Tisuću i jedna noć

The first volume appeared in 1704, and eleven more were published in the next ten years. A hundred or more years later, more complete and precise translations were published into English, and then into German, so that during the twentieth century "One Thousand and One Nights" was published in a long series of intermediate editions, translations from major and better-known European languages, as well as retellings, reinterpretations, remake variants and adaptations to different needs. Or to the same human need to tell a story.

The Western myth of "One Thousand and One Nights", a worthy monument to the original, was created by Jorge Luis Borges. But at the same time, easy-to-consume, industrial myths were created from newsagents and from the factories of artificial children's worlds, the most famous of which was that of the great Walt Disney.

By the time the boy would have reached his first Borges, he already knew Ali Baba, Šeherzad, Aladdin and Sinbad through Politika's zabavnik. Reconciliation of these two worlds, the one that started with the columns Believe it or not and Did you hear that, with Miki's comics and Dikan and Stari Slaveni, and the one that created a brilliant blind man with the power of imagination and a series of his reading discoveries, was an important imperative of growing up.

"One Thousand and One Nights" is a great and unusual book, which by no means demands that Politika's entertainment be discarded in the name of Borges.