Translation and Adaptation of Thousand and One nights into Tamil

Abstract

The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian nights) were introduced popularly to Tamil people and got a good response from both Muslims and non-Muslims, so it has been continuously translated into Tamil by different authors for over three centuries. We divided the Tamil translation of Arabian nights two, complete translation and partial translation. Sixteen complete translations and twelve partial translations were made in these three centuries. Some of the complete translations do not cover all stories of Arabian nights. The adaptation can be separated into two. The first one is to extract only the subject matter from Thousand and nights. In this way, there are a lot of short stories and novels were written in Tamil, based on the subject matter of Thousand and nights. Let us take the structure and subject matter of thousands and nights. There is a children novel in Tamil, Mayakkallan by Perisamy Thooran, which adapted the structure and subject matter of Thousand and nights. Mayakkalan, like Thousand and nights, involves many stories within a story and exemplifies magic in the subject matter.