Eastern Dreams

by Paul Nurse

  Burton’s Nights is frequently charming, but it is also terrifically difficult to wade through, particularly as its sixteen volumes are comprised of an average of nearly a hundred thousand words apiece. Never overly concerned with making things easy, Burton does not hesitate to toss arcane or even newly coined words into the mix, leaving his readers to swim as best they can, hopefully clinging to a dictionary as a life raft.

  Even a dictionary is not enough. Latin and French phrases are used in place of English equivalents, different spellings are given almost simultaneously, English and American slang expressions appear at jarring intervals and Burton freely admits he made up some words and phrases simply because they suited his style or he liked their sound—“she snorted and snarked,” used to describe a woman’s snoring, is a favourite example of commentators.

  For his sources, Burton used a variety of texts. In Arabic, he mainly used Calcutta II, the Breslau Text and the Bulaq Text, as well as the Wortley Montagu Manuscript, which Burton worked from via photographs because he loathed the Bodleian Library. He also consulted other English translations, especially Payne’s, checking them with the Arabic texts for exactness, and appears to have been intent on maintaining a literary integrity. Once, not having an Arabic original for one story, only a French version, Burton translated the French into Arabic and then the draft Arabic translation into English, to keep intact the flow of the whole.

  Payne may have translated his Nights on moving omnibuses, but Burton went a more conventional route. Besides the large study in the Trieste palazzo he shared with his wife, when in London he did much of his work at the India Office Library or the library of the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall. The club librarian, Henry Tedder, remembered the explorer working endlessly at the library’s great round table, barely pausing to eat, dressed in a white linen suit with a tiepin shaped like a sword. Tedder recalled that in conversation Burton was urbane and suave with a subtle, dry sense of humour, reminding him of a strange compound “of Benedictine monk, a Crusader, and a Buccaneer.”

  According to Burton’s account, serious work began in the autumn of 1882, when he assembled his materials for the first volumes and plunged wholesale into translation. Even a heart attack early in 1883 did not slow him down; he continued working from bed, propped up on pillows with his materials spread around him like battlements. While her husband worked on the book every moment he could, Isabel Burton—at first fearful that putting his name front and centre on a controversial work might lead to trouble and jeopardize his looming Foreign Office pension—soon got behind the project, procuring Payne’s mailing list and over a period of several months sending out tens of thousands of advertising circulars promoting the forthcoming Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to prospective subscribers.

  Seeing that John Payne had limited his sets to five hundred copies but was oversubscribed by more than a hundred percent, the Burtons chanced a round thousand copies for their issue, then regretted their restraint when they saw the number of subscriptions rise to more than two thousand. Like the other KSS issues, copies were priced high—a guinea a volume—a ploy as much to keep the work out of the hands of the average public, and therefore from the immediate attention of the vice societies, as it was for profit and to cover printing and distribution.

  Payne may have suffered no legal woes from his translation, but that did not mean the Burtons were safe. Burton’s version of the Nights does not cloud words or passages as Payne’s is content to do, but goes for as literal a rendering of the original as is possible; a rendering that most researchers admit actually over-emphasizes the coarse passages. In “The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince,” a man describes a woman in the gallant terms of “O thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores ever futtered by Negro slaves who are hired to have at thee!” The extensive use of ribald footnotes, a long “Terminal Essay” on the history and social manners of the Nights (including an extended look at homosexuality by period and region) and multiple appendices on everything from recipes for aphrodisiacs to harem lesbian practices, left Burton all the more open to prosecution.

  There were hints of potential trouble in the months leading up to the appearance of the first volumes. All were printed by the Waterlow Publishing Company of London and bound in black and gold—the colours of the Abbasid caliphate—and each contained a flyer requesting that the work not be exposed for sale in public places or be permitted to fall into the hands of other than students of Muslim customs—inserted, no doubt, for legal protection, but also as a likely publicity ploy.*

  But when she was in London during the summer of 1885 to see the first volumes through the press, there were times when Isabel Burton felt certain she was being followed by figures she feared were agents of the vice organizations, eager to investigate rumours her husband was about to publish an erotic edition of the Arabian Nights. The Burtons even consulted a criminal lawyer specializing in cases involving Lord Campbell’s Act, but were advised before any trouble came their way that John Payne would have to be charged first; otherwise no one could prove animus nocendi or “intent to harm.” Ready and perhaps even eager for trouble, Burton told his wife, “I don’t care a button about being prosecuted, and if the matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that, before they condemn me, they must cut half of them out, and not allow them to be circulated to the public.”

  Their fears were unfounded. The first volumes of Richard Francis Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night appeared in September 1885 and proved one of the literary sensations of the decade. Its success may have been helped by a curious piece of synchronicity. The same month as the first volume was released, H. Rider Haggard scored a massive hit with the publication of his classic adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines. With Africa and African travellers already on the public’s mind, this might have given Burton’s work an added boost via his reputation as one of Britain’s premier Nile explorers.

  At the end of the day, Richard Burton followed John Payne’s success by seeing a gamble pay off handsomely. The first volumes of his translation, fully entitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, With Introductory Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights, won him immense critical and popular praise. The anonymous verse presented at the beginning of this chapter made its way around London, wittily underscoring the racy appeal of his new edition of one of the most familiar books in Britain.

  Most reviewers awarded him unreserved praise. The St. James Gazette referred to Burton’s Nights as “one of the most important translations to which a great English scholar has ever devoted himself.” The Morning Advertiser called it “simply priceless.” Even in the United States—where a rumour that U.S. Customs was going to forbid importation of the work at New York harbour proved untrue—most newspapers and journals gave Burton high marks for his knowledge and audacity.

  A mark of Burton’s success came in a popular British magazine. In its October 24 issue of 1885, Vanity Fair published a fine profile of Burton at sixty-four, calling his translation “the most complete, laborious, uncompromising, and perfect translation of that collection of stories known to us as ‘The Arabian Nights,’” while contributing a warm appreciation of Burton himself:

  As a bold astute traveller, courting danger … Captain Burton has few equals; as a Master of Oriental languages, manners, and customs, he has none. He is still very young … vigorous, full of anecdote and playful humour…. He is a wonderful man.

  Of course, there were dissenters. The Pall Mall Gazette published two articles by John Morley under the headings “Pantagruelism or Pornography” and “The Ethics of Dirt.” There were others, but the greatest outcry came from Stanley Lane-Poole in the Edinburgh Review (whose editor, Henry Reeve, had been enemies with Burton for years), which harrumphed in
a long, hostile article that “Probably no European has ever gathered such an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice. It is a work which no decent gentleman will long permit to stand upon his shelves…. Galland is for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study, and Burton for the sewers.”

  These comparatively few naysayers did not dampen the Burtons’ triumph. The ten volumes of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night were released between 1885 and 1886, followed by the six-volume Supplemental Nights. Together, all sixteen volumes earned the Burtons some sixteen thousand guineas. Once the six thousand guineas spent on advertising, printing and distribution were subtracted, this left ten thousand guineas as pure income (in today’s figures, anywhere from half to upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars), enough for husband and wife to live comfortably for Richard’s remaining years. By comparison, John Payne made somewhere in the realm of four thousand pounds for his translation—hardly a miserable return, but nowhere in the same financial league.

  All the attention seemed to bemuse Burton. Although delighted with the praise and unaccustomed profit, he still could not refrain from a sardonic jab at the conventional society he alternately courted and despised. “I struggled for forty-seven years,” he told his wife. “I distinguished myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a ‘Thank you,’ not a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age and immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we shall never be without money.”

  Not entirely true, and not quite the last honour. Early in 1886, the couple were in Tangiers, celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, when they learned that he had been named a K.C.M.G.—a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. Queen Victoria had approved the knighthood in January, making them Sir Richard and Lady Burton.

  But Burton was still in Trieste, stuck as uncomfortably between East and West in fact as perhaps he was in character, and his health was failing. As the 1880s wore on, his iron constitution began giving way as heart disease, gout, liver problems and the aftereffects of a multitude of diseases—including syphilis contracted in Egypt and crippling malaria in East Africa—combined to break down what had once been a legendarily rugged physique. His breathing became troubled (the 1883 heart attack was followed by a second four years later), and he began having trouble performing the simplest tasks.

  In the autumn of 1890, while working on an annotated translation of the Arab love treatise The Scented Garden, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton died at his Trieste palazzo at the age of sixty-nine. Because he passed away a few months short of his retirement, he lost not only his consular salary, but also the government pension Isabel Burton had been so fretful about when her husband’s Nights came out. After the funeral, Lady Burton had her husband interred in England, within a marble mausoleum shaped like an Arab tent, in a Catholic cemetery in Mortlake, Surrey, where she joined him on her own death six years later.

  For all the flaws of text and translator, the Richard Burton Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night remains the most celebrated, eccentric and epic version of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to appear in English, or perhaps any language.

  It is also the most controversial English edition in existence, not because of its unexpurgated nature (if anything, the work’s reputation as the most risqué version in English is part of its mystique), but for Burton’s sources. Charges of plagiarism have been levelled at Burton from partisans of Payne, especially from Payne’s friend and biographer, Thomas Wright, who wrote an entire biography of Burton mainly to show how the older man “stole” from Payne. Some authorities, like the American mythologist Joseph Campbell, have accepted these claims completely even as others, among them Burton’s biographer Fawn Brodie, have tried to examine and discredit them.

  As part of his attack, Wright inserted pages in his biography where he compares Payne and Burton’s translations side by side, and it is true that in many instances, the two texts are nearly identical. That Burton used Payne’s translation is unarguable, since pages exist showing he had at least one copy of Payne’s Tales from the Arabic that he marked and annotated while preparing his own edition. That said, the accusations of deliberate plagiarism seem tenuous. As a friend and ardent admirer of Payne, Wright may have been trying to give the Payne translation an added gloss by running down Burton’s more celebrated work. Unlike Payne and Burton, however, Wright did not know Arabic and was not a translator. Unfamiliar with the difficulties of finding the right word or phrase to convey meaning and intent from one language to another, he checked the English versions of both texts, found passages similar and in some instances even identical, and cried theft.

  Still, the American orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald, who did know Arabic intimately and considers Burton’s Nights “his great work,” also believed Burton’s edition was dependent on Payne’s to a significant degree, even while admitting the explorer “knew ‘The Nights,’ after his erratic fashion, as no other European ever did.” Among other Arabists, Robert Irwin thinks at least a large portion of Burton’s translation is little more than disguised Payne, and Husain Haddawy is adamant that Burton consistently copied his predecessor extensively while tarting things up with his own insertions.

  As is often the case, the actual truth may lie somewhere among these various viewpoints. While it seems accurate to say that Burton consulted Payne extensively, using selections of the other man’s work in his own translation, he does give credit (as he does other sources and assistants) by inserting such footnotes as “I give Payne by way of example” or “I quote Payne.” And the Payne version was not the only English text Burton used while translating; in addition to printed and manuscript Arabic sources, he also employed the Torrens and Lane editions (whom he also cites), and there is general agreement that his rendering of the poetry is, whatever its literary worth, entirely his own translation.

  Thomas Wright also fails to point out that, eventually, Burton translated more stories than his predecessor, as well as more of the poetical refrains and decidedly more of the ribald passages (which Payne only translated if they also appear in the Bulaq and Breslau editions). In tales such as “Aladdin,” Burton’s version actually predates Payne’s translation, but with the same striking similarities of text that Wright believed were proof of plagiarism. The main body of the two translations contains the same number of stories translated from Calcutta II (not including incidental tales, 169 stories spread over 1001 Nights in Burton and Payne, respectively; a single difference being “How Abu Hasan Broke Wind,” more of which below), but in their respective supplementary volumes, Burton translated significantly more stories for his six-volume Supplementary Nights than Payne did for his three-volume Tales from the Arabic (sixty-one stories to Payne’s twenty, plus two more for the separate volume including “Aladdin”).

  Furthermore, Burton provides variations of tales that have more than one circulating version (such as Sindbad’s seventh and final voyage), plus many others contributed by the folklorist W.A. Clouston. Did Richard Burton use John Payne’s version of the Nights for his own translation? Yes, it seems a certainty—but not always, not entirely, not without accreditation and usually not without first checking the choice of words with other versions, both Arabic and European.

  It is also a feature of Burton’s translation that he goes much further than Payne in accentuating the bawdiness found within the Nights, to the point where Burton undoubtedly added another story to his scheme and intent. Robert Irwin informs us that “How Abu Hasan Broke Wind” is not found in any other collection of the Nights prior to Burton’s, but appears to be an old European story that Burton Arabized and inserted into his version as a humorous anecdote. In spite of this overreliance on the erotic and bawdy, however, Burton is capable of writing elegant passages, as in his famous description of a girl in the 421st Night, echoing the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon:

  The girl is soft o
f speech, fair of form like a branchlet of basil, with teeth like chamomile-petals and hair like halters wherefrom to hang hearts. Her cheeks are like blood-red anemones and her face like a pippin: she has lips like wine and breasts like pomegranates and a shape supple as a rattan cane. Her body is well-formed with sloping shoulders dight; she hath a nose like the edge of a sword shining bright and a forehead brilliant white and eyebrows which unite and eyes stained by Nature’s hand black as night.

  What is beyond question is Burton’s love of the Nights. Writing that “every man at some … turn of his life has longed for the supernatural powers and a glimpse of Wonderland,” Burton reveals that here

  he is in the midst of it. Here he sees mighty spirits summoned to work the human mite’s will … who can transport him in an eye-twinkling whithersoever he wishes … here he finds maga and magicians who can make kings of his friends, slay armies of his foes and bring any number of beloveds to his arms.

  The reader’s mind, he says, is “dazzled by the splendours which flash before it; by the sudden procession of Jinns … demons and fairies … by good wizards and evil sorcerers … by magic rings and slaves and by talismanic couches which rival the carpet of Solomon.”

  Splendours Burton provides aplenty, but what really distinguishes his edition from other English versions is not only the explicitness of his translation but his annotations and the truly massive Terminal Essay that takes up almost 240 of Volume 10’s 532 pages—the perfect vehicle for presenting a lifetime of accumulated knowledge of the peoples of the world, particularly but not exclusively those of Islam. As a Victorian, Burton had his full share of prejudices that found their way into his translation—a good deal of misogyny and Afrophobia, plus a fair slice of the virulent anti-Semitism he shared with the Victorian officer class—but the overall impression is that he has thrown open the floodgates of his knowledge to escort readers through the maze of an oriental phantasmagoria where fancy and fact meet in a new reality. Of English translators, Burton may be said to take the greatest delight in acting the role of literary tour guide through The Thousand and One Nights. After a lifetime spent erratically absorbing knowledge and expertise, he finally hit upon the perfect vehicle to exhibit his erudition.