Bibliography:
77. The Scented Garden. "My new Version," translated 1888-1890.
158. Nafzawi.
As we learn from a letter to Mr. Payne, 8th November 1888, Burton began
his "new version" of The Scented Garden, or as it is sometimes called,
The Perfumed Garden, in real earnest early in that month, and Lady
Burton tells us that it "occupied him seriously only six actual months,"
[569] that is, the last six months of his life.
The Scented Garden, or to give its full title, "The Scented Garden
for the Soul's Recreation" was the work of a learned Arab Shaykh
and physician named Nafzawi, who was born at Nafzawa, a white, [570]
palm-encinctured town which gleamed by the shore of the Sebkha--that is,
salt marsh--Shot al Jarid; and spent most of his life in Tunis. The date
of his birth is unrecorded, but The Scented Garden seems to have been
written in 1431. [571] Nafzawi, like Vatsyayana, from whose book he
sometimes borrows, is credited with having been an intensely religious
man, but his book abounds in erotic tales seasoned to such an extent
as would have put to the blush even the not very sensitive "Tincker
of Turvey." [572] It abounds in medical learning, [573] is avowedly
an aphrodisiac, and was intended, if one may borrow an expression from
Juvenal, "to revive the fire in nuptial cinders." [574] Moslems read it,
just as they took ambergrised coffee, and for the same reason. Nafzawi,
indeed, is the very antithesis of the English Sir Thomas Browne, with
his well-known passage in the Religio Medici, [575] commencing "I could
be content that we might procreate like trees." Holding that no natural
action of a man is more degrading than another, Nafzawi could never
think of amatory pleasures without ejaculating "Glory be to God," or
some such phrase. But "Moslems," says Burton, "who do their best to
countermine the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, [576] are not
ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi,
indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have
exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an
iridescent sunset. His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful
after death, and he says that these pleasures are "part of the delights
of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us,
namely delights a thousand times superior, and above which only the
sight of the Benevolent is to be placed." We who anticipate walls of
jasper and streets of gold ought not, perhaps, to be too severe on
the Tunisian. It must also be added that Nafzawi had a pretty gift of
humour. [578]
159. Origin of The Scented Garden.
The origin of the book was as follows: A small work, The Torch of the
World, [579] dealing with "The Mysteries of Generation," and written by
Nafzawi, had come into the hands of the Vizier of the Sultan of
Tunis. Thereupon the Vizier sent for the author and received him "most
honourably." Seeing Nafzawi blush, he said, "You need not be ashamed;
everything you have said is true; no one need be shocked at your words.
Moreover, you are not the first who has treated of this matter; and I
swear by Allah that it is necessary to know this book. It is only the
shameless boor and the enemy of all science who will not read it, or who
will make fun of it. But there are sundry things which you will have to
treat about yet." And he mentioned other subjects, chiefly of a medical
character.
"Oh, my master," replied Nafzawi, "all you have said here is not
difficult to do, if it is the pleasure of Allah on high."
"I forthwith," comments Nafzawi, "went to work with the composition of
this book, imploring the assistance of Allah (May He pour His blessing
on the prophet) [580] and may happiness and pity be with him."
The most complete text of The Scented Garden is that now preserved in
the library at Algiers, and there are also manuscripts in the libraries
of Paris, Gotha and Copenhagen. In 1850 a manuscript which seems to have
corresponded practically with The Torch of the World was translated into
French by a Staff Officer of the French Army in Algeria, and an edition
of thirty-five copies was printed by an autographic process in Algiers
in the year 1876. [581] In 1886 an edition of 220 copies was issued
by the French publisher Isidore Liseux, and the same year appeared a
translation of Liseux's work bearing the imprint of the Kama Shastra
Society. This is the book that Burton calls "my old version," [582]
which, of course, proves that he had some share in it. [583]
There is no doubt that the average Englishman [584] would be both amazed
and shocked on first opening even the Kama Shastra Society's version;
unless, perchance, he had been prepared by reading Burton's Arabian
Nights or the Fiftieth Chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall with the
Latin Notes, though even these give but a feeble idea of the fleshiness
of The Scented Garden. Indeed, as Ammianus Marcellinus, referring to
the Arabs, says: "Incredible est quo ardore apud eos in venerem uterque
solvitur sexus."
160. Contents of The Scented Garden.
Nafzawi divided his book into twenty one-chapters "in order to make it
easier reading for the taleb (student)." It consists of descriptions
of "Praiseworthy Men" and "Praiseworthy Women" from a Nafzawin point
of view, interpretations of dreams, medical recipes for impotence, &c.,
lists of aphrodisiacs, and stories confirmatory of Ammianus's remark.
Among the longer tales are those of Moseilma, "Bahloul [585] and
Hamdonna," and "The Negro Al Dhurgham" [586]--all furiously Fescinnine.
The story of Moseilema, Lord of Yamama, is familiar in one form or
another to most students of Arab History. Washington Irving epitomises
it in his inexpressibly beautiful "Successors" of Mahomet [587] and
Gibbon [588] tells it more fully, partly in his text and partly in
his Latin footnotes. Moseilema was, no doubt, for some years quite as
influential a prophet as his rival Mohammed. He may even have been as
good a man, [589] but Nafzawi--staunch Mohammedan--will not let "the
Whig dogs have the best of the argument." He charges Moseilema
with having perverted sundry chapters in the Koran by his lies and
impostures, and declares that he did worse than fail when he attempted
to imitate Mohammed's miracles. "Now Moseilema (whom may Allah curse!),
when he put his luckless hand on the head of some one who had not much
hair, the man was at once quite bald... and when he laid his hand upon
the head of an infant, saying, 'Live a hundred years,' the infant died
within an hour." As a matter of fact, however, Moseilema was one of
the most romantic figures in Arabic history. [590] Sedja, Queen and
Prophetess, went to see him in much the same spirit that the Queen of
Sheba visited Solomon. Moseilema, who outlived Mohammed about a year,
was defeated and slain near his capital Yamama, by the Mohammedan hero
Khalid, and Sedjah subsequently embraced Islamism.
In the tale entitled "Djoaidi and Fadehat el Djemal" [591] appears that
hoary poet, philosopher and reprobate, Abu Nowas [592] of The Arabian
Nights. Like the Nights, The Scented Garden has a cycle of tales
illustrative of the cunning and malice of women. But all the women
in those days and countries were not bad, just as all were not plain.
Plumpness seems to have been the principal attraction of sex, and the
Kama Shastra version goes so far as to assure us that a woman who had a
double chin, [593] was irresistible. If so, there were probably no
words in the language good enough to describe a woman with three chins.
According, however, to the author of the recent Paris translation [594]
this particular rendering is a mistake. He considers that the idea
Nafzawi wished to convey was the tower-like form of the neck, [595] but
in any circumstances the denizens of The Scented Garden placed plumpness
in the forefront of the virtues; which proves, of course, the negroid
origin of at any rate some of the stories, [596] for a true Arab values
slenderness. Over and over again in the Nights we are told of some
seductive lady that she was straight and tall with a shape like the
letter Alif or a willow wand. The perfect woman, according to Mafzawi,
perfumes herself with scents, uses ithmid [597] (antimony) for her
toilet, and cleans her teeth with bark of the walnut tree. There are
chapters on sterility, long lists of the kind to be found in Rabelais,
and solemn warnings against excess, chiefly on account of its resulting
in weakness of sight, with other "observations useful for men and
women."
While chapters i. to xx. concern almost entirely the relations between
the opposite sexes, Chapter xxi. [598] which constitutes more than
one-half of the book, treats largely of those unspeakable vices which as
St. Paul and St. Jude show, and the pages of Petronius and other ancient
authors prove, were so common in the pagan world, and which, as Burton
and other travellers inform us, are still practised in the East.
"The style and language in which the Perfumed Garden is written are,"
says the writer of the Foreword to the Paris edition of 1904, "of the
simplest and most unpretentious kind, rising occasionally to a very
high degree of eloquence, resembling, to some extent, that of the famous
Thousand Nights and a Night; but, while the latter abounds in Egyptian
colloquialisms, the former frequently causes the translator to pause
owing to the recurrence of North African idioms and the occasional use
of Berber or Kabyle words, not generally known." In short, the literary
merits or the work are trifling.
Although Nafzawi wrote his extended Scented Garden for scholars only, he
seems afterwards to have become alarmed, and to have gone in fear lest
it might get into the hands of the ignorant and do harm. So he ended it
with:
"O you who read this, and think of the author
And do not exempt him from blame,
If you spare your good opinion of him, do not
At least fail to say 'Lord forgive us and him.'" [599]
161. Sir Richard Burton's Translation.
It was in the autumn of 1888, as we have seen, that Sir Richard Burton,
who considered the book to take, from a linguistic and ethnological
point of view, a very high rank, conceived the idea of making a new
translation, to be furnished with annotations of a most elaborate
nature. He called it at first, with his fondness for rhyming jingle, The
Scented Garden-Site for Heart's Delight, and finally decided upon The
Scented Garden--Man's Heart to Gladden. Sir Richard's Translation was
from the Algiers manuscript, a copy of which was made for him at a cost
of eighty pounds, by M. O. Houdas, Professor at the Ecole des Langues
Orientales Vivantes. This was of the first twenty chapters. Whether a
copy of the 21st Chapter ever reached Sir Richard we have not been able
to ascertain. On 31st March 1890, he wrote in his Journal: "Began, or
rather resumed, Scented Garden," [600] and thenceforward he worked at
it sedulously. Now and again the Berber or Kabyle words with which the
manuscript was sprinkled gave him trouble, and from time to time he
submitted his difficulties to M. Fagnan, "the erudite compiler of
the Catalogue of Arabic books and MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale
d'Alger" and other Algerian correspondents. Lady Burton describes her
husband's work as "a translation from Arabic manuscripts very difficult
to get in the original" with "copious notes and explanations" of
Burton's own--the result, indeed, of a lifetime of research. "The first
two chapters were a raw translation of the works of Numa Numantius [601]
without any annotations at all, or comments of any kind on Richard's
part, and twenty chapters, translations of Shaykh el Nafzawi from
Arabic. In fact, it was all translation, except the annotations on the
Arabic work." [602] Thus Burton really translated only Chapters i. to
xx., or one-half of the work. But it is evident from his remarks on
the last day of his life that he considered the work finished with the
exception of the pumice-polishing; and from this, one judges that he was
never able to obtain a copy of the 21st Chapter. Lady Burton's statement
and this assumption are corroborated by a conversation which the writer
had with Mr. John Payne in the autumn of 1904. "Burton," said Mr. Payne,
"told me again and again that in his eyes the unpardonable defect of
the Arabic text of The Scented Garden was that it altogether omitted
the subject upon which he had for some years bestowed special study." If
Burton had been acquainted with the Arabic text of the 21st Chapter he,
of course, would not have made that complaint; still, as his letters
show, he was aware that such a manuscript existed. Having complained to
Mr. Payne in the way referred to respecting the contents of The Scented
Garden, Burton continued, "Consequently, I have applied myself to remedy
this defect by collecting all manner of tales and of learned material of
Arab origin bearing on my special study, and I have been so successful
that I have thus trebled the original manuscript." Thus, as in the
case of The Arabian Nights, the annotations were to have no particular
connection with the text. Quite two-thirds of these notes consisted of
matter of this sort.
Mr. Payne protested again and again against the whole scheme, and on
the score that Burton had given the world quite enough of this kind of
information in the Nights. But the latter could not see with his friend.
He insisted on the enormous anthropological and historical importance
of these notes--and that the world would be the loser were he to withold
them; in fact, his whole mind was absorbed in the subject.