The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 16 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

“Captain Burton’s Arabian Nights, however, has another defect besides this textual inaccuracy” (p. 180); and this leads to a whole page of abusive rhetoric anent my vocabulary: the Reviewer has collected some thirty specimens—he might have collected three hundred from the five volumes—and he concludes that the list places Captain Burton’s version “quite out of the category of English books” (p. 181) and “extremely annoying to any reader with a feeling for style.” Much he must know of modern literary taste which encourages the translator of an ancient work such as Mr. Gibb’s Aucassin and Nicolette (I quote but one in a dozen) to borrow the charm of antiquity by imitating the nervous and expressive language of the pre-Elizabethans and Shakespeareans. Let him compare any single page of Mr. Payne with Messieurs Torrens and Lane and he will find that the difference saute aux yeux. But a purist who objects so forcibly to archaism and archaicism should avoid such terms as “whilom Persian Secretary” (p. 170); as anthophobia, which he is compelled to explain by “dread of selecting only what is best” (p. 175), as anthophobist (p. 176); as “fatuous ejaculations” (p. 183), as a “raconteur”

(p. 186), and as “intermedium” (p. 194) terms which are certainly not understood by the general. And here we have a list of six in thirty-three pages:—evidently this Reviewer did not expect to be reviewed.

“Here is a specimen of his (Captain Burton’s) verse, in which, by the way, there is seen another example of the careless manner in which the proofs have been corrected” (p. 181). Generous and just to a work printed from abroad and when absence prevented the author’s revision: false as unfair to boot! And what does the critic himself but show two several misprints in his 33 pages; “Mr. Payne, vol. ix. p. 274” (p. 168, for vol. i. 260), and “Jamshah” (p. 172, for J�nsh�h). These faults may not excuse my default: however, I can summon to my defence the Saturday Review, that past-master in the art and mystery of carping criticism, which, noticing my first two volumes (Jan. 2, 1886), declares them “laudably free from misprints.”

“Captain Burton’s delight in straining the language beyond its capabilities(?) finds a wide field when he comes to those passages in the original which are written in rhyming prose” (p. 181). “Captain Burton of course could not neglect such an opportunity for display of linguistic flexibility on the model of ‘Peter Parley picked a peck of pickled peppers”’ (p. 182, where the Saj’a or prose rhyme is most ignorantly confounded with our peculiarly English alliteration). But this is wilfully to misstate the matter. Let me repeat my conviction (Terminal Essay, 144-145) that The Nights, in its present condition, was intended as a text or handbook for the R�w� or professional storyteller, who would declaim the recitative in quasi-conversational tones, would intone the Saj’a and would chant the metrical portions to the twanging of the Rab�bah or one-stringed viol. The Reviewer declares that the original has many such passages; but why does he not tell the reader that almost the whole Koran, and indeed all classical Arab prose, is composed in such “jingle”? “Doubtfully pleasing in the Arabic,” it may “sound the reverse of melodious in our own tongue” (p. 282); yet no one finds fault with it in the older English authors (Terminal Essay, p. 220), and all praised the free use of it in Eastwick’s “Gulist�n.” Torrens, Lane and Payne deliberately rejected it, each for his own and several reason; Torrens because he never dreamt of the application, Lane, because his scanty knowledge of English stood in his way; and Payne because he aimed at a severely classical style, which could only lose grace, vigour and harmony by such exotic decoration. In these matters every writer has an undoubted right to carry out his own view, remembering the while that it is impossible to please all tastes. I imitated the Saj’a, because I held it to be an essential part of the work and of my fifty reviewers none save the Edinburgh considered the reproduction of the original manner aught save a success. I care only to satisfy those whose judgment is satisfactory: “the abuse and contempt of ignorant writers hurts me very little,” as Darwin says (iii. 88), and we all hold with Don Quixote that, es mejor ser loado de los pocos sabios, que burlado de los muchos necios.

“This amusement (of reproducing the Saj’a) may be carried to any length (how?), and we do not see why Captain Burton neglects the metre of the poetry, or divides his translation into sentences by stops, or permits any break in the continuity of the narrative, since none such exists in the Arabic” (p.

182). My reply is that I neglect the original metres first and chiefly because I do not care to “caper in fetters,” as said Drummond of Hawthornden; and, secondly, because many of them are unfamiliar and consequently unpleasant to English ears. The exceptions are mostly two, the Rajaz (Anapaests and Iambs, Terminal Essay, x. 253), and the Taw�l or long measure (ibid. pp. 242, 255), which Mr. Lyall (Translations of Ancient Arab. Poetry, p. xix.) compares with “Abt Vogler,”

And there! ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head.

This metre greatly outnumbers all others in The Nights; but its lilting measure by no means suits every theme, and in English it is apt to wax monotonous.

“The following example of a literal rendering which Mr. Payne adduces (vol.

ix. 381: camp. my vol. v. 66) in order to show the difficulty of turning the phraseology of the original into good English, should have served Captain Burton as a model, and we are surprised he has not adopted so charmingly cumbrous a style” (p. 102). I shall quote the whole passage in question and shall show that by the most unimportant changes, omissions and transpositions, without losing a word, the whole becomes excellent English, and falls far behind the Reviewer’s style in the contention for “cumbrousness”:—

“When morrowed the morning he bedabbled his feet with the water they twain had expressed from the herb and, going-down to the sea, went thereupon, walking days and nights, he wondering the while at the horrors of the ocean and the marvels and rarities thereof. And he ceased not faring over the face of the waters till he arrived at an island as indeed it were Paradise. So Bulukiya went up thereto and fell to wondering thereanent and at the beauties thereof; and he found it a great island whose dust was saffron and its gravel were carnelian and precious stones: its edges were gelsomine and the growth was the goodliest of the trees and the brightest of the scented herbs and the sweetest of them. Its rivulets were a-flowing; its brushwood was of the Comorin aloe and the Sumatran lign-aloes; its reeds were sugar-canes and round about it bloomed rose and narcissus and amaranth and gilliflower and chamomile and lily and violet, all therein being of several kinds and different tints. The birds warbled upon those trees and the whole island was fair of attributes and spacious of sides and abundant of good things, comprising in fine all of beauty and loveliness,” etc. (Payne, vol. ix. p. 381).

The Reviewer cites in his list, but evidently has not read, the “Tales from the Arabic,” etc., printed as a sequel to The Nights, or he would have known that Mr. Payne, for the second part of his work, deliberately adopted a style literal as that above-quoted because it was the liveliest copy of the original.

We now come to the crucial matter of my version, the annotative concerning which this “decent gentleman,” as we suppose this critic would entitle himself (p. 185), finds a fair channel of discharge for vituperative rhetoric. But before entering upon this subject I must be allowed to repeat a twice-told tale and once more to give the raison d’�tre of my long labour. When a friend asked me point-blank why I was bringing out my translation so soon after another and a most scholarly version, my reply was as follows:—“Sundry students of Orientalism assure me that they are anxious to have the work in its crudest and most realistic form. I have received letters saying, Let us know (you who can) what the Arab of The Nights was: if good and high-minded let us see him: if witty and humorous let us hear him: if coarse and uncultivated, rude, childish and indecent, still let us have him to the very letter. We want for once the genuine man. We would have a medi�val Arab telling the tales and traditions with the lays and legends of his own land in his own way, and showing the world what he has remained and how he has survived to this day, while we Westerns have progressed in culture and refinement. Above all things give us the naive and plain-spoken language of the original—such a contrast with the English of our times—and show us, by the side of these enfantillages, the accumulated wit and wisdom, life-knowledge and experience of an old-world race. We want also the technique of the Recueil, its division into nights, its monorhyme, in fact everything that gives it cachet and character.” Now I could satisfy the longing, which is legitimate enough, only by annotation, by a running commentary, as it were, enabling the student to read between the lines and to understand hints and innuendoes that would otherwise have passed by wholly unheeded. I determined that subscribers should find in my book what does not occur in any other, making it a repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric phase, by no means intended for the many-headed but solely for the few who are not too wise to learn or so ignorant as to ignore their own ignorance. I regretted to display the gross and bestial vices of the original, in the rare places where obscenity becomes rampant, but not the less I held it my duty to translate the text word for word, instead of garbling it and mangling it by perversion and castration. My rendering (I promised) would be something novel, wholly different from all other versions, and it would leave very little for any future interpreter.[FN#453]

And I resolved that, in case of the spiteful philanthropy and the rabid pornophobic suggestion of certain ornaments of the Home-Press being acted upon, to appear in Court with my version of The Nights in one hand and bearing in the other the Bible (especially the Old Testament, a free translation from an ancient Oriental work) and Shakespeare, with Petronius Arbiter and Rabelais by way of support and reserve. The two former are printed by millions; they find their way into the hands of children, and they are the twin columns which support the scanty edifice of our universal home-reading. The Arbiter is sotadical as Ab� Now�s and the Cur� of Meudon is surpassing in what appears uncleanness to the eye of outsight not of insight. Yet both have been translated textually and literally by eminent Englishmen and gentlemen, and have been printed and published as an “extra series” by Mr. Bohn’s most respectable firm and solo by Messieurs Bell and Daldy. And if The Nights are to be bowdlerised for students, why not, I again ask, mutilate Plato and Juvenal, the Romances of the Middle Ages, Boccaccio and Petrarch and the Elizabethan dramatists one and all? What hypocrisy to blaterate about The Nights in presence of such triumphs of the Natural! How absurd to swallow such camels and to strain at my midge!

But I had another object while making the notes a Repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric form (Foreword, p. xvii.). Having failed to free