Yasmine Seale 4/5 Lecture

“Banish your embarrassment about the Nights,” Yasmine Seale encouraged the attendees of her talk “Always Almost: Approaching The 1001 Nights” emphasizing its vast history and influence. If only I could’ve heard this before the start of the MFA program’s translation seminar on the Thousand and One Nights. Admittedly, before the seminar, I was shy about the fact that my familiarity with the Nights came mostly from Disney. Now, my embarrassment is gone but only because of how much I’ve learned over the course of the semester.


Even so, with this Seale led us into her beautiful talk discussing the magnitude and ever-evolving nature of the Nights. “This work could go on forever,” she said, portraying the Nights as all afterlife and as a tradition rather than a fixed text. “All we have are versions upon versions.” She shared that while the Nights is like an onion with layers that leads to a core of ‘nothing,’ it reached it’s most glorious form in Arabic. Seale, both Arab and Arabist, discussed returning to the love of her life—Arabic—after being commissioned to translate twelve of the Nights orphan tales from 18th century French. Her commissioned then ‘mushroomed’ into a full volume. Later in the talk, she stressed that the Nights is a living organism that changes with each transmission.


For Seale, it was important to consider her approach to the Nights in order to reconcile being a part of a hostile dynasty. She asked herself, “What more can I do with it? Where does it want to go next in its English life?” Style, structure, and sensibility were her answers. Seale, with a background in theater and translating Syrian theater works, emphasized that the text must work in performance. This immediately brought to mind an example we examined in our Nights seminar that showcases this perfectly. Malcolm Lyons translated this line from the story of Dalila the Crafty as, “Zainab now told her mother to play some trick to win them a reputation in Baghdad and get them the salary that her father had been paid.” In contrast, Seale’s translation reads, “Now Zaynab said, “Go, Mother, play some trick that will make our name in Baghdad and win us back our father’s wage.”"


Moreover, Seale also underscored the significance of Shahrazade as a woman fighting for her life; critiqued her predecessor Hussain Haddawy’s omission of saj’, arguing that it is possible to reproduce the rhymed prose of Arabic poetry in English; and shared that visual language allows her to ‘cut up’ what her predecessors had done to the Nights, namely, turning it into what suited them.


Overall, the perspective Seale offered on the Nights, particularly looking at it from a naturalist point of view was interesting—a living organism that could go on forever. I found this approach not only a refreshing way to appreciate the Nights in general but also as a means to shift the focus away from debates of ownership, purpose, and superiority in translations. In my opinion, this viewpoint allows us to not only appreciate the Nights history and tradition but enables us to simply enjoy it. :)


—Maria

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