More interesting, to steal from Dr. K, is that this Arabic-influenced scene is how the author/translator chooses to handle Camilla’s death. As Dr. K says, Camilla is a woman warrior. She is powerful, and yet beautiful. For the time, this was impossible to wrap one’s mind around, so the author not only places her in a tomb, distanced by death, but an elaborate, flamboyant structure at that, which is tinged with the exotic, thereby placing Camilla just out of reach. This elaborate description, not only of materials but also the ever-present bow-and-arrow and the destruction of any stairs allowing access to the tomb, sets Camilla apart as a phenomenon more than a person, discouraging any attempt to “understand” the woman warrior by exalting her and doing so through “foreign” practices.

When Dronke goes into the issue of translation, I perk up. In hindsight everything is a phenomenon, and we are able to distance ourselves sufficiently to “study” the past. The warnings that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t pay attention the first time around is crap; we’re going to repeat it, it’s just a matter of time before we get cocky enough to think that certain events and practices are simply of the past and that we are now more sophisticated.

Certain tendencies are part of “human nature,” if you’ll excuse the cliché. One of these tendencies is stealing ideas from another group (ahem, culture) due to their exotic appeal, among other things. (I realize I’m being reductionist and that there are a million and one reasons to steal from other cultures, but bear with me.) Another extremely significant tendency is storytelling. Therefore, it is only natural, not to mention inevitable, that one culture should appropriate the stories (among other things) of other groups or cultures, and what’s more that they should alter these ever-so-slightly to make them relevant to their daily life.

Case in point: I made a feeble attempt at translating “The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man” for my boyfriend. Not in a grand display of my mastery of Spanish, but as a necessity as he is low on his English. He is a devout Christian, and upon reading this story I thought I have so got to show this to him. The characters involved are Muslim, but the moral is universal… or so I thought. As I was translating, which took much longer than I could ever have imagined, I came upon the first mention of “Allah”. Hmm. While I could have simply translated it to Dios to serve my purposes, I left it at Alá for the sake of staying as close to the “original” as possible. When I later shared my rough translation with my boyfriend, I was quite proud of the time and effort I had put into the small project and I thought for sure that he would fall in love with the story and the moral like I had, maybe tack it up on his wall. I warned him, “It’s from Arabian Nights so they’re using ‘Allah’ but I think it’s pretty universal.” As I finished reading my translation aloud, I looked to my Christian friend for a reaction, fairly proud of myself… whereupon he wrinkled his forehead and said, “There is no God but God; Allah is the devil.”

So it seems that he has some sort of block against even acknowledging elements of another faith. And what if I had simply translated the word “Allah” to “Dios“? And what if I even threw Christ in the story somewhere? I was amused when I realized that I was doing the very same thing that probably goes into these collections of stories in the first place, only I wasn’t quite as smart. While I was asking for an opening of the mind and an acceptance of the ideas of another culture as parallel to our own, it seems that what I should have done in order to get my point across would have been to take the story and change the necessary elements to make it a Christian story. Tah-dah! Then it still means the same thing, but my oh-so-devout boyfriend could accept and appreciate it.

While this feels only slightly disingenuous to a student of English literature accutely aware of the issues in translation, the same has been occuring for centuries. The borrowing of stories is nothing new, and even the stories