Antoine Galland

Did You Know?

• Galland continued d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale after his death in 1695, publishing it in 1697; it influenced William Beckford's oriental tale Vathek.
• He first translated The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor in 1701, and its success encouraged him to translate The Thousand and One Nights from a Syrian manuscript.
• Some of the most famous tales, like Aladdin and Ali Baba, have no pre-Galland Arabic versions; he wrote them down from the words of Hanna Diyab, a Maronite Christian from Aleppo.

Life and work

Galland completed school at Noyon and studied Greek and Latin in Paris, where he also acquired some Arabic. In 1670 he was attached to the French embassy at Istanbul because of his excellent knowledge of Greek, and in 1673 he travelled in Syria and the Levant, copying inscriptions, sketching, and in some cases removing historical monuments. After a brief visit to France, where his collection of ancient coins attracted attention, he returned to the Levant in 1677.

In 1679 he undertook a third voyage, commissioned by the French East India Company to collect for the cabinet of Colbert. During his prolonged residences abroad, he acquired a thorough knowledge of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages and literatures. On his final return to France, he assisted Melchisédech Thévenot, keeper of the royal library, and Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville. After d'Herbelot died in 1695, Galland continued his Bibliothèque orientale, a compendium of information about Islamic culture principally translated from the Arabic encyclopedia Kashf al-Zunun by Kâtip Çelebi; it was published in 1697 and influenced writers such as William Beckford.

Following the deaths of Thévenot and d'Herbelot, Galland lived at Caen under the roof of Nicolas Foucault, intendant of Caen. There he began in 1704 the publication of Les mille et une Nuits, which excited immense interest. In 1709 he was appointed to the chair of Arabic at the Collège de France and discharged those duties until his death in 1715.

Works

Galland's works include Les paroles remarquables, les bons mots et les maximes des Orientaux (1694), Contes et fables indiennes, de Bidpaï et de Lokman, translated from the Turkish author Ali-Tchelebi ben Saleh, and Histoire de l'esclavage d'un marchand de la ville de Cassis, à Tunis. He also wrote De l’origine et du progrès du café, Le Voyage à Smyrne, Histoire de Noureddin et de la belle persane, and Histoire d'Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse, in addition to Les Milles et une Nuits.