As I mentioned a few days ago, I had the opportunity to breeze through a translation of Aladdin and Other Stories from the Thousand and One Nights. To be honest, I wasn't overly familiar with the story, only knowing the broad strokes as most people do, and routinely confused The Thousand and One Nights with stories of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, so I'm not exactly in any position to offer a critical assessment about this particular translation.
Save for one little detail that amused me to no end.
Dawood offers his readers a short introduction to help set the tone of for the stories, and his words are encouraging and warm, though he warns his audience that the stories are "the unstudied products of untutored minds," possessing a "vocabularly that borders on the vulgar dialect" and not a part of Classical Arabic literature, but nevertheless a "faithful mirror of the life and manners of the age which engendered them."
Then, having gone to all these lengths to apologize for his subject's folksome roughness, he admits that there was a bit too much "narrative vigour," leading to his decision to excise a "smutty episode" that was obviously "wantonly injected" during a later period, and clealy out of step with the rest of the narrative architecture.
All of which may be true, but writing in 1956, it is probably the last time an author could presume so much, so candidly, on behalf of his or her readers. A decade later Roland Barthes would be announcing the death of the author and the power of the reader, while various post-modern factions would destabilize many of the assumptions that Dawood makes from the notion of a classical canon to the origins of folk tales. It struck me therefore as incredibly ironic that a self-proclaimed rescue mission of one era, inadvertently became a relic of another.
