Paper Prompts
#1: Both Dante Alighieri and authors of One Thousand and One Nights reference their native land in their works. In the Inferno, Dante speaks to spirits of fellow Florentines about the future of the city, while Middle Eastern and Indian cities, where the stories were collected from, were frequently used as the setting of the stories. Despite this similarity, the incorporation of native locations and events seem to have very different effects, since Dante’s stories have an overall fantastical setting (in hell) whereas One Thousand and One Nights was supposed to have worldly locations. Does the references add or take away anything from the stories themselves? What would the stories be like if these references were removed?
#2: From Dante’s “Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe” to Wang Wei’s “That splendid things are empty, of course, I know”, the masters left us interesting mysteries. Are these mysteries by the authors or made by translators? Are they intentional or by mistake? How do these impact the works themselves? Does it matter which source it is from?