1001 Nights with Animus

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Demiralp
Keyword(s):  
1001 Nights

The Arabic Novel: New Roots, New Routes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Holt
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Islamic Empire ◽  
1001 Nights ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.

The Movement of Ghosts: 1001 nights cast

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-3
Author(s):  
Barbara Campbell
Keyword(s):  
1001 Nights

scholarly journals Qamarayn

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Zayde Antrim
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Mutual Relation ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Sexual Encounters ◽  
1001 Nights

This two-part article argues that the earliest Arabic manuscripts of the 1001 Nights celebrate sameness, especially physical sameness, in sexual relationships to the extent that a category of erotic embodiment emerges that cannot be understood through a binary construction of sex. The first part of the article proposes a reading of a fifteenth-century manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies on their own terms. Eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. The resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. By contrast, when difference is stressed via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or threatening. The second part of the article presents a diachronic analysis of one story, “The Story of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. Manuscripts of the Nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest Arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. This case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.

Esther and Ancient Persian Storytelling

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
1001 Nights

This chapter argues that both the Hebrew and the Greek versions of Esther, as well as some ancient midrashim on the story, belonged to an ancient Persian storytelling context. Scholars have shown that Esther can be contextualized—historically or literarily—with reference to ancient Greek writings on Persia. In this chapter, it is shown that ancient Persian stories, which are preserved in Islamic-era texts, are just as important for the contextualization of Esther. Moreover, we revisit de Goeje’s theory regarding the possible relationship between Esther and the prologue of the 1001 Nights, and argue that although this theory was almost unanimously rejected by subsequent generations of scholars, aspects of it take on new meaning when considered as part of the Persian storytelling context that is argued for in this chapter.

Borges sobre la traducción / Borges on translation

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-39
Author(s):  
Suzanne Jill Levine
Keyword(s):  
Don Quixote ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Text Interpretation ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
1001 Nights ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Correct Translation ◽  
Sobre Todo

El presente artículo tiene por objeto exponer la personal teoría de Borges sobre la traducción, y en concreto la traducción literaria. A partir de la literatura secundaria, pero sobre todo de la propia obra de Borges al respecto ¾concretamente los ensayos Las dos maneras de traducir (1926), Las versiones homéricas (1932), Los traductores de las 1001 noches (1936), El enigma de Edward Fitzgerald (1951) y la «ficción» Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (1939)¾, se presentan y contextualizan las principales ideas del autor argentino, entre las que destaca el valor de la traducción como paradigma de lectura, escritura e interpretación de un texto. Asimismo se abordan aspectos que, si bien un sector de la teoría da hoy por supuestos, en su momento fueron pioneros, como son: la equiparación de original y traducción, la importancia del enfoque descriptivo y de la obra por encima del autor, el valor de la creatividad, la imposibilidad de que exista una sola traducción válida, el potencial de los errores de traducción, el concepto de ganancia a través de la traducción (no de pérdida), la (auto)censura y la ideología, etc. The aim of this article is to present Borges’ personal translation theory, particularly regarding literary translation. The Argentine author’s main ideas are introduced and contextualised through secondary literature, but especially through Borges’ own works in this regard ¾specifically the essays The Two Ways to Translate (1926), The Homeric Versions (1932), The Translators of the 1001 Nights (1936), The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald (1951) and the «ficción» Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1939). Among those ideas, the value of translation as a paradigm for reading, writing, and text interpretation stands out. The article also deals with aspects that were pioneering in their time, even though nowadays they are taken for granted by some scholars. Those aspects include placing both the original and the translation on an equal plane, the importance of the descriptive approach and of the work over the author, the value of creativity, the impossibility of there being only one correct translation, the potential of mistranslations, the notion of gain through translation (instead of loss), (self)censorship and ideology, etc.

scholarly journals Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses: A Foundational (Mis-)Translation

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Waisman
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Argentine Literature ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
1001 Nights ◽  
Latin American Literatures ◽  
De Man

Abstract In this article, I first introduce the deconstructionist idea of the error (drawn primarily from Paul de Man) as a potentially productive category, then combine this idea with what I call Borges’s theory of mis-translation, to analyze the foundational role of (mis-)translation in Argentine literature, focusing specifically on Borges’s 1925 version of the last page of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I go on to discuss Borges’s theory of mis-translation and its importance within an Argentine as well as a transnational context. In essays such as “Las versiones homéricas” [The Homeric Versions] and “Los traductores de Las 1001 Noches” [The Translators of The 1001 Nights], Borges posits that translations are not necessarily inferior to originals, and that a translation’s merits may actually reside in its creative infidelities. After delineating Borges’s irreverent position on translation, I carefully analyze Borges’s 1925 translation of the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses, to examine how Borges uses (mis-)translation to create a partial Argentine version of Joyce’s Modernist novel, which serves, among other things, a paradoxical foundational role in Argentine and Latin American literatures.

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