Work for Tuesday’s class

March 11, 2017 · by · in instructor's note

Hi everyone,

Thank you for posting on the themes from “Situating Thousand and One Nights.” Please read each other’s posts so you have a good understanding of the context of this collection of stories. Tuesday we’re going to focus on the different translations of Thousand and One Nights, so I would like you to do the following:

  1. Go to this site, which has five different translations of the text (see “complete versions by Burton – Dixon – Lang – Payne – Scott” at the top of the page).
  2. Select a story that appears in two different translations, and then read both stories focusing on their differences.
  3. Note where in the stories you find striking differences and copy those specific paragraph(s) in a separate Word document.
  4. In that same document, write a paragraph analyzing these differences. Print this page and bring it to class.
  5. Optionally, you can do some research on the translator to inform your analysis. When was this translation done? Where’s the author from? What time period is he writing in? Who is his main audience?

If you don’t know which story to select, you may consider the following:

 

  • The Story of the Merchant and the Demon
  • The First Old Man’s Tale
  • The Second Old Man’s Tale

 

You can also compare translations of the frame story that you read for Thursday’s class (“The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad,” sometimes called “The Story of King Shahryar and his Brother”), or one of the stories popularized in the West by Disney and others, such as Aladdin or Sindbad the Sailor (you don’t have to read the whole story if you select a really long one; just focus on a few pages). 

Note that not all stories have the exact same titles in different translations, so you might have to search for them a bit.