Abstract
Starting from a responsive comprehension of language and its enunciations, our research examines a few prefaces written by European translators of the One Thousand and One Nights, discovering through them not just the historically distinct relations between Europe and Orient, but most importantly the formation of a combative tradition of translations, in which different translators try to contest and supersede their precursors – at the same time they translate for someone, they are also translating against someone. Our reasoning for this study comes from two essays by Jorge Luis Borges (“Las mil y una noches” e “Los traductores de Las mil y una noches”), to which we add Edward Said’s thoughts about Orientalism and the prefaces written by Mamede M. Jarouche, Antoine Galland, Edward W. Lane and Sir Richard F. Burton for their translations of the One Thousand and One Nights.
Keywords
One Thousand and One Nights
; Orientalism; Jorge Luis Borges