 A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives is James Merrill's 1974 modernist poem "Lost in Translation".In Rabih Alameddine's novel "The Hakawati", or "The Storyteller", the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers.Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an, the Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights.