Seale Yasmine, Erasures from the Thousand and One Nights, Istanbul, 2020.
«What was loaned? We have a receipt and a title, but no text. The book itself, written in Arabic not in Hebrew, earthly not divine, was not buried, and has been lost. Or rather, it went the way of all human speech: it was subject to change, censorship, embroidery, misremembering and adaptation. Whatever it may have meant in twelfth-century Cairo, the Nights has never been a stable thing, and has never stopped changing shape. It is a loose collection of stories with no single author, altered and passed on by editors and compilers, translators and scribes, each of whom has enhanced, cut and shaped it over the centuries. No one can say what the Nights is: are there forty stories or two hundred? Which ones are authentic? What does that even mean? Its earliest incarnation was already a reworking of a Persian text, which itself adapted material from India, China and elsewhere. From the beginning, the Nights has been in perpetual translation.».
