“Homosexual relationships … have not been censored up until recent times. However, tragic endings were not always the standard in Persian literary culture.
Greene resumes the tradition of cultural translation by adding a happy ending and signals to the reader that this ‘forbidden love’ has the right to live and end happily,” said Shahbaz.
“In the ‘Game of Nard’, version shares the same plot arrangements - ending with the appreciation of the beloved, but in other versions I have seen the lovers struggle to survive. Greene reinvigorated the tradition of translation in his book The Gay Icon Classics of the World II. In 2013, he challenged the translations of a Princeton scholar who had censored the pro-gay work “Amores,” by the ancient Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata. Robert Joseph Greene, a visiting author and activist part of Green College’s “Canadian, Indigenous, and World Writers” series, traces the lineage of queer erasure in his work. How then, were queer narratives in these shifting landscapes treated? Historically, it has also been about re-imagining and sometimes erasing stories to meet the values of the society at the time. The work of the translator is not just about preserving meaning across languages. In those translations, the woman is executed, despite not having done anything, and she’s punished only for “having this thought of living her desire.” “The translator, Imad Thaghari, says that he eliminated some of the tales deliberately because he did not find them decent to be dedicated to the king, and so he replaced them with better ones,” explained Shahbaz. However the 14th-century version translated in Persian under the title of “ Jawahir al-Asmar” (Gems of Tales) ends very differently. The story ends happily with the couple’s reunion and the bird’s freedom from the cage. In the Sanskrit versions of the story, her husband returns home from a trip and she convinces him that she has not committed any sin. Known as the "70 Tales of the Parrot," it’s the story of a parrot who entertained the lady of the house for 70 nights by storytelling about forbidden love, in order to keep her from visiting her lover. She points to the Sukasaptati to illustrate her point. Pegah Shahbaz, a postdoctoral fellow with the department of Asian studies, observes that narrative traditions are not single, unchanging volumes - they’re flexible and ever-changing as they adjust to the new values of the culture that is translating them. The next time you find yourself dusting off an old book of tales, you might want to ask yourself what, or who, was left behind on the cutting room floor.ĭr. "Homosexual relationships … have not been censored up until recent times," said Dr.
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