difficult to stop in the middle of what are sometimes very long stories. Still, the mass market paperback edition is very reasonably priced, and it's a rewarding collection if you can manage to wade through it.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful. So neat to read from a different time and era, and yet the basic motivations of humanity stays the same. I like how one story is always about another story, which is about another. Also, these stories are quite a bit naughtier than I had realized. Loved it.
    • 4/5
      Some of the more memorable stories. A lovely selection. It would be wonderful if the notes were footnotes instead of placed in the appendix (really annoying to flip around 700+ pages to find a translation for something minor), but the authenticity has been well preserved. The language is flowery, beautiful, and a bit antiquated (I can feel like a smart feller!).
    • 3/5
      A mixed bag ... the first few were much better than the last few. I liked "The Talking Bird ..." in particular because it had a very strong female protagonist. None of the others really did to any great extent. Aladdin was good, as well as Ali Baba, but some of the lesser known stories are that way for a reason.
    • 4/5
      Book #21 - The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights - A huge collection of interesting and sometimes fun fantasy.There are a number of other translations of these stories, with varying amounts of liberties taken with the content (western-isms introduced, raunchier parts bowdlerized, stories condensed or omitted completely, etc.). I had this edition recommended to me as the definitive version. I'm glad I read it with the stories in the proper cultural context, but it certainly would have been easier going to read a more abridged version that was perhaps less true to the original Arabic.Richard Burton (not the actor) includes extensive footnotes comprising nearly a quarter the length of the stories themselves, some running on for several pages apiece. These footnotes explain metaphors, context, the translators own experiences in the East, etc. The best of these footnotes were illuminating and informative and really added to the experience; the worst are catty criticisms of previous translators. At first I read them thoroughly, but halfway through I took to skimming those that were going on at length about precise derivations of the original Arabic words.Note: A couple vague spoilers follow.The stories ranged from the fantastic to the meandering. The book starts off strong, with a racy story about how the King and his brother got into the whole marry-for-a-night, kill-her-in-the-morning thing, and how Shahrazade and her sister decided to risk their lives to stop the King through quality storytelling.She then launches into stories, many of which contain other stories (which occasionally contain OTHER stories) in a web of narration with each tale leaping into the next. Sometimes the flow is natural, such as "which reminds me of the tale of..." (a story related in theme) but other times it's a blatant non-sequitur, such as "They also tell of..." (completely non-related tale).Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves is here, complete with the "Open Sesame" treasure cave. It's a longer, more violent story than the way it's typically depicted in cartoons, but held my interest. Similarly, Alaeddin and his wonderful lamp is a longer, more complex story but had a satisfying conclusion.However, Sindbad was nothing like the adventure movies I grew up with. In fact, the seven voyages all boil down to the following formula: "Sindbad decides to sail somewhere, gathers a crew (who somehow don't know that he gets shipwrecked by the second paragraph each trip), is the sole survivor of a shipwreck (told you so), encounters something amazing and through unlikely coincidences rebuilds his fortune, then returns home vowing never to sail again". Curiously, the better stories are the first voyages so, rather than building to a climax, the stories seem to go on way too long. And really, after the second or third trip, he was just being an ass.A couple tales I had heard of before but only as vague references were the City of Brass and the Ebony Horse. They were enjoyable fantasy stories.One bizarre story was about a man named Abu Hasan who once publicly broke wind and how it changed his life. Really.Note: A pretty specific spoiler about one tale follows:The Three Apples is about a man who, when his wife became ill and craved apples (not native to the area) took great pains to obtain three for her. Later that day, he observes a slave eating an apple and when asked, the slave says that his lover's cuckold husband had bought the apple and a couple others. The man goes home and finds his wife with two apples so he stabs her to death, dismembers her body, stows it in a trunk and throws it in the river. He then learns that the slave was just kidding. Oops. Too bad, really, that's probably the kind of jape his wife would have appreciated if he hadn't just horribly murdered her.One of the longest and most pointless stories with the riveting title "Tale of Nur Al-Din and His Son Badr Al-Din Hasan" begins when two close brothers get to talking one night about how great it would be if they both met great women, got married and had children of the opposite sexes at about the same time so that one day their children could marry (relationships between first cousins are acceptable there). They then argued so severely about how much the hypothetical dowry would be that they vowed never again to speak to each other and one brother went into exile. Coincidentally, although no longer in contact, they both get married and have children of the opposite sexes at exactly the same time. Even more coincidentally, both children grow up to be the most attractive in the land. Ridiculously coincidental events have two djinn arguing about who is fairest and get the young couple together briefly, where they fall instantly in love and spend many pages barely missing each other in a series of misunderstandings that would have Jack Tripper saying "Oh, that's just stupid!", before their fates again become intertwined and the story goes on and on. If there's a moral or a point, I missed it entirely. If it's intended as comedy, then "Three's Company" would be an epic masterpiece.To sum up, this is a fascinating work. Some stories are epic adventures, some are the basis for famous stories we all know, and some go on and on and on for no reason whatsoever. I would recommend "Arabian Nights", but suggest anyone who doesn't have a particular interest in Arabic culture go for a more accessible abridged edition instead.