La sabiduría como pontífice

New Crowns for Old, a 19th Century British

cartoon based on the Aladdin story (Disraeli as Abanazer from the pantomime version of Aladdin

offering Queen Victoria an Imperial crown (of India) in exchange for a Royal one).

No Arabic source has been traced for the tale, which was incorporated into the book One Thousand and One Nights by its French translator, Antoine Galland, who heard it from an Arab Syrian storyteller from Aleppo. Galland's diary (March 25, 1709) records that he met the Maronite scholar, by name Youhenna Diab ("Hanna"), who had been brought from Aleppo to Paris by Paul Lucas, a celebrated French traveller. Galland's diary also tells that his translation of "Aladdin" was made in the winter of 1709–10. It was included in his volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710.

John Payne, Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp and Other Stories, (London 1901) gives details of Galland's encounter with the man he referred to as "Hanna" and the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin (with two more of the "interpolated" tales). One is a jumbled late 18th century Syrian version. The more interesting one, in a manuscript that belonged to the scholar M. Caussin de Perceval, is a copy of a manuscript made in Baghdad in 1703. It was purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale at the end of the nineteenth century.

Although Aladdin is a Middle-Eastern tale, the story is set in China,

and Aladdin is explicitly Chinese.[3] However, the "China" of the story is an Islamic country, where most people are

Muslims; there is a Jewish merchant who buys Aladdin's wares (and incidentally cheats him), but there is no mention of Buddhists or Confucians. Everybody in this country bears an Arabic name and its monarch seems much more like a Muslim ruler than a Chinese emperor. Some commentators believe that this suggests that the story might be set in

Turkestan (encompassing Central Asia and the modern Chinese province of Xinjiang).[4] It has to be said that this speculation depends on a knowledge of China that the teller of a folk tale (as opposed to a geographic expert) might well not possess,[5] and that a deliberately exotic setting is in any case a common story tellers' device.

For a narrator unaware of the existence of America, Aladdin's "China" would represent "the Utter East" while the sorcerer's homeland in the Maghreb (Northern Africa) represented "the Utter West". In the beginning of the tale, the sorcerer's taking the effort to make such a long journey, the longest conceivable in the narrator's (and his listeners') perception of the world, underlines the sorcerer's determination to gain the lamp and hence the lamp's great value. In the later episodes, the instantaneous transitions from the east to the west and back, performed effortlessly by the Djinn, make their power all the more marvellous.

Adaptations

In the United Kingdom, the story of Aladdin was first published in England between 1704–14; and was dramatised in 1788 by John O'Keefe for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.[6] It has been a popular subject for pantomime for over 200 years.[7] The traditional Aladdin pantomime is the source of the well-known pantomime character Widow Twankey (Aladdin's mother). In pantomime versions of the story, changes in the setting and plot are often made to fit it better into "China" (albeit a China situated in the East End of London rather than Medieval Baghdad). One version of the "pantomime Aladdin" is Sandy Wilson's musical Aladdin, from 1979. Since the early 1990s Aladdin pantos tend to be influenced by the Disney animation - for instance the 2007/2008 Birmingham version, which starred John Barrowman, and featured a variety of songs from the Disney movies Aladdin and Mulan.

Adam Oehlenschläger wrote his verse drama Aladdin in 1805. Carl Nielsen wrote incidental music for this play in 1918–19. Ferruccio Busoni set some verses from the last scene of Oehlenschläger's Aladdin in the last movement of his Piano Concerto, Op. 39.

The 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (the earliest surviving animated feature film) combined the story of Aladdin with that of the prince. In this version the princess Aladdin pursues is Achmed's sister and the sorcerer is his rival for her hand. The sorcerer steals the castle and the princess through his own magic in this version and then sets a monster to attack Aladdin, from which Achmed rescues him. Achmed than informs Aladdin he requires the lamp to rescue his own intended wife; Princess Pari Banou, from the demons of the Island of Wak Wak. They convince the Witch of the Fiery Mountain to defeat the sorcerer, and than all three heroes join forces to battle the demons.

The tale has been since adapted to animated film a number of times, including Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, the 1939 Popeye the Sailor cartoon.

In 1962 the Italian branch of the Walt Disney Company published the story Paperino e la grotta di Aladino (Donald

and Aladdin's Cave), written by Osvaldo Pavese and drawn by Pier Lorenzo De Vita. In it, Uncle Scrooge leads

Donald Duck and their nephews on an expedition to find the treasure of Aladdin and they encounter the Middle Eastern counterparts of the Beagle Boys. Scrooge describes Aladdin as a brigand who used the legend of the lamp to cover the origins of his ill-gotten gains. They find the cave holding the treasure which is blocked by a huge rock and it requires a variation of "Open Sesame" to open it, thus providing a link to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.[8] In the 1960s Bollywood produced Aladdin and Sinbad, very loosely based on the original, in which the two named heroes get to meet and share in each other's adventures. In this version, the lamp's djinni (genie) is female and Aladdin marries her rather than the princess (she becomes a mortal woman for his sake).

A Soviet film Volshebnaia Lampa Aladdina ("Aladdin's Magic Lamp") was released in 1966.

The anitamted feature "Aladdin et la lampe merveilleuse" [9] was released in 1970 by Film Jean Image in France. The story has a lot of the original elements of the story comparing it with the Disney version and was translated in several languages.

In 1979 kollywood produced "Allaudinaum Arputha Vilakkum" starring big Tamil actors such as Kamal Haasan as Aladdin, Rajinikanth,and many big stars

In 1982 Media Home Entertainment released Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.

Gary Wong and Rob Robson produced Aladdin the Rock Panto in 1985. The GSODA Junior Players recently staged the production at the Geelong Performing Arts Centre in June 2009.

In 1986, the program Faerie Tale Theatre based an episode based on the story called "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp".

In 1986, an Italian-American co-production (under supervision of Golan-Globus) of a modern-day Aladdin was filmed in Miami under the title Superfantagenio, starring actor Bud Spencer as the genie and his daughter Diamante as the daughter of a police sergeant.

Currently the form in which the medieval tale is best known, especially to the very young, is Aladdin, the 1992 animated feature by Walt Disney Feature Animation. In this version several characters are renamed and/or amalgamated (for instance the Sorcerer and the Sultan's vizier become the same person, while the Princess becomes "Jasmine"), have new motivations for their actions (the Lamp Genie now desires freedom from his role) or are simply replaced (the Ring Genie disappears, but a magic carpet fills his place in the plot). The setting is moved from China to the fictional Arabian city of Agrabah, and the structure of the plot is simplified.

Broadway Junior has released Aladdin Junior, a children's musical based on the music and screenplay of the Disney animation.

One of the many retellings of the tale appears in A Book of Wizards and A Choice of Magic, by Ruth Manning-Sanders.

There was also a hotel and casino in Las Vegas named Aladdin from 1963 to 2007.

The game Sonic and the Secret Rings is heavily based on the story of Aladdin, and both genies appear in the story. The genie of the lamp is the main villain, known in the game as the Erazor Djinn, and the genie of the ring, known in the game as Shahra, appears as Sonic's sidekick and guide through the game. Furthermore, the ring genie is notably lesser than the lamp genie in the story.

While only featured for a short segment of the film, the story of Aladdin was used as a metaphor for the Law of Attraction in the 2006 self-development film The Secret.

See also

• The Bronze Ring

• Jack and His Golden Snuff-Box • The Tinder Box

• One Thousand and One Nights • Arabian mythology

References

[1] John Payne, Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp and Other Stories, (London 1901) gives details of Galland's encounter with 'Hanna' in 1709 and of the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin and two more of the 'interpolated' tales. Text of "Alaeddin and the enchanted lamp" (http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index.htm)

[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14221

[3] Plotz, Judith Ann (2001). Romanticism and the vocation of childhood. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 148–149. ISBN 0312227353. [4] Moon, Krystyn (2005). Yellowface. Rutgers University Press. pp. 23. ISBN 0813535077.

[5] Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (1961). Section I "The Imaginary Continent".

[6] Pantomime Guided Tour: Aladdin (http://www.peopleplayuk.org.uk/guided_tours/pantomime_tour/the_origins_of_pantomime_stories/ aladdin.php) (PeoplePlay – Theatre Museum) accessed 10 July 2008

[7] "Aladdin" (http://www.its-behind-you.com/aladdin.html). . Retrieved 2008-01-22. [8] http://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL++344-AP

[9] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187687/

External links

• "Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp" (http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Payne/aladdin/p13_index.htm), in John Payne, Oriental Tales vol. 13

• Alaeddin (http://xahlee.org/p/arabian_nights/aladdin/aladdin.html), by Sir Richard Francis Burton. (in HTML and annotated)

• The Thousand Nights and a Night in several classic translations (http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index. htm), with additional material, including Payne's introduction (http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Payne/ aladdin/p13_index.htm) and quotes from Galland's diary.

• The Arabian Nights by Andrew Lang (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/128) at Project Gutenberg • Aladdin Junior (http://www.broadwayjr.com/store/showkitproduct.asp?oid=14), the Broadway Junior

Ali Baba

Ali Baba by Maxfield Parrish (1909). Ali Baba (Arabic: علي بابا ʿAli Bāba) is a fictional

character from medieval Arabic literature. He is described in the adventure tale of Ali Baba and the

Forty Thieves. Some critics believe that this story

was added to One Thousand and One Nights by one of its European translators, Antoine Galland, an 18th-century French orientalist who may have heard it in oral form from a Middle Eastern story-teller from Aleppo. However, Richard F. Burton claimed it to be part of the original One Thousand and One

Nights.

This story has been used as a popular pantomime plot—perhaps most famously in the pantomime/musical Chu Chin Chow (1916). Like many other folk tales frequently adapted for children, the original tale is darker and more violent than the more familiar bowdlerised versions. Popular perception of Ali Baba, and the way he is treated in popular media, sometimes implies that he was the leader of the "Forty Thieves": in the story he is actually an "honest man"[1] whom fortune enables to take advantage of the thieves' robberies.

Story

Ali Baba and his elder brother Cassim are the sons of a merchant. After the death of their father, the greedy Cassim marries a wealthy woman and becomes well-to-do, building on their father's business - but Ali Baba marries a poor woman and settles into the trade of a woodcutter.

One day Ali Baba is at work collecting and cutting firewood in the forest, and he happens to overhear a group of forty thieves visiting their treasure store. The treasure is in a cave, the mouth of which is sealed by magic. It opens on the words "Open, Simsim" (commonly written as "Open Sesame" in English), and seals itself on the words "Close, Simsim" ("Close Sesame"). When the thieves are gone, Ali Baba enters the cave himself, and takes some of the treasure home.

Ali Baba borrows his sister-in-law's scales to weigh this new wealth of gold coins. Unbeknownst to Ali, she puts a blob of wax in the scales to find out what Ali is using them for, as she is curious to know what kind of grain her impoverished brother-in-law needs to measure. To her shock, she finds a gold coin sticking to the scales and tells her husband, Ali Baba's rich and greedy brother, Cassim. Under pressure from his brother, Ali Baba is forced to reveal the secret of the cave. Cassim goes to the cave and enters with the magic words, but in his greed and excitement over the treasures forgets the magic words to get back out again. The thieves find him there, and kill him. When his brother does not come back, Ali Baba goes to the cave to look for him, and finds the body, quartered and with each piece displayed just inside the entrance of the cave to discourage any similar attempts in the future.

Ali Baba brings the body home, where he entrusts Morgiana, a clever slave-girl in Cassim's household, with the task of making others believe that Cassim has died a natural death. First, Morgiana purchases medicines from an

apothecary, telling him that Cassim is gravely ill. Then, she finds an old tailor known as Baba Mustafa whom she pays, blindfolds, and leads to Cassim's house. There, overnight, the tailor stitches the pieces of Cassims' body back together, so that no one will be suspicious. Ali and his family are able to give Cassim a proper burial without anyone asking awkward questions.

The thieves, finding the body gone, realize that yet another person must know their secret, and set out to track him down. One of the thieves goes down to the town and comes across Baba Mustafa, who mentions that he has just sewn a dead man's body back together. Realizing that the dead man must have been the thieves' victim, the thief asks Baba Mustafa to lead the way to the house where the deed was performed. The tailor is blindfolded again, and in this state he is able to retrace his steps and find the house. The thief marks the door with a symbol. The plan is for the other thieves to come back that night and kill everyone in the house. However, the thief has been seen by Morgiana and she, loyal to her master, foils his plan by marking all the houses in the neighborhood with a similar marking. When the 40 thieves return that night, they cannot identify the correct house and the head thief kills the lesser thief. The next day, another thief revisits Baba Mustafa and tries again, only this time, a chunk is chipped out of the stone step at Ali Baba's front door. Again Morgiana foils the plan by making similar chips in all the other doorsteps. The second thief is killed for his stupidity as well. At last, the head thief goes and looks for himself. This time, he memorizes every detail he can of the exterior of Ali Baba's house.

The chief of the thieves pretends to be an oil merchant in need of Ali Baba's hospitality, bringing with him mules loaded with thirty-eight oil jars, one filled with oil, the other thirty-seven hiding the other remaining thieves. Once Ali Baba is asleep, the thieves plan to kill him. Again, Morgiana discovers and foils the plan, killing the thirty-seven thieves in their oil jars by pouring boiling oil on them. When their leader comes to rouse his men, he discovers that they are dead, and escapes.

To exact revenge, after some time the thief establishes himself as a merchant, befriends Ali Baba's son (who is now in charge of the late Cassim's business), and is invited to dinner at Ali Baba's house. The thief is recognized by Morgiana, who performs a dance with a dagger for the diners and plunges it into the heart of the thief when he is off his guard. Ali Baba is at first angry with Morgiana, but when he finds out the thief tried to kill him, he gives Morgiana her freedom and marries her to his son. Ali Baba is then left as the only one knowing the secret of the treasure in the cave and how to access it. Thus, the story ends happily for everyone except the forty thieves and Cassim.

Adaptations

• The story was made into an Egyptian movie in 1942 as "Ali Baba We El Arbeen Haramy" (Alibaba and the Forty Thieves), with Ali AlKassar playing the lead as Ali Baba, and the famous comedian actor Ismail Yasin as his assistant.

• A French film Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs starring Fernandel and Samia Gamal (1954). • A French telefilm starring Gérard Jugnot and Michèle Bernier (2007).

• In 1970s Alibaba story was adapted in a Bengali film called 'Morgiana Abdulla'.

• Bollywood film Ali Baba aur 40 Chor, starring Dharmendra, Hema Malini and Zeenat Aman, was largely based on this adventure tale.

• A Malaysian comedy film, Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (1960) which quite faithfully adhered to the tale's plot details, but introduced a number of anachronisms for humour, for example the usage of a truck by Kassim Baba to steal the robbers' loot.

• The story was made into a Tamil movie in 1955 as "Alibabhavum Narpathu Thirudargalum" (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) with M.G.Ramachandran playing the lead as Ali Baba and Bhanumathi Ramakrishna as Morgiana. • The story was adapted in the 1971 anime Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (アリババと４０匹の盗賊 Aribaba to

Yonjuppiki no Tozoku), storyboarded by Hayao Miyazaki.

• The concept of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was used for the last installment of Disney's Aladdin series,

Aladdin and the King of Thieves, released in 1996, introducing Cassim the King of Thieves as Aladdin's father.

• In the television mini-series Arabian Nights, the story is told faithfully with two major changes. The first is that when Morgiana discovers the thieves in the oil jars, she alerts Ali Baba and together with a friend, they release the jars on a street with a steep incline and allow them roll down to break open. Furthermore, the city guard is alerted and arrest the disoriented thieves as they emerge from their containers. Later when Morgiana defeats the thief leader, Ali Baba, who is young and has no children, marries the heroine himself.

• A film adaption Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was made in 1944. The film was remade in 1965 as The Sword of

Ali Baba. Frank Puglia portrayed the character named Kassim in both versions.

• At the United States Air Force Academy, Cadet Squadron 40 was originally nicknamed "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" before eventually changing its name to the "P-40 Warhawks"

• A mythopoeic novel by Tom Holt, 'Open Sesame', is based on characters from the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves"

• A Tamil Film with the name "Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum" was made in 1956 with M. G. Ramachandran and Bhanumathi Ramakrishna in the lead.