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Arabian Nights

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Re: Arabian Nights

#81

Post by idlewords »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #80
idlewords wrote: post #76

There's a really nice modern translation of the Arabian nights by Husain Haddawy, that is worth your time. The preface to that translation goes into a lot of fun detail about the book's complex trajectory, and its unhappy translations by Burton and others. The first volume contains the closest thing to Arabian Nights "canon". Haddawy then published a second volume with stories that glommed onto the text later, but ar…

Interesting. I have made it through only a third or so of the Mathers' translation (translated to English from the French translation). I started the Burton translation but found the wording - dense? It seemed it should be more authentic though since it was a direct English translation. Burton, as I have glimpsed, was quite a character.

Burton translated into a fantastical, archaicized, almost unreadable version of English of his own invention. The Haddaway introduction has some nice examples of his prose compared to a "straight" translation of the original text.

Re: Arabian Nights

#82

Post by vixen99 »

idlewords wrote: post #81
JKCalhoun wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I have made it through only a third or so of the Mathers' translation (translated to English from the French translation). I started the Burton translation but found the wording - dense? It seemed it should be more authentic though since it was a direct English translation. Burton, as I have glimpsed, was quite a character.

Burton translated into a fantastical, archaicized, almost unreadable version of English of his own invention. The Haddaway introduction has some nice examples of his prose compared to a "straight" translation of the original text.

Amazing how the 'almost unreadable' Burton's Thousand Nights continues to sell to this day, even on Kindle. As far as I can gather, there is plenty of sexual imagery in the original manuscript undoubtedly emphasized by Burton. Suggestions of really gross mis-translation or invention by Burton, seem to be thin on the ground.

Re: Arabian Nights

#83

Post by ernesth »

bloak wrote: post #67
mrwnmonm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a place governed by the military, and they like to block things. But I have no idea why a country like Germany would do that.

This might have something to do with it: https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html (Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin are out of copyright in the USA, but not in Germany, but obviously there's more to it than that because different countries having different copyright durations is a very normal situation.)

There is nothing more to it: Project Gutenberg distributed books in Germany that are not in the Public Domain there. The rights holder sued. PG was condemned to stop distributing those books in Germany. PG complied by blocking the whole site in Germany.

No country has the same copyright law as USA. In those other countries, Project Gutenberg has not yet been sued. (Edit: and probably in some countries, people downloading from PG would be the only one in illegality, not PG)

For example Alfred Döblin's and Thomas Mann's books are not in the public domain in all of Europe, in most of South America, or in Australia.

Re: Arabian Nights

#84

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

eternalban wrote: post #56

This little bit of cultural misappropriation has always bugged me. Oddly enough, it is always the Europeans insisting on these Persian/Iranian matters being "Arab". I seriously wonder if this is still nursing ancient Persian Greek/Roman rivalries and is a byproduct of a chauvinist classical education of the European educated set of 19th century. I find it very strange. In the OP, we have a female Persian name (Shahrz…

The version of these tales that became internationally famous date from a time after Persia had already been under Arabic and Muslim influence for centuries and the Persian language had become replete with Arabic borrowings. It is the same reason that many of the traditions and foreign words borrowed into the cultures of Central Asia and the Volga–Kama region are generally referred to as "Arabo-Persian", even though those peoples were dealing mainly with Persian speakers and rarely met an actual Arab.

Re: Arabian Nights

#85

Post by Digit-Al »

natemcintosh wrote: post #47

I would highly recommend the musical interpretation by Rimsky-Korsakov ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade_(Rimsky-Korsakov) . The violin soloist as Scheherazade leads the Sultan through the stories. See the Overview section of the wikipedia page for her theme, and his theme. It's a piece I always love to come back to.

I've enjoyed that one since I was a child. Funnily enough I listened to it just a few weeks ago after having not listened to it for years.

Re: Arabian Nights

#86

Post by idlewords »

vixen99 wrote: post #82
idlewords wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burton translated into a fantastical, archaicized, almost unreadable version of English of his own invention. The Haddaway introduction has some nice examples of his prose compared to a "straight" translation of the original text.

Amazing how the 'almost unreadable' Burton's Thousand Nights continues to sell to this day, even on Kindle. As far as I can gather, there is plenty of sexual imagery in the original manuscript undoubtedly emphasized by Burton. Suggestions of really gross mis-translation or invention by Burton, seem to be thin on the ground.

I just referred you to a source for both. Burton is more inspired fanfic than translation. Some people like it!

Re: Arabian Nights

#87

Post by gjm11 »

vixen99 wrote: post #82
idlewords wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burton translated into a fantastical, archaicized, almost unreadable version of English of his own invention. The Haddaway introduction has some nice examples of his prose compared to a "straight" translation of the original text.

Amazing how the 'almost unreadable' Burton's Thousand Nights continues to sell to this day, even on Kindle. As far as I can gather, there is plenty of sexual imagery in the original manuscript undoubtedly emphasized by Burton. Suggestions of really gross mis-translation or invention by Burton, seem to be thin on the ground.

The trouble with Burton isn't inaccuracy so much as unreadability, or at least clumsiness, because he translated into an idiosyncratic variety of English never used by anyone else before or since.

Here's an example from the introduction to Dawood's translation, which I happen to have handy:

"But she rejoined by saying, 'Allah upon you both that ye come down forthright, and if you come not, I will rouse upon you my husband, this Ifrit, and he shall do you to die by the illest of deaths'; and she continued making signals to them."

I'm sure that's an accurate enough translation of the relevant bit of the Nights. But it's not good English. "Allah upon you"? "do you to die by the illest of deaths"? Maybe the idea is to give it an exotic flavour, but the stories themselves provide enough of that, and so far as I know the original language wouldn't feel exotic to a native reader.

Re: Arabian Nights

#88

Post by minikites »

somethingtoday wrote: post #54
Iv wrote: post #32

Always fun to remind people that Aladdin is actually Chinese in the original stories. But then, let's be fair, their depiction of China sounds like it was just a placeholder for "far away land"

Even to this day, the word China in Arabic (pronounced "seen") means far away. So if your friend lives across town and you are inconvenienced, in Arabic you would say "why do you live in China?".

Taking "the slow boat to China" is an idiom in English for a long duration or long journey.

Re: Arabian Nights

#90

Post by toast0 »

depressedpanda wrote: post #77
robin_reala wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question comes up a lot. The source to our production pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest part of why we produce good work is that we have a high quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part is very specific to English, and that’s the difficult part to replicate for other languages. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/ [2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/

Not that I doubt you, but what about the manual is very specific to English and wouldn't work for other languages?

From a brief look, the typography section of the manual is definitely language specific. Different written languages often have a much different typographic convention; depending on the language, different countries using it may have major or minor differences in conventions. And of course, there are different interpretations of the convention; they've included by reference a specific version of the Chicago Manual of Style. For another language, you'd need to at least need a different exhaustive manual to reference, as well as changing or reviewing the specific guidelines.

That's work that really needs to be done by a fluent, literate user of that language, hopefully with background in that language's literature and experience in copyediting, and familiarity with publishing. It's not really work you can demand of someone who did a good job (I assume) of it in English; they won't do a good job of it in another language without deep experience in that language. Developing and publishing the works in the language also needs to be done by people fluent in the language.

The example of the English version can be a guide for other languages, and there's of course room for collaboration on software between languages, but asking the English language project to expand to other languages is unlikely to get good results unless the developers also are fluent in those languages.

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