The translators of The Thousand and One Nights

Borges, Jorge Luís; Allen, Esther

doi:10.4324/9780429280641-16

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Following this experience, Khalid decides to spend his time "with the huris." 58 Turning himself into a long-haired dervish-gigolo, he wanders from one spiritual meeting of New York City's many "Don't Worry Circles of Metaphysical Societies" 59 to another. When he first enters into a liaison with a bohemian woman, she is drawn to his Middle-Eastern background.…”

Section: An Arab (Drago)man In New York and The Cultural Imaginary Of Confrontationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This exchange goes significantly beyond the adaptation and extension of certain themes, motifs, or stylistic devices. Beginning with two short stories explicitly ascribed to the Nights and published in his Universal History of Infamy 57 and the famous ironic essay on "The Translators of the 1001 Nights," 58 the Borgesian corpus regularly presents itself as an equally intimate and ironic re-articulation of the Arabic classic and its fictocritical spirit. 59 The tales and their curious mistranslations function as a template for Borges's own infinite textuality of (re-)reading and (re-)writing, questioning claims of originality and authorship, and framing translation as a polemical tool of creation.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…57 Others, like Philip L. Simpson or Tim Jon Semmerling, take a slightly more critical stance. While Semmerling is first and foremost interested in the racialized threat to American family and community values which the Arab demon symbolically represents, 58 Simpson not only reads the novel as the anticipation of "geopolitical hostilities to come" 59 but, in addition, interprets it as "an enduring supernatural melodrama of the impossibility of assimilation." 60 In this view, The Exorcist demonstrates "the deep-seated American fear of the invasive Middle Eastern Other."…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Funk and Sitka, "Timetable of Events in Ameen F.Rihani's Life and in the World,[53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62] Dawn, "The Origins of Arab Nationalism," 11. 193 Rihani, The Book of Khalid 134.…”

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Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies

Schmitz¹

2020

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Endings as Desert(ed) Starts"I take a long breath, the air of anticipation." 1 This is how Rabih Alameddine's 2013 novel An Unnecessary Woman ends. After Aliya, the fragile and equally eloquent Lebanese character at the center of the novel, has narrated her own tragic life story-the story of a lonely producer of unpublished (hence seemingly useless or at least unnecessary) Arabic literary transferences from English and French translations of works originally written in German, Italian, or Spanish-she decides for the first time to do direct translations of French or English novels into Arabic. No longer allowing the two former colonial languages to allegorically demarcate the limits of her own socio-psychological world, the elderly woman leaves the determination of what her next project will be to chance. The only thing she seems confident about is that she will give up translating from a second-order distance that doubly removes her from the source text. The toss-up regarding her next translational endeavor is between J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) 2 and Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires dʼHadrien (1951). 3 It shall be decided by a neighbor's way of stopping at her door: "If she rings my doorbell, my next project will be Hadrian, if she knocks, then it's Barbarians." 4 The reader does not learn what happens next. We are informed neither about the Arabic translator's future nor about her next translation's afterlife. Instead, the ending perpetuates the very moment of beginning a translation. Anticipating the possibility of other postnovelistic beginnings, it stresses the tension between the narrating self and the act of narrating itself. 5 I will elaborate on the particular non-conclusiveness and importance of narrative beginnings in Alameddine's writing in a later chapter, and I shall repeatedly come back to the scandal of unpredictable cross-cultural translations throughout this study when discussing the various Anglophone Arab ways of managing the

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Section: An Arab (Drago)man In New York and The Cultural Imaginary Of Confrontationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies

Schmitz¹

2020

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“…This way of looking at meaning made Borges looks at different and unfaithful nineteenth-century translations of the famous The Thousand and One Night with applauding appreciation. For example, when Borges (1935) talks about Jean-Charles Mardrus's translation, Borges argues against being faithful to the original and stating it clearly that in order "To celebrate Mardrus's fidelity is to leave out the soul of Mardrus, to ignore Murdrus entirely. It is his infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity that must matter to us.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Nietzschean Contributions to Translation

Alwadani¹

2023

AWEJ‑tls

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Post-Nietzschean thought has subverted the metaphysics of essentialist Platonic thinking about meaning. It has made significant contributions to elevating translation to a superior position after being considered inferior and secondary by essentialist thinking for more than two millennia. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: What insights do we gain from post-Nietzschean thought into meaning, and how might these impact the future of translation? We will shed light on some of the significant post-Nietzschean contributions that have paved the way for various insights into translation. These insights primarily contradict the essentialist viewpoint on the concept of meaning in translation, which has long regarded translation as inferior to the original. This paper adopts a corpus-based method that focuses mainly on Jorge Luis Borges’ enriching analysis of The Translators of The Thousand and One Night and Jacques Derrida’s reasonable letter entitled A Letter to a Japanese Friend. It also incorporates some other relevant arguments, including the work of Rosemary Arrojo, which contrasts many key post-Nietzschean contributions to provide anti-platonic perspectives on translation’s role in the formation of meaning and identity. This study suggests that post-Nietzschean perspectives on meaning may prompt us to reconsider our understanding of meaning and the original text, as well as our approach to translating and teaching translation.

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Translation or Adaptation?

Found¹

2017

J. of Class. Teach.

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I guess the first issue that comes to mind when considering classical works in translation is ‘what is the actual purpose of the text?’ In the Classical Civilisation classroom, we are introducing students to ancient societies and ancient cultures that they will discuss in English. Apart from the fact that few, if any, of our own (state school) students will have any experience in Latin or ancient Greek, I have to question the validity of the argument some use that Classics must be studied in its original language in order fully to understand and appreciate the ancient authors.

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The translators of The Thousand and One Nights

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies

Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies

Post-Nietzschean Contributions to Translation

Translation or Adaptation?

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