Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception

Abstract

Today, the Arabic recensions of the Nights and their many translations appear to belong easily to the canons of World Literature, but historically these stories have endured a variety of more contingent positions ranging from dismissal and scholarly neglect, to object of European oriental obsessions, to global postcolonial emblem. Thus, in turning to a question about the relationship between the Nights and a specific Latin American literary movement, it is important to bring to mind a sense of the larger story between Arabic and Spanish in which this question sits.... this story’s vastness also indicates why a topic like “post-magical realism,” which seems to be about the future, also calls for further grappling with the past. In this light, rather than a reception history in the traditional
sense, or a systematic intertextual analysis, what I offer in ... this article is an essay that interprets a single piece of this past from the perspective of Comparative Literature. Concretely, I compare what four magical realist writers say the Nights means to them with similar testimony from three leading interpreters of the Nights from Arabic-speaking worlds: Hussain Haddawy, the translator of the Norton edition of 1001 Nights, Muhsin Mahdi, the editor of the critical edition of the Nights, and the man Wail Hassan has called one of the “most original literary critics” in the Arab world, Abdelfattah Kilito.