阿拉丁是中国人

小时候，童话故事「一千零一夜」里的阿拉丁（Aladdin）大家都听过，可是你知道其中故事的设定，阿拉丁竟然是中国人吗？我一定不是最后一个知道的...

网友表示，我只知道阿拉是上海宁。

Surprising Facts about Aladdin and the Arabian Nights

The story of Aladdin is one of the most familiar narratives in all of literature, a classic ‘rags-to-riches’ tale featuring a young hero who has to learn an important lesson; an exotic setting; a good healthy dose of magic; a beautiful heroine; and an evil villain (or two, depending on which version of the story you follow).

表示“故事；叙事”，英文解释为“A narrative is a story or an account of a series of events.”举个🌰：

At several points in the narrative the two stories cross.

叙述中两条故事线多次交织在一起。

表示“白手起家，从赤贫到巨富的，从一贫如洗到家财万贯的”，英文解释为“a rags-to-riches story is about someone who becomes very rich after starting life very poor”。

表示“异国风情的，外国情调的”，英文解释为“something that is exotic seems unusual and interesting because it is related to a foreign country – use this to show approval”，如：exotic places 有异国风情的地方。

There's much about the Aladdin story that is universally known. The story is part of the Arabian Nights, or the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ told by Scheherazade, the woman who effectively invented the cliffhanger: the story goes that she was one of the sultan's concubines, and the sultan, after taking his pleasure with a woman, would have her killed.

cliffhanger /ˈklɪfˌhæŋə/ 表示“悬念，吊人胃口的场景”，英文解释为“A cliffhanger is a situation or part of a play or film that is very exciting or frightening because you are left for a long time not knowing what will happen next.”

sultan /ˈsʌltən/表示“苏丹（某些穆斯林国家的统治者的称法）”，英文解释为“A sultan is a ruler in some Muslim countries.”

Scheherazade, in a cunning move devised to save her life, decided to start telling the sultan a story, but each night would break off in the middle of the narrative … so the sultan would keep her alive until the next night, when he would find out what happened at the end of the story. Hence the title, One Thousand and One Nights. The tale of Aladdin, along with the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, is one of the most famous tales Scheherazade told.

表示“狡猾的”，英文解释为“Someone who is cunning has the ability to achieve things in a clever way, often by deceiving other people.”举个🌰：

These disturbed kids can be cunning.

这些心理失常的小孩可能会很狡猾。

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves 阿里巴巴与四十大盗

the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor 辛巴达第七次航海的故事

the Arabian Nights / the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ 天方夜谭 / 一千零一夜

For starters, where does Aladdin live? Not in the Middle East. In the earliest version of the story we have, Aladdin is a poor youth living on the streets of China. And he's no foreigner abroad either: he's a native Chinese boy, not an Arabian youth who's ended up in China. (Nor is he an orphan: in the earliest versions of the story, Aladdin is not an orphaned street urchin but a lazy boy living at home with his mother.)

orphan /ˈɔːfən/表示“孤儿”，英文解释为“a child whose parents are both dead”。

urchin /ˈɜːtʃɪn/ 表示“（穿着破烂的）小脏孩”，英文解释为“An urchin is a young child who is dirty and poorly dressed.”

As Krystyn R. Moon notes in Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s (Rutgers University Press, 2005):

Aladdin, which most people today associate with Persia (波斯) and the Middle East thanks to films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Disney's Aladdin (1992), was one of the more popular nineteenth-century productions set in China because of its romantic and moralistic storyline and its potential as a spectacle.

Moon goes on to note that when the story of Aladdin first appeared in the Arabian Nights, it was set in ‘western China’, with some scenes in North Africa (though that's not where Aladdin lives). She observes:

Composers and librettists sometimes chose Persia as the setting for the tale because One Hundred and One Arabian Nights was from that region of the world and, like China, was a popular imaginative space for Americans and Europeans.

熟词僻义，动词除了表示“观察，注意到”，此处表示“说，讲；评论，评述”，英文解释为“to make a remark about something”，举个🌰：

"I've always found German cars very reliable," he observed.

“我一直认为德国汽车很可靠，”他说道。

Many people doubtless know this fact concerning Aladdin's origins already – anyone who's read the story of Aladdin will know it – but the point is worth making because the popular Disney animated film of 1992 makes Aladdin an Arabian boy and gives the impression that it was always thus.

Okay, so where does Aladdin (that is, the story) come from? Not from the One Thousand and One Nights. Or at least, not really. We associate it with that collection because the story has been added to the Nights in translation as a sort of honorary extra tale (or ‘orphan tale’, to use an apt phrase). The Aladdin story was added to the collection by a French translator, Antoine Galland, in the early eighteenth century.

表示“恰当的，适当的”，英文解释为“An apt remark, description, or choice is especially suitable.”举个🌰：

The words of this report are as apt today as in 1825.

这份报告的措词在当今如在1825年一样恰当。

安托万·加朗（Antoine Galland，1646年4月4日－1715年2月17日）是一位法国东方学家、翻译家与考古学家，是第一位将阿拉伯文学作品《一千零一夜》翻译成欧洲语言的人。对欧洲的文学发展，以及欧洲人对伊斯兰世界的观感有相当大的影响。

Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights which he called Les mille et une nuits.（Wikipedia）

Although Galland heard the tale from an Arabian storyteller, the Aladdin story is firmly set in China (so not the Middle East at all, but the Far East). The tale had nothing to do with the original One Thousand and One Nights tales, and doesn't appear in any of the manuscripts. But, since Galland added it to his version, it has become arguably the most famous story (not) in the Arabian Nights.

表示“可论证地，可以说”，英文解释为“used when giving your opinion to say that there are good reasons why something might be true”，举个🌰：

They are arguably the most important band since The Rolling Stones.

他们可以说是自滚石以来最重要的乐队。

The reason we think of the story as one of the true-born Arabian Nights is that many of the characters in the tale of Aladdin are Arabian Muslims with Arabic names. But Aladdin is Chinese … at least, he is if you go back to the known origins of the story. Jasmine, Aladdin's girlfriend, was an invention of the Disney film – at least, the name was. In the original story, Aladdin's love-interest is called Badroulbadour (the name means ‘full moon of full moons’ in Arabic).

表示“恋爱角色（电影、书籍或戏剧中主角的情人）”，英文解释为“the character in a movie, book, or play that the main character loves”。

来源：Interesting Literature

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