This paper describes the process involved in turning a Jātaka tale from an historical text into a story fit for telling to a contemporary audience. The authors are storytellers within the UK storytelling tradition who were invited by an academic translator of the Jātakas to perform the stories as a ‘knowledge exchange’ event funded by the University of Edinburgh. The paper describes how the storytellers adjusted one of the Jātakas (the Vessantara Jātaka) in order to make the story accessible for a twenty-first-century Western audience. The description of the translation process (from text to performance) provides a tool to increase the popularity of the Jātakas in the West, but may also offer insights to the academic translators of the tales about their performativity.
目次
Abstract 1 Introduction 1 The Vessantara Jātaka 3 The Dilemmas of the Story of Vessantara for Western Audiences 4 The Tradition of Oral Storytelling 4 Translating Vessantara 6 Emotional Engagement 6 Contemporary Motifs 8 Changing the Plot 9 Audience Reaction 9 Conclusions 10 Acknowledgements 11 References 11
