How Aladdin's story was forged in Aleppo and Versailles

Evidence that its first teller was a Syrian dazzled by the court of Louis XIV inspires a new translation of this magical tale

Aladdin opens in the capital of “one of China’s vast and wealthy kingdoms”, but according to its latest translator, the story’s Syrian roots make it “an artefact from a destroyed world”.

The French-Syrian translator Yasmine Seale is the first woman to translate the whole of One Thousand and One Nights from its French and Arabic sources, and the first to produce an Aladdin since researchers have cleared up the mystery of the much-loved tale’s origins.

Aladdin: A New Translation by Yasmine Seale and edited by Paulo Lemos Horta is published by Liveright on 27 November.

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