by Paulo Lemos Horta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2017
An insightful examination of a significant literary work and the fraught complexities of translation.
From its origin, the Thousand and One Nights has been frequently translated, embellished, and transformed.
In his debut book, a fascinating work of cultural and literary history, Horta (Literature/New York Univ. Abu Dhabi) investigates the transmutations of the influential collection of Arabic tales, purportedly invented by Shahrazad to distract her husband, King Shahriyar, from murdering young women in his kingdom. In the second half of the eighth century C.E., Horta asserts, the collection was first translated from Persian into Arabic; since then, additional stories have been added by Arabic and European translators, including the familiar “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.” “The Thousand and One Nights,” writes the author, “must be understood not as a singular work but as an array of texts” that underwent constant interaction with other cultures, which incorporated into the collection “love stories, trickster tales, historical epics, tales of the supernatural, animal fables, and tales of heroic journeys to foreign lands.” Eventually, it became “one of the key texts in the emergence of world literature in French and English.” Horta focuses on several significant translators: Antoine Galland, the first French translator of the tales; Pre-Raphaelite poet John Payne; British Orientalist Edward William Lane; and the intrepid explorer Richard Francis Burton, who disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim to travel to Mecca and Medina in 1853. Besides offering a close reading of the translations, Horta draws on a memoir by Diyab, a Syrian traveler who told the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba to Galland; Lane’s notebooks and correspondence; and drafts of Burton’s translation. These sources reveal “partnerships and rivalries” that shaped each translator’s text. In investigating Diyab’s influence, for example, Horta notes, “the context of amorality and violence that characterized Diyad’s travels survives in these tales even after Galland’s stylish adaptation of the stories to meet French expectations of an Oriental tale.”
An insightful examination of a significant literary work and the fraught complexities of translation.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-54505-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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translated by Yasmine Seale ; edited by Paulo Lemos Horta
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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