Chapter 9 Kalila wa Dimna and the arts of storytelling: conversations with medieval Arabic literature in contemporary London

Rachel Scott

In May 2006, the Barbican Theatre premiered Mirror for Princes – Kalila wa Dimna, a SABAB Theatre production by the Kuwaiti–British playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam.¹ The play was a dramatic reworking of an ancient collection of exemplary fables aimed at rulers and their courtiers – a kind of textbook of statecraft – known in Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna. An Arabic translation of a Persian translation of a Sanskrit book called the Panchatantra, the fables have existed in written form since the fourth century C.E. and almost certainly for far longer in oral form. Al-Bassam’s retelling focuses on the context of their translation from Persian at the dawn of the Abbasid revolution in Iraq c.750 C.E. – one of the most turbulent moments in Islamic history, a period of Imperial expansion and the threat of civil war, as well as a golden age of Arab culture. The play follows the tragedy that unfolds around Ibn al-Muqaffa, a court scribe and scholar who translated the fables into Arabic for the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur amid revolution and religious propaganda.

In publicity material, SABAB Theatre described the play as ‘an exploration of the mechanics of Empire and the narratives of power, an argument for cultural and religious tolerance in the modern Arab and Western worlds’.² In interviews at the time, Al-Bassam also drew attention to the parallels with contemporary political events in the Middle East:

I was looking for a way into some of today’s ruined and chaotic and overcharged landscape of power and politics in my region […] I found that through them I could find a very satisfying indirect way of addressing some of the issues that I want to explore today. […] [The play is] not docu-drama, it’s an approach to politics, religion and questions of social justices in the Middle East through history on one hand and fable on the other. Both of which are mechanisms to objectify and then perhaps distort and that you feel you’re watching something that could very well be about now, that could very well be about this moment, that is in-fact about this moment.³

For Al-Bassam, the fables of Kalila wa Dimna provided a means of critiquing contemporary issues and events. The historical nature of the tales offers a ‘long view’ on the history of the Middle East and their fictional accounts of ethical and moral problems provide a means of gaining perspective on – ‘objectifying’ in Al-Bassam’s words, that is, ‘express[ing] (something abstract) in a concrete form; to render [it] objective’⁴ – commonly held truths, established norms, practices and beliefs. Al-Bassam’s use of the term ‘distort’ suggests that this process twists out of shape what is read (or viewed), until there arrives a sense of recognition; the issues being explored become magnified not as those of a distant past, but the here and now.

SABAB Theatre’s A Mirror for Princes is not the only example of contemporary, creative responses that have sought to bring these ancient fables to new audiences and through them, to explore contemporary political and cultural themes. Others include Moneim Adwan’s opera for the 2016 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the exhibition Fables Across Time, a collaboration between the Bahrain National Museum and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis which premiered in 2015 and 2016 respectively, and for which Tunisian artist Sabiha Al Khemir created original animated illustrations of several stories.⁵ These cultural outputs are an example of what Clare Lees and Gillian R. Overing, in The Contemporary Medieval in Practice, call the ‘ongoing critical conversation’ between past and present, medieval and contemporary that has found expression in much recent practice-based and creative–critical research.⁶ Lees and Overing consider the meanings of ‘conversation’ in its medieval English context (their particular specialism):

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that in the fourteenth century ‘conversation’, derived from Latin via French, referred to ‘the action of living, or having one’s being in a place or among persons’, or ‘figuratively’, to ‘one’s spiritual being’, and also to dealing with others, living together, and to conduct, social as well as spiritual bearing, or behaviour in the world. A conversation in the Middle Ages required at least one other person (no talking to yourself, then), and also an awareness of community and place, whether social or spiritual.⁷

The concept of conversation as it is defined here, encompassing a sense of community and ethical behaviour, is useful when thinking about what we do as literary researchers, who we work with and speak to, and why it matters. Scholarly research does not take place in isolation but is rather part of ‘a public conversation with a communal audience’.⁸ While this statement is made in The Contemporary Medieval in Practice with specific reference to Old English poetry, it is also reflective (intentionally or not) of perceptions of the role and value of academic scholarship as something that is – or should be – in dialogue with wider society and that responds to and seeks to solve societal issues.⁹

The notion of the ‘value’ of the humanities and of literature and literary scholarship has been addressed in both academic and public discourse in recent decades. Essays in The Public Value of the Humanities, edited by Jonathan Bate, offer justifications of the public importance of the humanities to society using case studies that draw on a wide range of disciplines, including those that lie on the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences, such as law and geography.¹⁰ In Literature and the Public Good, Rick Rylance likewise argues for the ‘deeply embedded and consequential’ nature of literature, whose benefits are not simply a matter of ‘academic’ debate but are discussed ‘by practitioners, policymakers, and politicians daily as well as ordinary people’.¹¹ Rylance’s reflections are notable for the emphasis he places on the monetary value of the literary economy, which he reasons has been significantly under-appreciated, although, ultimately, he defines its significant worth in broader terms than the economic rationale to which public debates frequently turn. Academic arguments such as these have been repeatedly borne out by research-led projects that engage directly with societal issues, as exemplified by Impact Case Studies submitted for the UK’s 2014 and 2021 Research Excellence Frameworks (REF), which encompass improvements to health and wellbeing;¹² public understanding of critical social issues;¹³ and the promotion of the value of diverse literatures and cultures and of cross-cultural communication and collaboration.¹⁴ The activities that comprise literary scholarship – among which I include reading, transcribing, translating, writing, editing and teaching, though others may be added – play a critical role in the creation and dissemination of knowledge both within and beyond academia, in policy, schools and the cultural sector. These activities play a particularly vital role in increasing awareness of the literatures of earlier historical periods and of other languages and cultures; in doing so, they enable conversations between peoples and cultures across time, place and language.

In this chapter, I discuss another recent ‘critical conversation’ with Kalila wa Dimna that provides new and unique insights into the power of literature when approached through interdisciplinary and collaborative methods. Ancient Tales for Troubled Times was an ambitious collaboration between academic researchers, UK-based and international artists, curators, community arts organisations and charities, and primary school pupils. The project engaged creatively with Kalila wa Dimna to examine important societal realities and issues. At the heart of the project lay issues of identity, community, migration, and intercultural and interpersonal relations – themes that are highly relevant on a global level as well as more locally to a city like London. Storytelling was another central focus: sites of shared heritage, stories provide a space in which to imagine who we are, who we want to be and how we relate to others; myths, plays, pictures, novels and histories are all ‘among humankind’s chief instruments for understanding ourselves and our world’.¹⁵ The project sought to foreground the importance of historical literatures and to disseminate knowledge of a globally significant text that influenced European forms of storytelling and yet remains relatively unknown in the UK.

Development of Ancient Tales for Troubled Times began in 2019 as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Language Acts and Worldmaking and culminated in a series of public events and an exhibition at the P21 Gallery in London, a charitable trust promoting contemporary Arab art and culture, between 12 May and 11 June 2022.¹⁶ The exhibition was curated by Ghazaleh Zogheib and Rania Mneimneh and included artworks by artists DemaOne, Ali J. Dalloul, Rayan Elnayal, Alice Kettle in collaboration with ‘Anna’, a refugee from Syria, Jean Morris, Dima Nachawi and Vaishali Prazmari; members of East London Textile Arts (ELTA), a participatory project involving local communities in Newham led by artists Sonia Tuttiett and Celia Ward; a group of young people working with artist Dima Karout and musicians at Play for Progress, a Croydon-based charity that delivers therapeutic and educational music and arts programmes, advocacy and wellbeing support for unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK; and a group of Year 6 pupils from Sir John Heron Primary School in Newham. The programme of online and in-person public events included creative workshops and demonstrations and conversations with artists, curators and researchers that focused on different thematic strands underpinning the exhibition: ‘Reimagining spaces and restoring lost histories’, ‘Threading stories of friendship in textile art’, ‘Art practice in challenging environments’ and ‘Cross-cultural encounters in the medieval world’.¹⁷

Conversation, in both the modern and the medieval sense, lies at the heart of Kalila wa Dimna. The fables it relates are framed by a dialogue between a ruler and his counsellor, wherein the ruler asks questions or poses a problem to which the counsellor replies with an exemplary tale that provides guidance or resolution. The tales told by the counsellor frequently contain further nested stories, told in dialogue between characters to elucidate the ruler’s conundrum, which often boils down to the very issues suggested by the medieval notion of ‘conversation’ given in the OED: ‘dealing with others, living together, and to conduct, social as well as spiritual bearing, or behaviour in the world’. Many of the tales are narrated by animals, an ancient technique for thinking about and representing society and the nature of truth. Social relations are a core thematic concern: alliances and coexistence between different groups are shown to be possible, albeit sometimes only temporarily, under certain conditions – namely, the recognition and understanding of the interests and natures of others. Kalila wa Dimna uses storytelling to understand the world and other people, revealing the messy complexity of life, the multiplicity of perspectives and voices that comprise it, and the fact that there exists not one single truth but many. This is mirrored in the book’s structure: the tales echo and refract, and at times contradict each other, in a conversation that takes place across multiple narrative levels. The book’s transmission might also be characterised as a type of dialogue: it has been translated into more than forty languages and stands, according to one critic, as ‘a remarkable document of the history of contacts between civilisations’ – a history that is narrativised in the prologues to many of its translations, which offer metafictional accounts of its origins and global dissemination.¹⁸

The type of ‘critical conversations’ that Lees and Overing discuss in The Contemporary Medieval in Practice are not only between past and present, but between text (literature) and image (visual arts). For large portions of its history, Kalila wa Dimna was not only a work of literature but a work of art: the fables were transmitted alongside rich illustrative traditions in Persian, Arabic and Turkish manuscripts and, while perhaps not as striking or richly decorated, there exist illustrated Latin, Spanish and German manuscripts, and printed editions in German, Spanish, Latin, Italian and English that include woodcuts.¹⁹ In his introduction, Ibn al-Muqaffa, the eighth-century Arabic translator, explains that one of the book’s aims is ‘to demonstrate the images of the animals by various kinds of colors and tints so that they may be appealing to the hearts of kings, who should have a strong desire to enjoy such pictures’,²⁰ underscoring how Kalila wa Dimna was intended to capture readers’ interest visually as much as textually. Illustrations, illuminations, woodcuts, annotations and other marginalia work together and, at times, against each other to interpret the fables and impart meaning. It is precisely because earlier literary works such as Kalila wa Dimna so often blend the textual and the visual that I would argue they lend themselves to creative explorations and why, perhaps, they continue to hold appeal in the hyper-visual societies of the twenty-first century.

Kalila wa Dimna’s own mixed-media reception history offers a persuasive example of the benefits of ‘critical conversations’ that bring together literature and the visual arts. Such interdisciplinary conversations are not only productive but potentially transformative; they can unearth new ways of thinking about the arts and literature and highlight different perspectives on a range of issues. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley suggest that putting the visual and material arts into dialogue with the theoretical or the textual (a process they describe as ‘conversational sparring’), ‘enables a form of thinking and articulation beyond what is often conceivable on one’s own’.²¹ Elizabeth Benjamin and Sophie Corser argue similarly that

the reinterpretation of a text by an artist, or an art object by an author, provokes not only an assessment of the new and original work, but also a reappraisal of art, literature, and the process of adaptation. The relationship prompts evaluations, and therefore a self-consciousness of both or either medium.²²

The type of interdisciplinary approach discussed in this chapter ‘encourages a questioning of how the activities of artists/authors and viewers/readers are linked in a progression of interpretation, reinterpretation, rewriting, and reimaging’.²³ These encounters take on even deeper significance when they place the past into dialogue with the present, as Lees and Overing discuss: ‘The profound human dilemmas we now experience’, they write, ‘whether these be political, racial or environmental, are brought into sharp relief and are given a new affective and potentially activist dimension’.²⁴ It is with this activist spirit that Ancient Tales for Troubled Times evolved.

In Ancient Tales for Troubled Times, participating creative practitioners and organisations became hakawatis or ‘tellers of tales’, continuing Kalila wa Dimna’s tradition of using storytelling to understand the world. The project focused on one chapter from the book: the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’, a story about looking beyond perceived differences and working together to overcome adversity and build successful relationships with others. Like all chapters in Kalila wa Dimna, the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ begins with a brief dialogue between the ruler and his counsellor. The ruler states that he wishes to hear an example of true friendship. His counsellor responds with a tale about a crow, a mouse, a tortoise and a deer. On the surface at least, the four principal characters appear too different to get along, yet over time they recognise each other’s worth and come to a mutual understanding. The four animals are faced with a series of threats, represented in the story by the figure of a hunter, which they overcome by working together, exemplifying the moral of the fable that true friendships are strengthened by adversity. The events of the chapter take place in a landscape of persecution and fear in which the animals travel repeatedly from place to place to find safety. Encounters with others are, at first at least, frequently the cause of anxiety and mistrust – emotions that are overcome through conversation. Along the way, the animals debate the different types of friendship, loyalty and the value of reciprocity in companionship, as well as philosophical questions of material wealth and poverty, misfortune, ambition, destiny and the acquisition of wisdom. In the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’, storytelling lies at the heart of the animals’ ability to see beyond their differences. As they recount their own personal histories and the journeys that have brought them together, they find common ground and create a community in which they are finally able to find peace. The journeys undertaken by the four friends are not only physical – from one place to another – but symbolic: from pessimism to acceptance of help; from ignorance to wisdom; from fear and persecution to safety and tranquillity; and from exile to companionship.

The creative process that resulted in Ancient Tales for Troubled Times was similarly rooted in conversation: mirroring Kalila wa Dimna’s dialogic form, participating practitioners and organisations explored the chapter collectively in research-led workshops; the hakawatis then read and reflected on the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ individually or within their own respective communities. Through these conversations – with the text and with each other – they formulated creative responses that translated the tale into new forms to be ‘read’ anew by contemporary audiences. Like medieval and early modern commentators before them, the artworks of the hakawatis glossed the fable; the intralinear comments, amendments, marginalia and textual commentary of their predecessors replaced by new material forms of interpretation. These new creative responses featured animation (Dalloul and Nachawi), calligraffiti and sculpture (DemaOne), collage and blackout poetry (Morris), digital illustration (Elnayal), miniature oil painting (Prazmari), music, soundscapes, sketches and painting (Play for Progress), oral history (ELTA) and textiles (ELTA; Kettle and ‘Anna’).²⁵ Some of the artists engaged directly with medieval artistic forms and genres – calligraphy (DemaOne), cartography (Elnayal), manuscript illumination and illustration (Prazmari, DemaOne) and oral storytelling (Dalloul and Nachawi; ELTA) – while others did so indirectly. Many referenced different material and visual traditions, including Islamic arabesque geometry (DemaOne; ELTA; Kettle and ‘Anna’), Syrian textile patterns (Kettle and ‘Anna’), Indian and Persian miniature traditions and Chinese oil painting (Prazmari). Mirroring the plurality of perspectives and truths contained in Kalila wa Dimna’s labyrinthine structure, each piece represented one of many simultaneous dialogues with these ancient fables that, when brought together, created a powerful whole.

What emerged out of this creative engagement with the book illustrates the fruitfulness of the sorts of collaborations set out by Lees and Overing, Hilevaara and Orley, and Benjamin and Corser. The artworks produced for the exhibition are a compelling example of the rich potential of earlier literatures to serve as ‘conversation-starters’, engendering discussions about contemporary issues while also highlighting the historical continuities of these topics. Feedback received from visitors to the exhibition demonstrates the effectiveness of this type of interdisciplinary approach for developing public understanding of an ancient literary text. Ancient Tales for Troubled Times sought to encourage audiences to reflect on who we are as a society and how we live alongside those who appear to be different, and to highlight the importance of non-European literatures at a time of cultural, social and political division. Visitors acknowledged that they were ‘unfamiliar about the topics discussed and exhibited [beforehand] but [felt] very informed’ afterwards; that they ‘left with a lot to digest and think about’. In response to artworks that examined the important role that stories can play in community building and in finding one’s way in the world through different languages (ELTA; Kettle and ‘Anna’; Play for Progress), one visitor remarked that the exhibition ‘made me think about the connections between friendship and community defence in a deeply historical way. It also helped me think about storytelling as a genre that helps to root/build identity without centering an individual self’; another commented that, ‘It was interesting that the exhibition brought out the themes of diversity, tolerance, combatting ignorance/misapprehension of the “other” – how the story can be used as a “bridge” to bring people of different backgrounds together.’ The mobility and movement that characterises the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ also defines the lived experiences of many people globally today: some of the artists addressed this by playing with perspective and subject position, evoking feelings of dislocation, uncertainty and fear (DemaOne; Elnayal; Play for Progress; Prazmari); others explored the pain of forced displacement as a result of poverty (Morris). This topic significantly impacted exhibition visitors, who recognised ‘the importance and relevance of stories like Kalila wa Dimna for issues around migration and belonging’ and remarked that they ‘would have probably not realised its ability to explore migration issues with such depth’. Other hakawatis foreground the symbolic associations between the weaving of stories and the weaving of threads, positioning textile art as a form of collaborative working that exemplifies the moral of the tale (Kettle and ‘Anna’; ELTA). This approach also resonated with the exhibition’s audience, with one visitor remarking that, ‘There was something very striking about the consistent sight of weaving that came together with translation and retelling quite movingly.’

The impact of this type of interdisciplinary approach to literature and culture is also evident in the experiences of the collaborating organisations. At Play for Progress, young people seeking asylum explored the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ with artists and musicians in weekly, after-school creative programmes. The charity’s founder Alyson Frazier remarked that, ‘The themes of cooperation and community and storytelling more generally always feature in our work but were more explicitly explored this project. One line of the story that really struck home with us was “in your anxiety to escape, do not forget to help one another.”’²⁶ The process of engaging with these ancient tales facilitated the group’s relationship-building, their exchange of ideas, stories and experiences, and their practice of self-expression.²⁷ This was the first time that young people from Play for Progress had been part of an exhibition in a central London gallery, and they expressed great pride, joy, and even disbelief upon seeing their work publicly displayed. Frazier also remarked that ‘being placed within a larger global context felt right’ for the charity, and that this type of collaborative exhibition – on a larger scale than they were typically part of – offered ‘a great opportunity’ to publicise their work.²⁸

Similar sentiments were expressed by Year 6 pupils and teachers at Sir John Heron Primary School in Newham who took part in workshops in October 2021, co-developed with artist Sonia Tuttiett from ELTA. The workshops sought to engage students with literature and the visual arts in a fun way, and to highlight the creative potential of storytelling (visual, textual and oral) to explore important issues such as identity, community, home and migration. These issues speak to the PSHE (personal, social, health and economic) curriculum as well as to the lived experiences of many schoolchildren in London, including some of the students in this class, whose families had experienced migration or forced displacement. The activities sought to encourage multiliteracy in the visual arts and literature, drawing on home and heritage material cultures and languages (many of the children spoke a language other than English and had learned English after coming to the UK). Finally, the workshops aimed to give students an opportunity to explore their creativity by making artworks that would be shown in the exhibition at the P21 Gallery. This was an important aspect of the project: Newham has some of the lowest levels of cultural engagement in London, and children in this multicultural and multilingual borough have fewer opportunities to participate in or benefit from creative practices.²⁹

In response to group discussions about the importance of stories and storytelling, the history of Kalila wa Dimna, the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ and the themes of the project, the Year 6 pupils produced calligrams, poems and short prose pieces. Many were profoundly moving.³⁰ The children also created visual artworks in response to the fable, decorating cloth figures that were sewn together in a chain, like textile ‘paper dolls’, to symbolise how individuals, societies and cultures are connected and interdependent. Pupils drew inspiration from textiles, decorative arts and symbols from across the world, as well as illustrations depicting Kalila wa Dimna in medieval manuscripts. Many pupils looked to their own heritages for inspiration, for example, borrowing from Pakistani truck art or Latvian textile patterns; others incorporated keywords relating to the themes of home, identity, community and friendship in languages they spoke at home (Urdu, Pashto, Bengali) or were learning (German, Korean, Japanese). When visiting the P21 Gallery with their teachers, the children were visibly proud to see their work exhibited publicly alongside that of professional artists, and many were excited to see themselves and their families’ experiences, languages and cultures represented. Visitor feedback foregrounded the children’s artwork as a particular highlight of the exhibition. Pupils likewise described the workshops as ‘fun’, ‘creative’ and ‘joyful’, and commented that working with literature in this way had encouraged them to explore more stories and art forms from around the world and made them think differently about how to be creative with languages. Teachers at the school also recognised the educational potential of using the visual arts in conjunction with literature to support multiple areas of the curriculum and as a way of engaging students from diverse backgrounds: one teacher commented that the workshops were ‘Such a powerful way to engage children in all aspects of teaching’ that they ‘might use this to plan similar projects in school’. The work produced by the children was displayed in Sir John Heron Primary’s corridors for other members of the community to view as part of the school’s drive to promote cross-cultural understanding and learning through literature, history and the arts, and to inculcate in pupils a sense of community and pride both personally and in their academic work.

Also based in Newham, East London Textile Arts works with diverse groups of all abilities and backgrounds in the local community. The use of a literary text as the starting point for their creative practice was a new way of working for ELTA, which the group’s leaders have since incorporated into subsequent projects.³¹ In a blog post about their experience of working with Kalila wa Dimna, Sonia Tuttiett, co-founder and lead textile artist, wrote that engaging directly with a literary text had added depth to their creative work: ‘we had some lively discussions that engaged people’s interest before we started trying to bring the story to life through our stitching’.³² For some members of the collective, Kalila wa Dimna held personal significance: in some cases, it resonated with personal experiences of migration; others recalled reading the book in school or hearing its stories read aloud when young. The pieces created by members of ELTA for the exhibition both reflected and reached out to communities in Newham: in one, embroiderers from the group produced costumes of the four animal characters and the hunter, which were worn during a performance of the fable by a local drama group for adults with learning disabilities; another, a fifteen-minute film titled Migration Tales, featured accounts of lived experiences of migration told by members of the group. These testimonies provided glimpses of the human reality behind statistics of migration, individualising those who are so often perceived as an impersonal multitude. The artworks produced by ELTA’s members create a space in which local stories intersect with global literatures and cultures. To ensure that they reached communities in Newham who were unlikely to travel into central London to visit the exhibition at the P21 Gallery, ELTA exhibited their work in Stratford Library in Autumn 2022, engaging a local audience with Kalila wa Dimna and the issues explored by the project, and promoting local community-based creative practice.

Even more poignantly, in her blog post Sonia describes how working with the fables provided a shared experience of community and joy during the COVID-19 pandemic – a period of fear, instability, isolation and, for some, very real danger, that echoed the struggles faced by characters in the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’:

As I reflect back on the experience of running East London Textiles Arts throughout the pandemic, I realise that we were not only considering how to illustrate the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’ through embroidery, but at a much deeper level these stories of co-operation, loyalty and ingenuity related in such a significant way to our collective experience of living through the uncertainty and fear around COVID and the restrictions on freedom it brought with it. […] As we worked away at the embroideries, unable to meet in person during lockdown, we found new ways in which to connect, communicate, work together, and encourage one another, centred around our work on the fables. […] Coming out of this time, we all have a new story to tell of how we have been affected by the pandemic and its consequences. The embroidery group became very important as a virtual social space through Zoom and WhatsApp at a time when we weren’t able to meet in person. The personal stories of coping, of loss, of family and friends, as well as the embroidery, became the thread that bound us all together. Without the embroidery and knitting, I think that our conversations would have petered out fairly quickly. It’s the Kalila stories, the creating and making, the discussion and debate, the positivity of a project to focus on that kept our group alive and able to weather those difficult times together.

Sonia’s reflection on ELTA’s work for Ancient Tales for Troubled Times communicates the contemplative, meditative aspect of engaging with literature, of sharing stories, listening, inviting conversation; a process that has ancient roots.³³ Alice Kettle, another of the project’s hakawatis, describes the creativity of craft ‘as a common language’ that ‘extends to become a multi-cultural, totally inclusive connecting force which can affect change’.³⁴ Sonia’s description of storytelling as a means of creating and sustaining community – as being ‘the thread that bound us all together’ – echoes the message of the ‘Tale of the Four Friends’: that conversation lies at the heart of the animals’ ability to see beyond their differences and find peace and companionship. Most relevant, perhaps, for the discussions in this chapter, her words offer a powerful statement about literature’s potential for real-world impact.

These types of ‘critical conversations’ that bring into dialogue past and present, literature and the visual arts, and research and creative practice can be highly beneficial for scholars of ancient literatures, offering different and even unexpected perspectives and bringing to light comparisons and connections that may not be so evident when texts are approached solely through an academic lens. Creative responses to literary works can furthermore provide a fruitful way of thinking about how and why literatures travel and evolve, about the global circulation and reception of works like Kalila wa Dimna that have undergone complex histories of transmission and taken on a cultural life of their own.³⁵ Creating conversations between the visual arts and literary research serves as a reminder that the texts we study cannot be separated from the material conditions of their production and transmission, that there is more to literature than the words on the page and that words live through the bodies and groups that speak and perform them in their everyday creative interactions and encounters with past and present worlds.