The Thousand and One Nights, vol. 1 (El libro de las mil noches y una noche (tomo 1)) for Spanish learners: level, words and how to read it

What the book is about

King Shahriar, betrayed by his wife, marries a new bride every night and has her killed in the morning. Shahrazad, the vizier’s daughter, marries him of her own will and tells him a story that she stops at dawn, so that he lets her live one more night. This volume covers the first nineteen nights.

Inside the frame come “El mercader y el efrit”, in which three old men buy a merchant’s life with their stories, “El pescador y el efrit”, in which a fisherman frees a genie from a bottle, the long tale of the porter and the three ladies of Baghdad, and the mystery of the murdered woman in the chest. The volume opens with prefaces by Enrique Gómez Carrillo and by Mardrus.

Themes

• Storytelling as survival. Shahrazad wins every night with words alone.
• Fate and the will of God. Characters keep saying that what is written must happen.
• Wealth and the city. Baghdad, markets, palaces, jewels and the caliph Harun al-Rashid in disguise.
• Desire and betrayal. Mardrus’s version is the full, adult one: love, jealousy and sensual scenes are not cut.

How hard is The Thousand and One Nights, vol. 1 to read in Spanish?

How many unknown words will you meet? With a vocabulary of about 2,000 words, roughly 16 in every hundred, since those words cover 84.1% of the text. With 5,000 words it is about 10 in a hundred, with 10,000 about 7. Character names are not counted.

Measured by vocabulary alone, the book is B2–C1: that is the level at which almost every word is already familiar (why 98% matters). Tap-to-translate covers the rest, so you can start at B2. It is slightly harder than La Regenta and slightly easier than Treasure Island.

What is hard: Arabic and oriental words (visir, califa, efrit, dinar, hammam, alfanje), long formal sentences with many politeness formulas, old spelling (á for the preposition a) and stories nested three levels deep, so you must remember who is telling what. Many characters recite poems. What helps: the language of the narration is simple and repetitive, formulas come back again and again, and each night ends with a clear cliffhanger.

Our take: B2 with tap-to-translate (B2–C1 by vocabulary). Read it the way it was meant: a few nights per evening, and let the repetitions help you.

Words to know before you start

The book’s own vocabulary: frequent in this text, much less common elsewhere. Ten minutes with this list makes the opening chapters smoother.

How to read it in Spanish

1. Skip the prefaces at first. The stories begin with “Historia del rey Schahriar”.
2. Use the nights as bookmarks. Each night begins with He llegado á saber, ¡oh rey afortunado! and ends with Schahrazada vió aparecer la mañana, y se calló discretamente.
3. Learn the formulas. Phrases like ¡Por Alah! come back dozens of times; once you know them, whole lines read themselves.
4. Note: this is the adult version. Mardrus kept the sensual passages that older translations left out.

The first line

Cuéntase —pero Alah es más sabio, más prudente, más poderoso y más benéfico— que en lo que transcurrió en la antigüedad del tiempo y en lo pasado de la edad, hubo un rey entre los reyes de Sassan, en las islas de la India y de la China.

Anónimo, El libro de las mil noches y una noche (tomo 1)

Cuéntaseit is told (= se cuenta)

verb

Tap a highlighted word

“It is told, but Allah is wiser, more prudent, more powerful and more beneficent, that in times long past there was a king among the kings of Sassan, in the islands of India and China.” The first line of the frame story. The pious aside in dashes is a fixed formula, and Blasco Ibáñez keeps Mardrus’s solemn rhythm: en la antigüedad del tiempo y en lo pasado de la edad.

Frequently asked questions