Ramsay Wood is the author of two
sui generis
''Sui generis'' ( , ) is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind", "in a class by itself", therefore "unique".
A number of disciplines use the term to refer to unique entities. These include:
* Biology, for species that do not fit in ...
modern novels which aim – via vernacular spiels within complex
frame-story narratives – to popularize the pre-literate, oral story-listening drama of multicultural animal fables mimed and declaimed along the ancient Silk Road. His books blend ''
The Jatakas Tales'', ''The
Panchatantra
The ''Panchatantra'' (IAST: Pañcatantra, ISO: Pañcatantra, sa, पञ्चतन्त्र, "Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. '' and the likely (fourth century BCE) role of Alexander the Great's legacy in "bringing the Aesopian tradition to North India and Central Asia" via
Hellenization in Central Asia and India. Wood's ''
Kalila and Dimna
The ''Panchatantra'' ( IAST: Pañcatantra, ISO: Pañcatantra, sa, पञ्चतन्त्र, "Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. ...
– Selected Fables of
Bidpai
The ''Panchatantra'' (IAST: Pañcatantra, ISO: Pañcatantra, sa, पञ्चतन्त्र, "Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. '' (Vol 1) was published by
Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...
in 1980 with an Introduction by
Nobel Laureate
The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing (; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remain ...
.
A ''
Times Literary Supplement
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History
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'' (3/3/82) review stated that
"Wood has produced a vigorous modern version . . . overlaid with a racy personal idiom, a witty mixture of archaic grandiloquence, modern slang, and (in some passages) the jargon of sociology, television and local government . . . his version will certainly be much more attractive to modern readers than the older translations, with their drier narratives and unfamiliar oriental hyperbole".
Early fable compilations as examples of remix culture
In a 2011 lecture in Morocco he suggested that these inter-woven ancient fables provide one of the earliest literary examples of what
Lawrence Lessig calls
remix culture
Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a term describing a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. A remix culture would be, by default, pe ...
. Wood stated that in hundreds of literary reconfigurations, various arrangements of ''The Jatakas Tales'', ''Aesop'' and ''The Panchatantra'' fables are known by separate titles in different languages at different times in different places. Yet each unique cultural remix always harkens back to an oral, often pre-literate, storytelling society in ancient Greece or India. No original Sanskrit ''Panchatantra'' nor Greek ''Aesop'' text survives: only theoretically reconstructed scholarly compilations from several diverse sources.
We thus only can enjoy and study the many recompiled
derivative works and variants of the missing original ''Panchatantra'', of which the few surviving medieval Arabic ''Kalila wa Dimna'' manuscripts by
Ibn al-Muqaffa
Abū Muhammad ʿAbd Allāh Rūzbih ibn Dādūya ( ar, ابو محمد عبدالله روزبه ابن دادويه), born Rōzbih pūr-i Dādōē ( fa, روزبه پور دادویه), more commonly known as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ ( ar, ابن الم ...
(750 CE) remain as the keynote pivots between ancient India and modern Europe.
Ibn al-Muqaffa
Abū Muhammad ʿAbd Allāh Rūzbih ibn Dādūya ( ar, ابو محمد عبدالله روزبه ابن دادويه), born Rōzbih pūr-i Dādōē ( fa, روزبه پور دادویه), more commonly known as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ ( ar, ابن الم ...
is also personally responsible for the profuse flowering of Islamic manuscript illustration that uniquely stems from ''Kalila wa Dimna'', for his Preface to it clearly states that two of the book's four intentions (specifically, the second and the third) are
"to show the images (''khayalat'') of the animals in varieties of paints and colours (''asbagh'', ''alwan'') so as to delight the hearts of princes, increase their pleasure and also the degree of care which they would bestow on the work. Thirdly, it was intended that the book should be such that both kings and common folk should not cease to acquire it; that it might be repeatedly copied and recreated in the course of time thus giving work to the painter (''musawwir'') and the copyist (''nasikh'')".
First English remix by Sir Thomas North in 1570
The
Panchatantra
The ''Panchatantra'' (IAST: Pañcatantra, ISO: Pañcatantra, sa, पञ्चतन्त्र, "Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. fables first appeared in English as ''
The Morall Philosophie of Doni'' in 1570, translated from the Italian by
Sir Thomas North
Sir Thomas North (28 May 1535c. 1604) was an English translator, military officer, lawyer, and justice of the peace. His translation into English of Plutarch's ''Parallel Lives'' is notable for being the main source text used by William Sha ...
, who also translated ''
Plutarch's Lives''. Wood’s two ''Kalila and Dimna'' volumes are the first modern English, multiple-sourced, remix of these ancient fables since North's version. Wood’s ''Kalila and Dimna – Fables of Friendship and Betrayal (Vol 1)'' is reconstituted from the North text and also seven other works translated from
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
,
Syriac Syriac may refer to:
*Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic
*Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region
* Syriac alphabet
** Syriac (Unicode block)
** Syriac Supplement
* Neo-Aramaic languages a ...
and
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
.
In his 'Afterword' to (citing the latest Kindle 2010 and 2011 subtitles) ''Fables of Friendship and Betrayal (Vol 1)'' and to ''Fables of Conflict and Intrigue (Vol 2)'' Wood suggests that these strikingly distinct literary compilations of ancient fables, although highly revered classics in each target language, are among the world's most durable examples of cross-cultural migration, adaptive morphology and secular survival – as they have been widely and continuously shared and modified for over two thousand years, downstream from a legendary, long-lost, Sanskrit original manuscript known as the ''Ur-Panchantantra''.
Doris Lessing and the Institute for Cultural Research
In her introduction to all seven English editions of ''Kalila and Dimna (Vol 1)''
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing (; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remain ...
supports Wood's remix contention (and does so again in her monograph, ''Problems, Myths and Stories''). Lessing also cites several literary variants of ''The Panchatantra''. Her Introduction was reprinted in her 2005 collection of essays, ''Time Bites: Views and Reviews''.
At the London 2009
Institute for Cultural Research
The Institute for Cultural Research (ICR) was a London-based, UK-registered educational charity,The Institute for Cultural Research's UK registered charity number is 313295. 's Seminar entitled ''The Power of Stories''
Wood gave a lecture ''The Kalila and Dimna Story – How an ancient 'book' left home''. It featured illustrations from a wide range of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, all exemplifying Ibn al-Muqaffa's original 750 CE injunction that his work "be repeatedly copied and recreated in the course of time thus giving work to the painter and the copyist".
In October 2011 the Institute for Cultural Research published Monograph Series No 59 wherein Wood follows up this theme in greater detail: ''Extraordinary Voyages of the Panchatantra''.
[ Monograph Series No 59: "Extraordinary Voyages of the Panchatantra"] An extended English version of this monograph, including an Appendix (''how we limit our understanding of the word "story"''), appears as an Afterword in the December 2011 Medina (UK) and Al Kotob Khan (Egypt) co-edition of Wood's second Kalila and Dimna volume, ''Fables of Conflict and Intrigue''. It also is published in the same title's 2011 Kindle edition.
Edinburgh Festival 1984
In 1983, Wood's ''Kalila and Dimna (Vol 1)'' was turned into a play entitled ''A Word in the Stargazer's Eye'' by Stuart Cox of Theatr Taliesin Wales. The show premiered at the 1984
Edinburgh Festival
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, starring the actor Nigel Watson. ''
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'' reviewed it thus
French editions: 2006, 2019 & 2020
In 2006
Éditions Albin Michel
Éditions Albin Michel is a French publisher. In January 2022, the new director is Anna Pavlowitch, the daughter of Paul Pavlowitch, Romain Gary and Jean Seberg's nephew.
History
It was founded in 1900 by Albin Michel. They published, first, Ro ...
published a French translation of his 1980 first volume. A review by
Roger-Pol Droit
Roger-Pol Droit (born 1949) is a French academic and philosopher. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he has written numerous books, most notably ''101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life'', which has been tran ...
in ''
Le Monde
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'' on 15 September 2006 said:
Crossing linguistic and cultural frontiers, these fables also transcend conventional time-frames. They abound with temporal paradoxes. Ancient letters, locked in a series of smaller and smaller treasure chests by King Houschenk in the past, are addressed to kings of the future. They contain words of advice whose meaning only becomes gradually clear, sometimes after a very big delay.
In September 2019 Éditions Desclée de Brouwer published a revised mass market paperback edition. In 2020 they published a revised translation entitled ''Conflits et intrigues'' of the 2011 Medina (Vol 2) English edition.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wood, Ramsay
British writers
Writers from Texas
People associated with The Institute for Cultural Research
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)