More than a millennium after its earliest tales began circulating, Alf Lela w Lela in Arabic and ‘Arabian Nights’ in English remains, in the literal sense, unfinished. She does this for a thousand and one nights. The main tale opens onto another, which opens onto another, and another, with no clear point of end. Antoine Galland, a French Arabist, published the first European translation, Les Mille et Une Nuits (One Thousand and One Nights, 1704 – 1717) in twelve volumes, based on an incomplete Syrian manuscript. A book whose thousand and one nights, scholars note, were always meant to suggest an idea of infinity —a story that, by design, never quite ends.