J. C. Mardrus

Joseph Charles Mardrus, otherwise known as "Jean-Charles Mardrus" (1868–1949), was a French physician, poet, and a noted translator. Today he is best known for his translation of the Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French, which was published from 1898 to 1904, and was in turn rendered into English by Edward Powys Mathers. A newer edition, Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit, was published in 1926–1932.

Mardrus's version of the Arabian Nights is mentioned explicitly in the pages of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Mardrus was an Orientalist and inserted a lot of material of his own, and his translation is therefore not wholly authentic. Much of the homosexual material for example, is an absolute invention of Mardrus himself, and so confuses the issue of actual homosexuality in the Nights, of which there is a substantial amount. Mardrus claimed that his translation was based on a previously unknown "Tunisian text", but this fictional manuscript was never seen by anyone else.