The phantasmatic Shahrazad: distortion and translation of «One Thousand and One Nights» in the Hispanic area

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Abstract

We may intuitively be aware of certain representations of literary works, active in collective imaginaries. Some of these representations leave traces in Spanish language newspapers, which, concerning One Thousand and One Nights, convey three different images of Shahrazad, the main character, and consequently of the whole work —the wise woman, the sly woman, and the banal woman. The question is whether these representations have a factual basis, on the one hand, in the original text of the work, which is part, in its original Arabic Islamic context, of the genre known as adab, i.e. miscellaneous artistic prose, and, on the other, in different translations into Spanish and other languages. After classifying the different versions according to the image of the main character displayed, the origin of the banal representation is looked for in sources other than the book, provided that the former has nothing to do with the meanings supported by the reading of the latter. We conclude that the translators in general have played a secondary role in the making and transmission of the misrepresentation, and that there has been more than a single discourse on the book in the Hispanic area.