Beatrice Gründler (EXC 2020) & Marwa M. Ahmed (Freie Universität Berlin) | Kalīla and Dimna, Simultaneously and Across Time

Kalīla and Dimna is a fable collection that oscillates between rulers' advice and popular philosophy. It has spread over centuries into over forty languages, with the Arabic translation serving as the basis. However, this version itself became fluid, and its surviving witnesses from the thirteenth to the twentieth century must be viewed jointly in order to fully embrace their widely differing instantiations. The method to achieve this is a multi-text edition that momentarily freezes the Arabic versions of different times and places in apparent simultaneity. These, however, are in fact snapshots of diverging processes of intervention by individual redactors, whose identities must be painstakingly extracted from their written performances. The edition is itself the outcome of a years-long dialogical process of research, and to view it – horizontally between versions rather than vertically along the plot – calls for a new way of reading.