Ramsay Wood is the author of two sui generis modern novels which aim – via vernacular spiels within complex frame-story narratives – to popularize the pre-literate, oral story-listening drama of multicultural animal fables mimed and declaimed along the ancient Silk Road.
his version will certainly be much more attractive to modern readers than the older translations, with their drier narratives and unfamiliar oriental hyperbole".In a 2011 lecture in Fez, Morocco[3] he suggested that these inter-woven ancient fables provide one of the earliest literary examples of what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture.
Wood stated[4] that in hundreds of literary reconfigurations, various arrangements of The Jatakas Tales, Aesop and The Panchatantra fables are known by separate titles in different languages at different times in different places.
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.
[12] An extended English version of this monograph, including an Appendix (how we limit our understanding of the word "story"), 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.
They contain words of advice whose meaning only becomes gradually clear, sometimes after a very big delay.In September 2019 Éditions Desclée de Brouwer published a revised mass market paperback edition.