Ramsay Wood
Ramsay Wood is a writer best known for his modernized compilation of the ancient animal fables derived from The Jatakas Tales and The Panchatantra. His Kalila and Dimna -- Selected Fables of Bidpai was published by Knopf in 1980.[1] Wood believes that these fables provide one the earliest secular examples of what Lawrence Lessig calls Remix Culture.
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[edit] Early fable compilations as examples of Remix Culture
Wood claims[2] that in hundreds of literary reconfigurations, various arrangements of The Panchatantra fables are known by separate titles in different languages at different times in different places. Yet each unique cultural remix always harkens back to an oral, even pre-literate, storytelling society in ancient India. No original Sanskrit Panchatantra text survives, only theoretically reconstructed scholarly compilations from several diverse Indian sources.
We thus only can enjoy and study the many recompiled derivative works and variants of the missing original Panchatantra, of which the few surviving medieval Arabic Kalila wa Dimna manuscripts by Ibn al-Muqaffa (750 CE) remain as the keynote pivots between ancient India and modern Europe.
Ibn al-Muqaffa is also personally responsible for the profuse flowering of Islamic manuscript illustration that uniquely stems from Kalila wa Dimna, for his Preface to it clearly states that two of the book's four intentions (specifically, the second and the third) are
"to show the images (khayalat) of the animals in varieties of paints and colours (asbagh, alwan) so as to delight the hearts of princes, increase their pleasure and also the degree of care which they would bestow on the work. Thirdly, it was intended that the book should be such that both kings and common folk should not cease to acquire it; that it might be repeatedly copied and recreated in the course of time thus giving work to the painter (musawwir) and the copyist (nasikh)".
[edit] Modern Panchatantra Remixes by Wood since 1980
Wood’s Kalila and Dimna (Vol 1) — Fables of Friendship and Betrayal has an Introduction by the novelist and 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing supporting his remix contention (and she also does so in a subsequent monograph, Problems, Myths and Stories[3]). Lessing's Introduction to Wood's Kalila and Dimna Vol 1 cites several literary variants of The Panchatantra. Her Introduction was reprinted in her 2005 collection of essays, Time Bites: Views and Reviews.[4]
At the London 2009 Institute for Cultural Research's Seminar entitled The Power of Stories[5] Wood delivered his lecture The Kalila and Dimna Story — How an ancient 'book' left home. This lecture featured illustrations from a wide range of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, all exemplifiying Ibn al-Muqaff's original 750 CE injunction that his work "be repeatedly copied and recreated in the course of time thus giving work to the painter and the copyist".
A online video of this lecture (including these illustrations) is available on youtube.com and from Wood's website.[6] In October 2011 The Institute for Cultural Research published his monograph following up this theme in greater detail: Extraordinary Voyages of the Panchatantra — and how we limit our understanding of the word •story•. An extended version of this monograph, including an Appendix, appears as an Afterword in the December 2011 Medina (UK) and Al Kotob Khan (Egypt) co-edition of Wood's second Kalila and Dimna volume, Fables of Conflict and Intrigue.
[edit] First English Remix by Sir Thomas North in 1570
The Panchatantra fables first appeared in English as The Morall Philosophie of Doni in 1570,[7] translated from the Italian by Sir Thomas North, who also translated Plutarch’s Lives.[8] Wood’s two Kalila and Dimna volumes are the first modern English, multiple-sourced, remix of these ancient fables since North's version. Wood’s Kalila and Dimna Fables of Friendship and Betrayal (Vol 1) is reconstituted from the North text and also seven other works translated from Sanskrit, Arabic, Syriac and Persian.
In his ‘Afterwords’ to Fables of Friendship and Betrayal (Vol 1) and to Fables of Conflict and Intrigue (Vol 2) Wood suggests that these strikingly distinct literary compilations of ancient fables,[9] although highly revered classics in each target language, are among the world’s most durable examples of cross-cultural migration, adaptive morphology and secular survival — as they have been widely and continuously shared and modified for over two thousand years, downstream from a legendary, long-lost, Sanskrit original manuscript known as the Ur-Panchantantra.
[edit] Edinburgh Festival 1984
In 1983, Wood’s book was turned into a play entitled A Word in the Stargazer’s Eye by Stuart Cox of Theatr Taliesin Wales. The show premiered at the 1984 Edinburgh Festival, starring the actor Nigel Watson. The Scotsman reviewed it thus:
A stunning performance, bridging the gap of understanding between East and West. We are blessed a while with the wonderment of children as we listen to these eternal tales of the human psyche. A show for every nationality under the sun.
Theatr Taliesin Wales subsequently toured the production in many countries for several years, from Iceland to India.
[edit] French edition 2006
In 2006 Éditions Albin Michel published a French translation of his 1980 first volume. A review by Roger-Pol Droit in Le Monde on Sept 15th 2006 said:
Crossing linguistic and cultural frontiers, these fables also transcend conventional time-frames. They abound with temporal paradoxes. Ancient letters, locked in a series of smaller and smaller treasure chests by King Houschenk in the past, are addressed to kings of the future. They contain words of advice whose meaning only becomes gradually clear, sometimes after a very big delay.
FRENCH TEXT: "Sans frontière linguistique ni culturelle, ces fables ignorent aussi celles du temps. Au sein du recueil, les paradoxes temporels abondent. Des lettres très antiques, enfermées dans une série de coffres par le roi Houschenk autrefois, s'adressent aux souverains de l'avenir. Elles renferment des conseils dont le sens ne s'éclaire qu'à mesure, parfois avec un très grand retard."
[edit] Other activities
Wood was a freelance photographer and journalist who covered feature stories in Europe, Africa and the Far East until 1986. His first major publication, when he was 25, was an interview and photographs with the poet Robert Graves in LIFE Magazine.[10] He was chairman of the original charity called Afghan Relief, from 1992 until its dissolution in 2000. He was a co-founder and acting Secretary of the College of Storytellers from 1980 until 1991. In 2005 he qualified as a literacy teacher and now teaches part-time in London at Emerson House[11] helping dyslexic children learn keyboard and reading skills. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1943.[12]
[edit] References
- ^ See page 100, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, fifth edition, 1985 ISBN 0-19-866130-4
- ^ See page 262 of Kalila and Dimna, Selected fables of Bidpai[Vol 1], retold by Ramsay Wood, Knopf, New York, 1980; and the Afterword of Medina's 2011 Fables of Conflict and Intrigue
- ^ Doris Lessing, Problems, Myths and Stories, London: Institute for Cultural Research Monograph Series No. 36, 1999, p 13
- ^ Publisher's site: http://www.harperperennial.co.uk/books.aspx?id=30228
- ^ [1]
- ^ http://www.ramsaywood.com/video.html
- ^ Full digital text: http://www.archive.org/details/earliestenglishv00doniuoft
- ^ This is the book by Sir Thomas North that made his more celebrated impact upon English literature: http://www.archive.org/details/shakespearesplut01plutuoft
- ^ See page 262 of Kalila and Dimna, Selected fables of Bidpai, retold by Ramsay Wood, Knopf, New York, 1980
- ^ LIFE Atlantic, March 4th 1968, pages 24 - 27
- ^ Emerson House
- ^ 25th Anniversary Report, Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1965, Cambridge, USA 1990, pages 969 - 971
