Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

The book that we now usually call The Arabian Nights didn’t originate in the Arab world. Its probable origin is Indian; Indian story compendiums too have a fondness for frame stories, for Russian-doll-style stories within stories, and for animal fables.

As a migrant myself, I have always been fascinated by the migration of stories, and these jackal tales traveled almost as far as the Arabian Nights narratives, ending up in both Arabic and Persian versions, in which the jackals’ names have mutated into Kalila and Dimna. They also ended up in Hebrew and Latin and eventually, as The Fables of Bidpai,

the children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.

The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly t

Calvino himself collected and perhaps partially invented many Italian wonder tales in his classic work Italian Folktales, and all his work was steeped in the language of the Italian fable.

there is nothing that swims, crawls, walks, or flies that tells stories. Man alone is the storytelling animal.

Grass’s co-opting of animal fables, his extensive use of talking flounders, rats, and toads, grows from his absorption in the wonder tales of Germany, as collected by the Brothers Grimm.

My advice would be a little different. Only write what you know if what you know is really interesting.

But I mourn the loss of the Hazar Afsaneh, which would, if rediscovered, complete the story of the stories, and what a find that would be. Perhaps it would solve a mystery at the heart of the frame story, or rather at the very end of it, and answer a question I’ve been asking myself for some years: Did Scheherazade and her sister, Dunyazad, finally