Translations of the Arabian Nights, by Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement
| Dates: | 5 November 2015 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | Current University students, General public, University staff |
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| Speaker: | Robert Irwin |
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Part of the CTIS Research Seminar Series. All welcome, no registration necessary. Abstract: Translators of Beowulf, Proust, J.K. Rowling, and motor-car maintenance manuals have it easy, as they and their target audience are clear about what is being translated. This is not the case with The Arabian Nights, or, more correctly The Thousand and One Nights. First, it has never been clear which stories properly belong to that story collection and which recension of those stories it would be best to translate. Secondly, there has been a long tradition of Nights translators lying about what they were actually translating. In what follows I shall discuss the major translators of the Nights into English and French and their various malpractices and denounce Borges’s famous essay, ‘The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights’. I shall also trace the evolution of the idea of translation from (1) improving something barbarous by putting it into a more civilised language to (2) registering the exoticism and primitivism of the original in the translation to (3) aiming for transparency, though perhaps it is difficult to clear as to what ‘transparency’ is.
Speaker
Robert Irwin
Role: Consultant Editor
Organisation: Times Literary Supplement
Travel and Contact Information
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A113
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
