ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an undergraduate course on translations, adaptations, and rewritings of The One Thousand and One Nights. The course treats translations as translations so as to problematize notions of authenticity and originality while highlighting the role of translators as interpreters. The study of adaptations and rewritings enlarges students' understanding of the translators' role in constructing a text out of which other texts and media proliferate to form what we call "world literature". Students become aware that translation is essential to how we perceive the rest of the world as they develop skills in reading translations without sacrificing close reading to "distant reading". The course not only involves a cultural translation from a supposed medieval Arab literary tradition to what Pascale Casanova has called the "world republic of letters", but it also teaches students to read translations as artifacts of mediation between various cultural logics: Arabic-European, Eastern-Western, and Islamic-secular.