Yasmine Seale: It doesn’t really want to be a book

From the in-class presentation, I was a little intimidated by Seale. Not because of her strong opinions on how the A Thousand and One Nights should be, but because she knows what she is doing in her translation. The course of A Thousand and One Nights: A Translator's Playground suggests how many translators had their approaches to this work, yet making it like a playground. Seale is like the king of kids in the playground, she knows her power and she knows what she wants.

One of her especially fascinating ideas is that The Nights resists being called "a book”. It is a combination of stories that were valued as storytelling. Its unique form is not replicable by any books. Seale also mentioned how 1001 is not an exact number but an abstract concept. 1000 is like an infinite number, and that plus one means beyond infinite. 

Seale pointed out that the translation of The Nights itself is a way to “keep the tradition going”. It is to keep the practice of storytelling. Storytelling is so much more than simply writing the plot of certain stories. At its core, it is associated with the practice of worshiping these stories with various translations, making them as currencies, to tell stories like you’re telling a story.
Because there are already many Night translators, Seale must be clear in her vision of her

 translation. Her approach to translating the night lands on style, structure, and sensibility. In that specifically, I love how she explained larger sentences mark the presence of the sun, while shorter sentences mark the presence of the moon. This would be like the passing of a night.
--Kerry

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