摘要：The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the Thousand and One Nights: ‘[I]t is not necessary to have read it, for it is part of our memory.’1 He was most certainly right: from Sir Richard Burton’s illustrated volumes for Victorian England to contemporary Disney films, the Nights has become a global myth – one might even say it is one of the most global of all texts. The earliest known manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights dates from ninth-century Persia, but versions of the tales have been found from various regions across the ancient Islamic Empire and as far away as China, revealing a process of transmission that was clearly transcultural.2 Where an individual tale originated is not always possible to discern, and a game of chicken-and-egg has entertained scholars for generations. Much of the energy spent on investigating the manuscript history of the Nights, however, has been geared towards uncovering origins and purity, especially in regard to creating ‘definitive’ translations.
