The Art of Translation: Shaharzad's Legacy

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices. 

But the text we’ll be examining, 1001 Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike with the Proust that we discussed in the first episode, there is not one fixed source text to work with. There were many retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, which were then written down as many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”?