“restricted to the few wealthy collectors of proscribed books and what
booksellers’ catalogues describe as ‘facetiæ’” (p. 179); for “when an
Arabic word is unknown to the literary language” (what utter
imbecility!), and “belongs only to the low vocabulary of the gutter”
(which the most “elegant” writers most freely employ) “Mr. Payne
laboriously searches out a corresponding term in English ‘Billingsgate,’
and prides himself upon an accurate reproduction of the tone of the
original” (p. 178). This is a remarkable twisting of the truth. Mr.
Payne persisted, despite my frequent protests, in rendering the “nursery
words” and the “terms too plainly expressing natural situations” by old
English such as “kaze” and “swive,” equally ignored by the “gutter” and
by “Billingsgate”: he also omitted an offensive line whenever it did not
occur in all the texts and could honestly be left untranslated. But the
unfact is stated for a purpose: here the Reviewer mounts the high horse
and poses as the Magister Morum _per excellentiam_. The Battle of the
Books has often been fought, the crude text _versus_ the bowdlerised and
the expurgated; and our critic can contribute to the great fray only the
merest platitudes. “There is an old and trusty saying that ‘evil
communications corrupt good manners,’ and it is a well-known fact that
the discussion (?) and reading of depraved literature leads (_sic_)
infallibly to the depravation of the reader’s mind” (p. 179).[452] I
should say that the childish indecencies and the unnatural vice of the
original cannot deprave any mind save that which is perfectly prepared
to be depraved; the former would provoke only curiosity and amusement to
see bearded men such mere babes, and the latter would breed infinitely
more disgust than desire. The man must be prurient and lecherous as a
dog-faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either. And
most inept is the conclusion, “So long as Mr. Payne’s translation
remains defiled by words, sentences, and whole paragraphs descriptive of
coarse and often horribly depraved sensuality, it can never stand beside
Lane’s, which still remains the standard version of the Arabian Nights”
(p. 179.) _Altro!_ No one knows better than the clique that Lane, after
an artificially prolonged life of some half-century, has at last been
weighed in the balance and been found wanting; that he is dying that
second death which awaits the unsatisfactory worker and that his Arabian
Nights are consigned by the present generation to the limbo of things
obsolete and forgotten.
But if Mr. Payne is damned with poor praise and mock modesty, my version
is condemned without redemption—beyond all hope of salvation: there is
not a word in favour of a work which has been received by the reviewers
with a chorus of kindly commendation. “The critical battery opens with a
round-shot.” “Another complete translation is now appearing in a
surreptitious way” (p. 179). How “surreptitious” I ask of this scribe,
who ekes not the lack of reason by a superfluity of railing, when I sent
out some 24,000–30,000 advertisements and published my project in the
literary papers? “The amiability of the two translators (Payne and
Burton) was testified by their each dedicating a volume to the other. So
far as the authors are concerned nothing could be more harmonious and
delightful; but the public naturally ask, What do we want with two
forbidden versions?” And I again inquire, What can be done by me to
satisfy this atrabilious and ill-conditioned Aristarchus? Had I not
mentioned Mr. Payne, my silence would have been construed into envy,
hatred and malice: if I am proud to acknowledge my friend’s noble work
the proceeding engenders a spiteful sneer. As regards the “want,” public
demand is easily proved. It is universally known (except to the Reviewer
who will not know) that Mr. Payne, who printed only 500 copies, was
compelled to refuse as many hundreds of would-be subscribers; and, when
my design was made public by the Press, these and others at once applied
to me. “To issue a thousand still more objectionable copies by another
and not a better hand” (notice the quip cursive!) may “seem
preposterous” (p. 180), but only to a writer so “preposterous” as this.
“A careful (again!) examination of Captain Burton’s translation shows
that he has not, as he pretends (!), corrected it to agree with the
Calcutta text, but has made a hotchpotch of various texts, choosing one
or another—Cairo, Breslau, Macnaghten or first Calcutta—according as it
presented most of the ‘characteristic’ detail (note the dig i’ the side
vicious), in which Captain Burton’s version is peculiarly strong” (p.
180). So in return for the severe labour of collating the four printed
texts and of supplying the palpable omissions, which by turns disfigure
each and every of the quartette, thus producing a complete copy of the
Recueil, I gain nothing but blame. My French friend writes to me:
_Lorsqu’il s’agit d’établir un texte d’après différents manuscrits, il
est certain qu’il faut prendre pour base une-seule redaction. Mais il
n’est pas de même d’une traduction. Il est conforme aux règles de la
saine critique littéraire, de suivre tous les textes._ Lane, I repeat,
contented himself with the imperfect Bulak text while Payne and I
preferred the Macnaghten Edition which, says the Reviewer, with a futile
falsehood all his own, is “really only a revised form of the Cairo
text”[453] (_ibid._). He concludes, making me his rival in ignorance,
that I am unacquainted with the history of the MS. from which the
four-volume Calcutta Edition was printed (_ibid._). I should indeed be
thankful to him if he could inform me of its ultimate fate: it has been
traced by me to the Messieurs Allen and I have vainly consulted Mr.
Johnston who carries on the business under the name of that now defunct
house. The MS. has clean disappeared.
“On the other hand he (Captain Burton) sometimes omits passages which he
considers (!) tautological and thereby deprives his version of the merit
of completeness (_e.g._ vol. v. p. 327). It is needless to remark that
this uncertainty about the text destroys the scholarly value of the
translation” (p. 180). The scribe characteristically forgets to add that
I have invariably noted these excised passages which are always the
merest repetitions, damnable iterations of a twice-, and sometimes a
thrice-told tale, and that I so act upon the great principle—in
translating a work of imagination and “inducing” an Oriental tale, the
writer’s first duty to his readers is making his pages readable.
“Captain Burton’s version is sometimes rather loose” (p. 180), says the
critic who quotes five specimens out of five volumes and who might have
quoted five hundred. This is another favourite “dodge” with the
rogue-reviewer, who delights to cite words and phrases and texts
detached from their contexts. A translator is often compelled, by way of
avoiding recurrences which no English public could endure, to render a
word, whose literal and satisfactory meaning he has already given, by a
synonym or a homonym in no way so sufficient or so satisfactory. He
charges me with rendering “_Siyar_, which means ‘doings,’ by ‘works and
words’”; little knowing that the veteran Orientalist, M. Joseph
Derenbourgh (p. 98, _Johannes de Capua, Directorium_, etc.,) renders
“Akhlák-í wa Síratí” (sing. of Siyar) by _caractère et conduite_, the
latter consisting of deeds and speech. He objects to “Kabir” (lit. =
old) being turned into _very_ old; yet this would be its true sense were
the Ráwí or story-teller to lay stress and emphasis upon the word, as
here I suppose him to have done. But what does the _Edinburgh_ know of
the Ráwí? Again I render “Mal’únah” (not the mangled Mal’ouna) lit. =
accurst, as “damned whore,” which I am justified in doing when the
version is of the category Call-a-spade-a-spade.
“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 Nicholete (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
“raconteurs” (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 Jánsháh). 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 pepper’” (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, 163–164) that The Nights, in its present condition, was
intended as a text or handbook for the Ráwí or professional
story-teller, 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 Rabábah 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.
256), and all praised the free use of it in Eastwick’s “Gulistán.”
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) maybe 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 (Anapæsts and Iambs, Terminal Essay, x. 294),
and the Tawíl or long measure (_ibid._ pp. 282, 296), which Mr. Lyall
(Translations of Ancient Arab. Poetry, p. xlix.) 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: comp. 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
cornelian 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’être_ 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 mediæval 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 naïve 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.[454]
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 Abú Nowás and
the Curé 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
sold 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. xix). Having failed to free
the Anthropological Society from the fetters of _mauvaise honte_ and the
mock-modesty which compels travellers and ethnological students to keep
silence concerning one side of human nature (and that side the most
interesting to mankind), I proposed to supply the want in these pages.
The England of our day would fain bring up both sexes and keep all ages
in profound ignorance of sexual and intersexual relations; and the
consequences of that imbecility are peculiarly cruel and afflicting. How
often do we hear women in Society lamenting that they have absolutely no
knowledge of their own physiology; and at what heavy price must this
fruit of the knowledge-tree be bought by the young first entering life.
Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence? What an
absurdum is a veteran officer who has spent a quarter-century in the
East without learning that all Moslem women are circumcised, and without
a notion of how female circumcision is effected; without an idea of the
difference between the Jewish and the Moslem rite as regards males;
without an inkling of the Armenian process whereby the cutting is
concealed, and without the slightest theoretical knowledge concerning
the mental and spiritual effect of the operation. Where then is the
shame of teaching what it is shameful not to have learnt? But the
ultra-delicacy, the squeamishness of an age which is by no means purer
or more virtuous than its ruder predecessors, has ended in trenching
upon the ridiculous. Let us see what the modern English woman and her
Anglo-American sister have become under the working of a mock-modesty
which too often acts cloak to real _dévergondage_; and how
Respectability unmakes what Nature made. She has feet but no “toes”;
ankles but no “calves”; knees but no “thighs”; a stomach but no “belly”
nor “bowels”; a heart but no “bladder” nor “groin”; a liver and no
“kidneys”; hips and no “haunches”; a bust and nor “backside” nor
“buttocks”: in fact, she is a monstrum, a figure fit only to frighten
the crows.
But the _Edinburgh_ knows nothing of these things, and the “decent
gentleman,” like the lady who doth protest overmuch, persistently fixes
his eye upon a single side of the shield. “Probably no European has ever
gathered such an appalling collection of degrading customs and
statistics of vice as is contained in Captain Burton’s translation of
the ‘Arabian Nights’” (p. 185). He finds in the case of Mr. Payne, like
myself, “no adequate justification for flooding the world (!) with an
ocean of filth” (_ibid._) showing that he also can be (as said the
past-master of catchwords, the _primus verborum artifex_) “an interested
rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” But
_audi alteram partem_—my view of the question. I have no apology to make
for the details offered to the students of Moslem usages and customs,
who will find in them much to learn and more to suggest the necessity of
learning. On no wise ashamed am I of lecturing upon these esoteric
matters, the most important to humanity, at a time when their absence
from the novel of modern society veils with a double gloom the
night-side of human nature. Nay, I take pride to myself for so doing in
the face of silly prejudice and miserable hypocrisy, and I venture to
hold myself in the light of a public benefactor. In fact, I consider my
labours as a legacy bequeathed to my countrymen at a most critical time
when England the puissantest of Moslem powers is called upon, without
adequate knowledge of the Moslem’s inner life, to administer Egypt as
well as to rule India. And while Pharisee and Philister may be or may
pretend to be “shocked” and “horrified” by my pages, the sound common
sense of a public, which is slowly but surely emancipating itself from
the prudish and prurient reticences and the immodest and immoral
modesties of the early xixth century, will in good time do me, I am
convinced, full and ample justice.
In p. 184 the Reviewer sneers at me for writing “Roum” in lieu of Rum or
Rúm; but what would the latter have suggested to the home-reader save a
reference to the Jamaican drink? He also corrects me (vol. v. 248) in
the matter of the late Mr. Emanuel Deutsch (p. 184), who excised “our
Saviour” from the article on the Talmud reprinted amongst his literary
remains. The Reviewer, or inspirer of the Review, let me own, knew more
of Mr. Deutsch than I, a simple acquaintance, could know; but perhaps he
does not know all, and if he did he probably would not publish his
knowledge. The truth is that Mr. Deutsch was, during his younger years,
a liberal, nay, a latitudinarian in religion, differing little from the
so-styled “Christian Unitarian.” But when failing health drove him to
Egypt and his hour drew nigh he became (and all honour to him!) the
scrupulous and even fanatical Hebrew of the Hebrews; he consorted mainly
with the followers and divines of his own faith, and it is said that he
ordered himself when dying to be taken out of bed and placed upon the
bare floor. The “Saviour” of the article was perhaps written in his
earlier phase of religious thought, and it was excised as the end drew
in sight.