1001 Nights talk on now:

Marina Warner: "Even the first theme parks were full of Oriental fantasies based on the Nights."

Yasmine Seale, now translating the Nights: "Trying to understand the Nights is like trying to understand the ocean ... there is no fixed text."

Okay @yasmineseale speaks too fast to quote on the fly but quotes later from my recordings.

"I have fantasies of trying to make it into a 3D object...it seems unsuited to the flat page."

Yasmine: "I was also thinking about the fact that these are stories told at night." "I wanted to see if I could create a night-language, or find some form to reflect that this is a night work...and the fact that these stories take place where dreams should be."

Yasmine: "The formal decision I've taken is that each night is a single run-on sentence. ... To stop would be fatal."

"Night thoughts are more like phrases, maybe musical phrases."

Marina: The Nights touch "very deep structures, not only within literature, but in society as well."

Love how Marina draws together The Nights and Freud.

Yasmine: There's a view of literature that it expresses the genius of a particular (nation, language) and The Nights resists this.

Marina: There are aspects of the Nights that are disturbing to us now; quite a strong streak of racism. Are you thinking of telling the stories in ways that it won't be embedded?

Yasmine: I am. What are the stories that we want to continue to tell, & why do want to retell them.

Q: Yasmine, what's your fave story?

A: I think it's the story of the porter & the three women of Baghdad ... great deal of material detail ... begins with fantastic shopping expedition. But it's also about the ... dark pleasures of language, connected to sensuality..mystery...