by Paul Nurse
Many of the tales found within Vikram are similar in form and spirit to stories found within the Nights, wherein a frame tale provides the ready excuse for storytelling; in this case, the hero Raja Vikram’s attempts to capture and transport a chatty demon. “These tales … strung together by artificial means … are manifest precursors of the Decamerone, or Ten Days,” Burton writes. “Here was produced and published for the use of the then civilized world, the genuine Oriental apologue, myth and tale combined which, by amusing narrative and romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals….” In offering these stories to a publisher, he remarked that “They are not without a quaintish merit,” but the public did not agree; Vikram’s sales were only moderate. But it is clear the pleasure Burton derived from translating the tales prompted him to continue, in however desultory or fitful a manner, with his translation of the Nights.
Regardless of the host of projects he worked on more or less simultaneously, Burton still expected to be the first individual to produce a fully unexpurgated English translation of the Nights, continuing to work sporadically on the book until reading in a November 1881 issue of the British literary journal Athenaeum about Payne’s work. With the first volumes set to appear the next year, this was a notice announcing the near-completion of the translation Payne called The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (to differentiate their editions, Burton eventually entitled his The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night) and advertising for subscribers.
With a possible gold-mining operation in West Africa on the horizon, Burton wrote at once to the Athenaeum offering Payne precedence in the field, his good wishes and his full support in issuing an uncensored edition of the Nights, while cannily leaving the door open for his own version. “My work is still unfinished,” Burton wrote. “I rejoice, therefore, to see that Mr. John Payne has addressed himself to a realistic translation without ‘abridgements or suppressions.’ I have only to wish him success…. I want to see that the book has fair-play; and if it is not treated as it deserves I shall still have to print my own version.”
Payne, who knew Burton’s reputation as an Arabist was gained through practical experience, wrote to him immediately, suggesting collaboration and offering the older man a share of any royalties. But Burton’s reply was cagey. “Your terms about the royalty are more than liberal,” he replied. “I cannot accept them, however, except for value received, and it remains to be seen what time is at my disposal…. I must warn you that I am a rolling stone.” When they met in London in the spring of 1882, it was arranged that Burton should read the proofs of Payne’s subsequent volumes (the first was already out) for corrections and suggestions. For more than a year, as soon as the proof sheets of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night came off the press, Payne had them shipped to Burton in Trieste for the consul’s editorial advice.
Soon an admiring relationship, if not a close friendship, sprang up between the two men. Burton saw quickly that Payne was a formidable translator whose text needed few changes, and so promised not to bring out his own version before the final volume of Payne’s translation was completed and in the hands of his subscribers. In the end, Burton refused compensation for his advice, and Payne dedicated a later volume to him in the warmest terms.
What Burton did do, however, was continually prod the younger man to be more explicit in his translation. Time and again, Burton tried to nudge Payne toward greater accuracy, complaining in one letter, “You are ‘drawing it very mild.’ Has there been any unpleasantness about plain speaking? Poor Abu Hasan is (as it were) castrated. I should say ‘Be bold (Audace, etc.)…. I should simply translate every word.” In another letter, he is emphatic that an unexpurgated translation should be as literal as possible, explaining, “What I mean by literalism is literally translating every noun … so the student can use the translation. I hold the Nights [to be] the best of class books, and when a man knows it he can get on with Arabs everywhere.”
Burton was hardly shy about telling his countrymen what he thought of general British knowledge about the Muslim world. “This book is indeed a legacy which I bequeath to my fellow-countrymen,” he writes in his introduction. He adds, “Apparently England is ever forgetting that she is at present the greatest Mohammedan [sic] empire in the world,” while in the same passage strongly denouncing “the crass ignorance concerning … Oriental peoples which should most interest her [Britain], [and] expose her to the contempt of Europe as well as the Eastern world,” and advocating instruction in Arabic for imperial officials rather than the typical public school Latin and Greek.
The first volumes of John Payne’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night appeared in 1882. Nine volumes were issued over the next two years. Three additional volumes entitled Tales from the Arabic, incorporating stories from the Calcutta I and Breslau texts, appeared in 1884, with another volume entitled Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp arriving in 1889. From the start, the richness and boldness of Payne’s translation made his series much sought-after bibliographical items, with many aficionados considering Payne’s version of The Thousand and One Nights the most graceful rendering in English.
But it is still a work unwilling to go much beyond conventional boundaries. For all his boldness in issuing an uncensored edition, Payne remains curiously detached about translating the more graphic portions of the Nights, avoiding excessive explicitness. While he cuts little or nothing, Payne is coy about employing coarse words or phrases to describe scenes or acts, especially those regarding sexuality. By using such descriptions as “go into a maid” and “join thy body to mine,” his version of the Nights is literal but not especially graphic, sacrificing some of the earthiness that is so much a feature of the Arabic Nights, and which later came to distinguish—many say mar—Burton’s translation.
Despite continual badgering of Payne to be more explicit, Burton’s praise for the younger man’s work was sincere and unreserved. “He succeeds admirably in the most difficult passages,” Burton wrote, “and he often hits upon choice and special terms and the exact vernacular equivalent of the foreign word so happily and so picturesquely that all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.” This last point has proved to be a particularly loaded phrase when comparing the two editions, but more on that later. As Payne dedicated Volume 9 of his translation to Burton, besides thanking him profusely in the preface to Volume 1, Burton reciprocated by dedicating the second volume of his work to Payne (the first is dedicated to John Steinhaeuser’s memory), generously describing the gradual development of the Arabian Nights in Europe as having been “begun … by Galland, a Frenchman, continued by Von Hammer [Purgstall], an Austro-German, and finished by Mr. John Payne … an Englishman.”
Or so he said, for it is clear the aging explorer felt the English translation sweeps were not yet over. Burton watched Payne’s success with interest and probably some envy, since he and his wife were often in financial straits and he had now been working at his own version for perhaps upwards of three decades. When he learned that not only did Payne not suffer any legal repercussions for releasing an uncensored version but sold out the entire printing, while winning substantial critical praise (but not from all: as might be expected from a man who remained a virgin for life following the first sight of his wife’s pubic hair, John Ruskin took exceptional disgust), Burton reactivated plans for his own edition and forged ahead, “ordering … old scraps of translations and collating a vast heterogeneous collection of notes” he had assembled over the years.
He was aided by a device similar to Payne’s Villon Society, but clothed in much more secrecy. On a visit to India in 1876, Burton and a friend, the Bombay civil servant Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, came up with the idea for a bogus publishing society that would act as a smokescreen for translations of English versions of eastern erotica or similar works that had appeared only in edited form. At the time, Arbuthnot was engaged in translating a number of Indian works, including several hea
vily erotic in theme, and was unsure how to release them without running afoul of the authorities.
What was needed was some kind of shield to throw the British legal beagles off the scent, and thus was born the fictitious Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, with its headquarters located allegedly in Benares, India, but the actual printers were housed in the London suburb of Stoke Newington. The name was taken from the Hindi words for “love” and “doctrine” or “scripture” (respectively kama and shastra), giving those with some knowledge of Indian languages a hint about the sorts of works such a “Love Scripture” Society was likely to issue. Over the next seven years, the Kama Shastra Society (KSS) printed and distributed seven works under its banner, including the first English translation of the love manual the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana and Burton’s Nights.
It is a mark of the atmosphere surrounding sexual matters in late Victorian Britain that no translator’s name appeared on any of the KSS issues (except for Burton’s Nights), although it is known that most were done by either Arbuthnot or the Bombay-based Hungarian linguist Edward Rehatsek. The only printings to appear with any mention of authorship were versions of the Ananga Ranga, the first of which was produced by Burton and Arbuthnot in 1873. The two men tried having this printed in England under the generic title Kama Shastra, disguising their involvement by using their initials in reverse order: “translated by A.F.F. and B.F.R.”
They needn’t have bothered, since the printer lost his nerve after running off no more than a few copies of the proof sheets and refused to print further. It was this episode that convinced Burton and Arbuthnot of the need for a mechanism to circumvent Lord Campbell’s Act; something to protect their identity when issuing translated eastern works, even if these were only for private sale. Twelve years later, they printed the original work under its actual title of Ananga Ranga with the reversed initials intact, but all other Kama Shastra Society “issues” except for Burton’s Nights were printed anonymously.
For there were dangers. Burton and Arbuthnot knew that agents of the vice societies in London were making inquiries regarding the KSS and those behind it. Nothing came of this, but it demonstrates the risks they were taking. As a further safeguard, in some Kama Shastra works the city “Cosmopoli” is cited as the place of publication, but this is yet another smokescreen, as “Cosmopoli” is actually a mythical city in which all peoples of the world come to live together. In certain literary circles of the period, however, it was also a euphemism for “sophisticated” literature designed for worldly readers.
Burton and Arbuthnot knew what they were doing. From the outset, works issued by the non-existent Kama Shastra Society either sold well or sold out altogether. In its first two years alone, the Kama Sutra went through two printings; it was then pirated for most of the next century before finally being openly published in the 1960s. Proceeds from the sale of these works may have provided Burton with the money he needed to absorb the printing costs of his Nights. When he discovered that the best offer he could get from an interested publisher for a multi-volume translation was five hundred pounds (the bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch thought Isabel Burton mad for offering to sell all rights for a flat ten thousand pounds—perhaps half a million dollars or more today),* Burton decided to undertake the entire expense himself and release his edition as a Kama Shastra issue, eliminating any middlemen and keeping any profits for himself.
This time, however, there was a major difference. While the other KSS works all appeared as anonymous or disguised volumes, Burton decided to gamble by releasing his translation under his own name, trusting in his reputation as an orientalist and authority on indigenous “manners and customs”—often Victorian code for knowledge of sexual habits—as a selling point to subscribers who knew he would not shy away from blunt language or descriptions. But this decision also meant that he could not hide behind a cloak of anonymity, and might face trouble.
Whatever dangers existed, Burton knew his public. Unlike Payne, the retiring London solicitor, Burton’s name was as identified with the desert world of the Nights as Captain Cook’s was with the sea, and he must have guessed that a translation of the Arabian Nights by Richard Burton, the man who had travelled to Mecca and searched for the Nile, would be ready-made for English-reading audiences. He also understood that his reputation for raciness might actually help sales. From the success of the Kama Shastra works, Burton knew a market existed in Britain for eastern books dealing with the erotic. Payne’s success suggested that a fully translated version of the Nights in all its earthy glory remained to be done, and might prove even more popular and financially rewarding.
When trying to interest Quaritch in the project, Burton wrote to the publisher, “I may tell you that the work will be a wonder. Payne was obliged to ‘draw it mild’…. I have done the contrary … the tone of the book will be one of extreme delicacy and decency … broken by the most startling horrors like ‘the Lady Who Would be Rogered by the Bear’ … some parts beat Rabelais hollow….” Burton predicted confidently to Payne, “My conviction is that all the women in England will read it and half the men will cut me [dead].”
There also appears to be a second, personal reason Burton wanted to issue a new English translation so soon after Payne’s. Several references suggest that Burton was convinced a heavily annotated translation of the Nights would not be merely a worthy addition to private libraries that were not adverse to having such things among their shelves, but might act as a kind of de facto anthropological encyclopedia for English-speaking Europeans on Muslim manners (including sexual habits) not mentioned in other translations or even books devoted to Islamic culture.
His concept, then, was not only to provide an even more unexpurgated version than Payne’s, but one that included extensive annotation and appendices beyond anything in the younger man’s work. Writing to Athenaeum late in 1881 (in the same letter in which he gives Payne’s project his support), Burton remarks that he regards the Nights as a book
mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales … unique as a study of anthropology … a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos … its contrast of the highest and purest morality with … orgies … take away the reader’s breath.
Privately, he wrote to Payne in August 1884, “I am going in for notes where they do not fit your scheme, and shall make the book a perfect repertoire of Eastern knowledge in its most esoteric form.” He elaborates on this in the foreword, writing that previous versions, no matter how charming, had degraded “a chef-d’œuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnological interest and importance to a mere fairy book….” He defended the extensive use of notes in “a book whose speciality is anthropology” by recalling previous difficulties he’d faced in publishing his researches on indigenous sexuality, hoping this new translation would be “an opportunity of noticing in explanatory notes many details of the text which would escape the reader’s observation … I am confident that they will form a repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric phase.”
Like Payne, Burton found it best to issue volumes of the standard, accepted Nights stories first before adding a series of additional volumes containing “supplementary” tales appearing in other texts. Except for one personal addition, he follows the standard sequence of stories and Nights as they appear in the Calcutta II edition. In their respective supplementary volumes, both Payne and Burton include stories found in other printed texts and manuscripts of the Nights, but which are not part of either the Bulaq or Calcutta II texts. Both “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” are part of these supplementary volumes—another indication that while they had appeared in Galland, they existed in no original Arabic manuscripts.
Unlike Payne, however, Burton chose to follow Lane by including extensive annotation with the text, explaining that where notes
did not fit into Mr. Payne’s plan. They do with mine: I can hardly imagine The Nights being read to a
ny profit by men of the West without commentary…. These volumes … afford me a long-sought opportunity of noticing practices and customs which interest all mankind and which ‘Society’ will not hear mentioned.
In fashioning his long-sought opportunity, Burton was intent on writing as close to how an Arab might write in English as possible, producing “a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the mécanique, the manner and the matter,” of the tales, noting that “however prosy and long-drawn out be the formula, it retains the scheme of the Nights because they are a prime feature of the original.” Burton had done this previously with his translation of Camõens’s sixteenth-century Lusiads and Lyricks (1880 and 1884), constructing a pre-Spenserian English to convey the flavour of Portuguese verse at the time the poet was writing.
At the end of the Nights , Burton reiterates, almost apologetically, the reasons for his eccentric style by noting that the original Arabic
is highly composite; it does not disdain local terms, bye-words and allusions … and it borrows indiscriminately from Persian, from Turkish and from Sanscrit. As its equivalent in vocabulary, I could only devise a somewhat archaical English whose old-fashioned and sub-antique flavour would contrast with our modern and everyday speech, admitting at times even Latin and French terms … my conviction remains that it represents … the motley suit of Arab-Egyptian….
“Archaical” is absolutely right. By attempting to write as an Abbasid Arab might compose in English, Burton goes much too far. The literary style of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night is rendered in a pseudo-medieval, almost Chaucerian English that has no true equivalent in any language. Burton may have been technically right to employ such a method—to impart a sense of Arabian “timelessness,” C.M. Doughty uses much the same device to an even greater degree in his classic book Travels in Arabia Deserta—but he leaves the reader with a steep uphill climb.
