After ten centuries of its creation, the stories of One Thousand and One Nights still continue to stimulate the imagination of readers around the world. Borges warmed that reading it can lead to madness. Mario Vargas Llosa made it in the theatre. Disney produced an animated film with the story of Aladdin. And the names of Ali Baba or Sinbad the Sailor sound familiar in the five continents. The fascination of this work is usually explained by appealing to its portentous narrative magnitude or its historical importance in the formation of the Arab identity. But it is usually disparaged one defining characteristic, if not its quality, at least for literary success: One Thousand and One Nights are full of sex. Throughout the nearly three thousand pages of One Thousand and One Nights, infidelity, polygamy and sexual exchange in all its variants are among the most repeated ingredients. However, great works are precisely so, because they deal with universal topics. And there are few such universal themes as sex. All human beings have one. And there are even those who have more then one. Nowadays, of course, nobody is shocked by the erotic allusions of this book. With the eyes of 21st century, the sensuality of One Thousand and One Nights is a touching innocence. With the promiscuity of the body, this book faces us with the promiscuity of tales. Their stories touch, mix, nurture, father and contaminate each other, it is difficult to determine the mother or partner of which one. Therefore One Thousand and One Nights is a narrative bacchanalia. The work celebrates the joy of senses, but also of intellect, even interchangeable in those nights when the king delivers himself to the arms and stories of Scheherezade. The themes of these stories, in general, are the same ones as found in Shakespeare or Cervantes: power, adventure, travel, betrayal. But two main themes that run though the pages are the relationships between sexes and literature. While both things still exist, this book will dazzle us with the wit and prank. And if one day they stop to do it, the humans would not have many reasons to continue without them.

Authors

One Thousand and One Nights is a daughter with no known parents. Philologists still debate whether he is Arab, Persian or Indian. And we do not know if it is the work of a compiler or the fruit of a collective creation. It is not even clear whether it arose as we know it, or grew fat throughout centuries of popular tradition, adding new stories as an empire annexes new territories. Their relationships are obvious. His affiliation, inextricable.

Santiago Roncagliolo. Foreword.

Miguel Carini. Illustrations.