Panel “Premodern Fables and Ambivalent Authorship: Interlocutors, Copyists, and Creative Redactors.”

Chair: Olga M. Davidson
Discussant: Neguin Yavari

Recensions of Riddling Beast Fables: The Case of an Aesopic Werewolf  / Gregory Nagy

A Comparative Approach to the Medieval Theory of Authorship / Yuriko Yamanaka

A Western European Parallel to the Mythological Version of an Aetiology for Kalīla wa Dimna / Olga Davidson

Reassessing the Sources of Qāni‘ī Ṭūsī’s Versification of Kalīla and Dimna (ca. 658/1260) / Theodore S. Beers

Elusive Justice: Rewriting the Chapter of “Dimna’s Trial” in Kalīla and Dimna / Beatrice Gründler

Abstract: Kalīla and Dimna, a classic of global literature, has passed from Sanskrit to over forty languages worldwide with multiple versions in each, among which the Arabic phase constitutes the fountainhead: from it, all later versions derive. Some chapters were added by the Arabic translator-adaptor Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757), notably a sequel to the book’s longest chapter, “The Lion and the Ox.”

That chapter ends with the villain, the jackal Dimna, instigating the king (a lion) to kill his innocent advisor (an ox). The new chapter then supplies the villain’s trial. The outcome is fixed, the procedure a mockery, but the villain presents among all speakers the best arguments; he lectures the court on legal principles, the ideal judge, proof versus suspicion, and the dangers of false confession.

How this plays out, however, radically differs in the 15 manuscripts selected for comparison (from over 140 extant manuscripts). Some versions are twice the length of others, and the passages shared by all amount to less than 10 percent of the text, whereas passages appearing in only one or two manuscripts each exceed that proportion, so that the story lacks a “common ground.” The texts’ fluidity will be shown along three thematic trajectories and hypotheses advanced on what may have occasioned such invasive rewriting, which exceeds the degree of rewriting anywhere elsewhere in Kalīla and Dimna.

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AIS encourages works grounded in the social sciences and humanities, which probe new scholarly approaches to Iranian Studies, broadly defined. AIS also welcomes submissions on all aspects of Iran’s historical borderlands, including Turkic-Iranian history and culture, Kurdish spaces, the Persianate world, and the Iranian diaspora.

Full conference programme available via the AIS homepage.