Abstract

Kalīla wa-Dimna (KD) with its more than 140 manuscripts only in Arabic from eight centuries, multiple translations in dozens of languages over a period of almost 1500 years, and multiple references in various works as well as adaptations cannot be solely treated as a single text or a book with a stable meaning and functionality. Thanks to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs famous translation, the “Indian book,” a mirror of princes in the shape of a frame narrative that contains fables, allegories, and parables expresses a universal utility and for that reason became – though sometimes a camouflaged – part of world literature long time before the rise of book printing. Dealing with the history of the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna and the diffusion of fables means dealing with textual fluidity and semantic expansion in manuscript cultures as well as the boundaries of what scholarship had usually considered as “classical Arabic literature.” Our panel sheds light on the different facets of the Kalīla wa-Dimna tradition and the problem of its historicization, namely the history of its transmission, from the copies of the early Syriac recension and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs translation over multiple strands of redacting within Arabic to the Persian appropriation of the book. Also, we will investigate the social significance of such story material by looking at other animal fables. Members of the Berlin Kalīla wa-Dimna – AnonymClassic and colleagues will address the issue of textual mouvance, the analysis of textual and cultural translation and appropriation as well as other varieties of intertextuality, and hope to spur discussions on how to write a modernized global literary history beyond notions of national philology.

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