Volume 45, Issue 3-4

Translations of the Arabian Nights into non-Western languages have received little attention. A Hawaiian-language translation of selections of the Arabian Nights , published in the 1870s, was part of the Hawaiian-language newspapers' large-scale production of foreign texts in translation and of printed Hawaiian narratives that had been circulating orally. Sharing an interest in the politics of translation, a fairy-tale scholar with an interest in gender and a Hawaiian historian and practicing translator examine He Kaao Arabia as a foreign kaao (fiction or tale of wonder) within the dynamics of western and Hawaiian “storytelling" played out in the newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa .

This article discusses three variants of the tale of “Aladdin and the magic lamp,” one of the most famous tales from the Arabian Nights . The variants, collected from Makran in Pakistani Balochistan in 1996, 1997 and 2003 from two illiterate non-professional storytellers, are compared with the tale as it appears in the Nights in order to show how a highly popular tale with a strong written tradition is transformed in oral tradition, and how oral storytellers feel free to creatively modify such a famous tale.

Turkish versions of the Arabian Nights have enjoyed a great popularity. On the one hand, there are translations designed for a popular adult audience. On the other, the Arabian Nights have been perceived as an appropriate source for the entertainment of children. My contribution aims to analyze various issues concerning the Turkish translations. Some of the questions are: What were the political and cultural reasons for translating the Arabian Nights into Turkish? What were the criteria for editing and revising the material for children's literature? In pursuing these questions, I venture into the relationship between literature and cultural politics.

Little evidence is left of Arab rule in Sicily. Frederick II created a school of translation where the Oriental collection of fables, Kalila wa Dimna , was translated. Sicilian oral tradition has preserved stories inspired by the Thousand and One Nights . In the nineteenth century the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè gathered stories from Sicilian oral tradition in which one recognises numerous motifs belonging to the Nights . In my contribution, I discuss Sicilian stories of Oriental origin in order to demonstrate analogies and differences.

The present contribution deals with the occurrence of the Thousand and One Nights in East Africa and offers a survey of available data relating to the Swahili-speaking coast of Kenya and Tanzania. Issues discussed include: (1) versions of tales from the Nights documented between 1860 and 1890 that can be related to printed Arabic sources; (2) the canonical edition of Alfu Lela Ulela (1929) translated as part of the colonial endeavour and aiming to mediate world literature in the perspective of the British Empire; and (3) a new project of translating the Nights into the Swahili language initiated in 1996.

This paper focuses on two cultural developments in Germany and their intersection in the period from 1880 to 1935. One of these developments is the robust reception of the Arabian Nights in print. The other is the emergence of visual culture in the form of motion pictures. The paper shows how the literary reception of the Arabian Nights as a visual experience can help explain why filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch ( Sumurun , 1920), Fritz Lang ( Der müde Tod , 1921), and Paul Leni ( Das Wachsfigurenkabinett , 1924) adapted the content and narrative structure of the Arabian Nights in their cinematic work.

This essay is concerned with the links between the Arabian Nights and Iranian Culture. While the links are to some extent quite obvious and have been extensively discussed in previous research, some implications are less visible. In surveying these links, I discuss five major areas: (1) The Iranian prototype of the Nights ; (2) Tales of alleged Persian origin; (3) Persian characters within the tales; (4) Persian translations of the Arabian Nights ; and (5) The position of the Arabian Nights in modern Iran.

Considerable scholarship has developed tracing possible oral sources for important examples of early written literature, as well as the observable features of oral narrative style and the processes of oral performance and transmission in various traditions and settings. The specific changes in a written narrative, when it turns, or returns, to oral performance and transmission, have not received as much attention. This paper examines one case of transformation of a story from Alf Laylah in its nineteenth century literary Persian translation, and thence into an oral performance recorded in pre-war Afghanistan. The comparison identifies elements of the then-current oral folktale style in Dari (Afghan Persian), both in plot structure and gross content, and in surface stylistics, that the teller(s) introduced into the performance of a tale for which the present performer identified a specific published edition as his source.

This essay deals with common aspects between the Arabian Nights and the corpus of Greek folktales collected from oral tradition. It is introduced by a survey of the most important Greek translations of the Nights , from the second half of the eighteenth century up to the 1920s. The following comparison shows several degrees of exchange between the two narrative corpora. At the same time, various plots and themes in Greek popular tradition have often evolved in unexpected ways, probably because of a distinct cultural background and different ways of transmission. The further discussion focusses on the motif of the “Swan Maiden” and related tales as an interesting example of the interaction between the Nights and Greek oral tradition.