Claudia Ott
As a musician, translator and presenter, she has collaborated with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, the Göttingen International Handel-Festival as well as with artists Mahmud Darwish, Mohamed Mounir, Abdo Dagher and Gamal al-Ghitany among others.
Based on the oldest existing Arabic manuscript of the One Thousand and One Nights in the critical edition by Muhsin Mahdi, she published her German translation consisting of 282 stories on 700 pages in 2004.
[3] Commenting on the historical literary character of The Nights, Ott referred to their use in oral storytelling as a form of popular entertainment in traditional Oriental societies.
Striving to stay as close as possible to the oldest known Arabic text before any later European additions, the stories about Ali Baba, Aladdin and Sindbad were not included in Ott's editions.
As modern literary scholarship had shown, these stories had only been added to the French edition of The Tales by Antoine Galland in his own and many later versions.
The real significance of the frame tale lay thus in her act of disrupting the spiral of violence, achieved not through conventional feminine traits like charm, attractiveness, and beauty, but rather through knowledge, education, and the power of literature.
This collection of 100 translated poems from seven different oriental languages presents works written in different historical periods and features important themes of this sub-genre.
[11] A review in the online magazine Qantara called Ott's style "freed from the imposed patina of the European fairytale idiom" and also remarked her translations of the original poems set between the tales.
[12] These poems had been omitted in earlier German versions, and Ott included them, using various poetic metres reflecting the original Arabic verses.
