Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Usually I would do Latin in the afternoon after the nap since I spent the morning on the America Votes meeting, but instead today I began to nose around in another favorite locale of mine, the 1001 Nights. I’ve read two different translations of the tales of Scheherazade, both entertaining, but I’ve learned through two new books in my library, “Stranger Magic”by Maria Warner and “The Arabian Nights-A Companion,” by Robert Irwin, that both of the translations have significant flaws.
So I found two new translations, one with only 271 tales but the other, with an introduction by Irwin himself, that is three volumes long. When I finish up with Malcolm X, I intend to get back into the Arabian Nights. Between Ovid and the Arabian Nights the tales are endless and well told. There’s something profound in the types of stories a culture folds into itself, makes significant through reception. The same is true, I suppose, of individuals. I’ve had djinn and Dionysus running around in my head since high school.
Then there’s that whole matter of the biblical stories, too. The narrative lenses through which we come to understand our lives and the lives of others. Those three: Bible, Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights are more key to me than most of the greats of Western literature, perhaps with the exception of Kafka and Hesse. The other work that stands with these in my own inner world is the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
This is the way my life goes lured by political change, entranced by stories of the divine and the magical, enfolded in the life of plants and dogs, wrapped up in the world of art. There are worse ways to live.
