Inspiring 1,001 storytellers

Scheherazade weaves her magic over the king - and so saves her life

The characters are as familiar as any from British folklore: Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba. The plots are gloriously convoluted and the rich descriptions unforgettable.

As a collection of stories, the Arabian Nights is hugely influential.

Ever since the translation by Antoine Galland in the 18th Century, authors and artists have been riveted by the tales. Now the publication of the first complete translation into English from the Arabic since the 1880s is released, having been 10 years in the making.

The stories, narrated by the bride Scheherazade to the Persian king, have resonated in art and literature for centuries, from Edgar Allan Poe to Alfred Tennyson's Recollections of the Arabian Nights.

Salman Rushdie, too, has used the tales as inspiration. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, for instance, the names Haroun and Rashid are a reference to Harun al-Rashid, who appears in many stories.

Isabel Allende, in The Stories of Eva Luna, creates a modern Scheherazade, who entertains her lover with stories conjured from her imagination. The magical realists have all used elements from the tales.

Robert Irwin, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, says the stories were written to entertain in normal, conversational Arabic of the late Middle Ages - and were aimed at the tradesmen and the lower-middle classes.

But they had an enormous impact on European literature.

"The real impact they had was in the 18th Century when people read Galland's French translation," he says. "In the 19th Century, people were still reading these older translations. Dickens, for example, is suffused with the Arabian Nights as it was translated in the 18th Century."

And then there is the imaginative inspiration that the stories have given children - although, as Mr Irwin points out, many of the most famous characters like Ali Baba are not to be found in the original, but in Galland's translation.

Film, novels, poetry and art have all found the tales a source of inspiration

"It is what changed European literature. It made the English novel, the picaresque novel, it made fantasy literature, it's the wildness of the plotting, above all.

"The extraordinary things like the prince who is petrified up to his waist, or the oarsman who rows the man to the magnetic mountain, or the trees on which women grow - fabulous imagery - and incredibly intricate plotting."

Common people

Iraqi writer and poet Salah Niazi agrees that the influence on European literature was enormous.

"The influence of the Arabian Nights on European literature is great because of the innovative techniques of the stories - there is a story within a story within a story," he says.

And then there is the intellectual calibre of the tales. "Mixing reality with fiction, historical characters with common characters; I think when you read it you will have looked at a great deal.

The extraordinary things like the prince who is petrified up to his waist, or the oarsman who rows the man to the magnetic mountain, or the trees on which women grow Robert Irwin

"When you read Shakespeare, there are a lot of psychological layers in what he is telling you. With Arabian Nights, you are reading geography, history, psychology, erotica."

But, perhaps surprisingly, he explains that the Arabian Nights did not influence Arabic literature because it simply was not read.

"Arabic literature deals with the elites, not with the common people. The Arabian Nights is not mentioned in any historical book in Arabic."

That is because the tales were written in a colloquial Arabic - it took the European translations and outside interest in the stories for the Arab world to become interested. Eventually, they were 'discovered' through the English and French translations.

Ultimately, the films, novels, poems and paintings inspired by the stories speak for themselves. AS Byatt in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, conjures some of the fascination of the stories.

"What delights above all in the Arabian Nights is its form," she writes.

"Story is embedded in story, story sprouts out of the midst of story, like the Surinam toads out of the back of their mother toad, which Coleridge used as a metaphor for his unruly imagination.

"The collection resembles both a group of Russian dolls, formally similar, faces and colours different, and amaze or spider web with threads and passages leading in all directions, both formless and orderly at once."