In the field of Middle East studies, the scholarly gaze often falls upon a series of core European translators of A Thousand and One Nights (or the Arabian Nights), such as Antoine Galland (1646–1715) and Richard Burton (1821–1890), while providing critical analysis of their translations. Mia Gerhardt's The Art of Storytelling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights (1963) further introduces the term “orphan tales”—stories such as Aladdin and Ali Baba that were added by Galland to his version of the Arabian Nights, which until recently had not been attributed to anyone. However, Paulo Lemos Horta's Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (2017) examines the literary context of translation by acknowledging the overlooked “storytellers, translators, and cultural insiders,” casting light on the oral story transmitter Hanna Diyab (2, 3). The main thread throughout the author's work evidences the downplaying and outright thievery by European translators from historical figures who provided information, or told tales, to them. All the while, Horta outlines the lives and contributions of these key collaborators as a crucial part of the translation process.

Previous scholarship expounds on the challenging relationship between Richard Burton and John Payne (1842–1916), underlining how Burton plagiarized much of Payne's work. Rather than merely focusing on the translators of the Arabian Nights, Marvellous Thieves brings to life the “intimate process of storytelling” of the Arabian Nights by showing cross-cultural collaboration between translators and collaborators (15). Comprising of an introduction and seven chapters that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book exposes how texts are sites of “translational or editorial labor” rather than a “stable object owned by a single author” (11). The introduction elucidates Horta's theoretical concern of incorporating critical literary theory, and the concept of world literature. At the same time, the methodological practice in Horta's approach showcases comparative elements between the original manuscript, translations, and oral traditions of the collaborators. As such, the reader becomes familiar with Diyab, a Syrian Maronite who had influence on Galland's translation, through Horta's elucidation of Diyab's memoir, a source “long neglected in the collections of the Vatican Library” (2). Essentially, Marvellous Thieves strikes down the commonly held belief that Antoine Galland mostly employed his experiences from the Levant in the story of Aladdin. In chapter 1, Horta explicates the difficulty of “disentangling the creative agency of Diyab and Galland in the production” of Aladdin and Ali Baba (54). Concomitantly, Diyab's travels in France, specifically the decadence of Versailles, heavily influenced his telling of the tale of Aladdin to Galland. The second chapter further explains how Diyab became acquainted with Galland through an intermediary named Paul Lucas, a French traveler and antiquarian who saw Diyab as linguistically beneficial whilst they met in Aleppo.

Aware of the plundered pasts and orientalist perceptions of the European translators, Horta highlights in chapter 3 the “close connection between the production of [the Arabian Nights] and the apparatus of colonial rule” as “critical features of the English translations that followed in the nineteenth century” (93). Horta then provides a glimpse into Edward William Lane's (1801–1876) manuscript as having been influenced by Osman, a Scotsman in Cairo who had supposedly adopted that name, and Lane's interest in the religious life and magical practices within Cairo, in the fourth chapter (174). In chapter 5, the author cogently elucidates Lane's translation as an inherently poor portrayal of women's agency in Cairo. Yet, Lane depended on insights by Cairo bookseller Sheikh Ahmad. Despite this engagement with the bookseller, Lane instilled within his translation a “Victorian knowledge of the Orient” and in tandem repressed the characters’ sexuality in the stories (216). The author then turns to Payne's relationship with Burton in the sixth chapter, stating that Payne was enthralled by Burton's cosmopolitan experience as a world traveler, explorer, and adventurer (218). While Burton would ultimately plagiarize Payne's translation of the Arabian Nights, Horta argues that Payne ignored the plagiarism by perceiving it as “a form of flattery through imitation” (254). The final chapter portrays the complex life of Burton and shows how the “Terminal Essay” at the beginning of his translation of the Arabian Nights disrupted European social norms. Horta further explains that Burton brought attention to homosexuality in Europe; yet, Burton's version capitalized on sexuality, violence, and comic tension, unlike Lane's Victorian interpretation of the Arabian Nights (247).

Marvellous Thieves is a major contribution to the study of the Arabian Nights as it makes use of overlooked primary sources such as Diyab's memoir. Horta shows the historical experience and literary culture that permeated the process of translation by capturing the storytelling and editorial relationship between translator and collaborator. The book should be of interest to both scholars of Middle Eastern literature and scholars of world literature who seek to understand the cross-cultural exchanges that occurred during translations of the Arabian Nights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, scholars who research plundered pasts through the lens of colonialism will recognize Horta's scholarly contribution. Vacillating between arguments, the author's work holds in tandem the presence of a didactic and literary relationship between the European translators and collaborators, and yet, an orientalist one which also consists of betrayal and theft. Due to the occurrence of complicated concepts, including “middle literature” and “Middle Arabic,” entwined in a precarious way, the book should be more useful for instructors and graduate students whose courses and research focuses on the Arabian Nights rather than university undergraduate syllabi (4).