Marina Warner Quotes About Books

• The model of the educational Kalila Wa-Dimna. These are books of instruction to rulers and humans. The stories unfold a range of human psychology, a vast range of human psychology. The Sultan is being moved from his narrow and bigoted position into a wider, more subtle, more nuanced understanding of human experiences.

  Marina Warner

  Educational, Book, Psychology

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.

  Marina Warner

  Diversión, Libro, Escritura

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• There is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories are so illuminating that they must be engraved and encased in gold and put in the palace library, the people who compile the book are telling us that this is a collection of human wisdom.

  Marina Warner

  Book, People, Library

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well... English has fallen short.

  Marina Warner

  Beautiful, Book, Italian

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story...how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel.

  Marina Warner

  Beautiful, Running, Husband

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Mind, Enchantment

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world.

  Marina Warner

  Libro, Noche, Pensamiento

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• Muchas de las cosas encantadas del libro son lámparas, alfombras, sofás, gemas, anillos de latón. Es un paisaje bastante diferente al de los cuentos de hadas de Occidente. Aunque tenemos interiores y palacios, no tenemos ciudades bulliciosas, y no hay el énfasis en el artesano que hace las cosas. El ambiente en el que se escribieron era totalmente distinto. Las Mil y Una Noches surge de un inmenso mundo de mercados y comercio. El Cairo, Basora, Damasco: oficios y habilidades.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Night, Skills

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Mirrors, Order

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction.

  Marina Warner

  Brother, Book, Voice

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Trying, Titles

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• Hay una serie de mujeres que no están representadas en la tradición occidental de los cuentos de hadas. Los maridos golpeadores son especialmente interesantes, así como los hombres pederastas. En Las mil y una noches se dice a menudo a los niños: "A este hombre le gusta secuestrar niños, ten cuidado con él". Estos temas se exploran a través de los cuentos, pero en realidad la arquitectura del libro es tal que hay muchos ejemplos de mujeres leales, valientes, entregadas, sobre todo a sus amantes.

  Marina Warner

  Children, Husband, Book

  Fuente: therumpus.net

• La técnica del libro y la técnica que lleva la figura de Scheherazade es la de abrir la mente del Sultán. Es el emblema del ignorante: el hombre ignorante, encerrado, furioso, que quiere matar todo lo que no entiende. El modelo del libro es el extraordinario Espejo de los Príncipes, muy grande.

  Marina Warner

  Libro, Hombres, Espejos

  Fuente: therumpus.net

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