The impact of the Arabian Nights in Modern Egyptian narration: Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days as a Case Study

The Arabian Nights were passed orally for long eras, long before they were written down; the collective sense, through several anonymous narrators, developed them: changing, modifying, omitting and adding to this oral discourse. All for the purpose of entertaining the public according the spirit of the age and the socio-cultural contexts, afterwards, it was recorded in different versions, as diverse as their sources, up until the landmark version, namely the one printed in Bulak, Egypt in 1835.The West is to be commended on paying attention to the significance of The Arabian Nights, academically and creatively, before its original-home, especially since it was later translated to many languages. After French orientalist Antoine Galland (1646 - 1715) translated into French between 1704 and 1713 a third of the manuscript he had brought from the Orient.This study delves into “The Impact of The Arabian Nights on Modern Egyptian Narration”. The researcher tries to point out how Egyptian writers were inspired by the classic text by examining Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (Layālī alf laylah) as a case study. An analytic, text-based approach was used to detect the intertextual interaction between the classic and the modern, and to explore how classical elements and connotations were employed within the modern text.

O Simbólico, o Imaginário e o Real nas narrativas jesuítas: estudo comparado dos escritos de Manuel da Nóbrega e Luís Fróis (1549-1585)

The present work aims to provide a comparative analysis of the workings of the Companhia de Jesus in Brazil and Japan in the second half of the sixteenth century, before considering the activities of Portuguese Jesuit priest Luís Fróis (1532-1597) on the Japanese mission and his central importance to the written output and publication of the mission among European and Ignatian circles. In writing on the Japanese mission, Fróis introduces into his discourse the foreign voice of the native Japanese, giving them a voice in the texts and describing their rituals, customs, and way of life. A comparative analysis with the written output of Manuel de Nóbrega, who wrote on the Brazilian mission, indicates that the symbolic aspect of the written representation of difference, which may be located in Luis Fróis, is less pronounced or even absent from Nóbrega’s work, giving rise to the appearance of the other not as difference, but as similarity, diluted in the fifteenth-century European imaginative and rhetoric frameworks. To conclude, a general reading is carried out between the work of Luis Fróis and Antoine Galland, the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights.

Mahometan/Muslim: The Chronotope of the Oriental Tale

This chapter argues that we read the literary trend for the oriental tale that overtook England in the early part of the eighteenth century as one that extended beyond the metropolis. An essential element of the oriental tale, whether Antoine Galland and Grub Street’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or Francois de la Croix’s Turkish Tales, is the chronotope of the Mahometan—the imagined counterpart of the Ottoman or Mughal Muslim kings—a that figure defies Enlightenment modalities of ancient time and geographic origin. A ubiquitous figure in the English oriental tale, the Mahometan is constructed as a homeless potentate, a traveling merchant, an itinerant dervish, and a wanderer.

A NEGAÇÃO DO IMAGINÁRIO: notas sobre algumas traduções do Livro das Mil e uma Noites

O Livro das Mil e uma Noites chegou ao Ocidente em 1704, na tradução francesa de Antoine Galland. A partir daí, o texto nunca tomou uma forma definitiva, nunca constituiu uma versão canônica. Os manuscritos não coincidem, assim como as sucessivas edições e traduções. Trata-se de um livro eternamente inacabado, cujo destino é o de ser, também, eternamente reescrito. O artigo procura interpretar o movimento de algumas versões, as querelas entre tradutores e comentadores, a obsessão pela busca da versão original, do verdadeiro autor, ou do texto mais legítimo, questões que, ao fim e ao cabo, terminam por negar a dimensão do imaginário e da fantasia, que são, afinal, as mais essenciais do livro.