Who ate the baby? ‘Canis’’ adaptation history visualized
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In the tale of the hasty father, the returning father assumes his baby has been eaten and kills the one he considers responsible before realizing that they in fact saved the baby's life. Depending on the version, the killed character can be a mongoose, a dog, and even the baby's mother. This creative response presents the tale of the hasty father based on the Sanskrit Panchatantra, the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar, and the Greek Stephanites kai Ichnelates as three cartoons. The question these cartoons ask is how a visualization of these three versions can highlight the transformation of the killed character and the misogyny in the 11th-century Greek translation in which the mother is killed. Although the killing of the mother can be explained as a translation mistake, it nevertheless points out the underlying misogyny that makes the woman’s behavior plausible and accepted in further translations until today. The idea is that a visualization can point out the impact by repeating the same brutal scene in three comparable depictions. In this way, the brutal absurdity of the wife being beaten to death just like an animal can be recognized without the need to imagine the scene from a written text.
Source: Open Library of Humanities
DOI: 10.16995/olh.25991
Author: Lilli Hölzlhammer
Institutions: Uppsala University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4415403444
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