After seeing 'Secrets of The Arabian Nights' shows up on my regular TV show listing, I am curious to watch it. Turns out it was BBC4 production so I know it should be good.
It was quite good. It shows the history of the 1,001 Arabian Nights, how it came to be popular in the West despite being only orally told in the Middle East, how it coloured the perception of the West toward Middle East, how the story is still considered scandalous in the Middle East.
After years of reading and watching the more popular pieces of the story and realizing a few years back that the most popular one 'Aladdin' and 'Sinbad' were the works of the first guy who collected and translated the story into French. Now I am starting to reading it. I choose the seemingly oldest translated version by Sir Richard Burton. I wants to read the most complete version of this since in the show it mention that Lanes version got edited to remove all the sex and drinking out to turn it into children books for the Victorian era.
So far it been very interesting read. Just like the TV show said, the magic in the stories were very different from what I read in the Western novels and maybe Japanese mangas.
But I must say I like it so far. It is very interesting, especially the 'The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad' one ;)
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