translation of the _Arabian Nights_, and its fortunate possessors will
now be able to realize the full flavour of Oriental feeling. They will
now have the great storehouse of Eastern folk-lore opened to them, and
Captain Burton’s minute acquaintance with Eastern life makes his
comments invaluable. In this respect, as well as in the freeness of the
translation, the version will be distinguished from its many
predecessors. Captain Burton’s preface, it may be observed, bears traces
of soreness at official neglect. Indeed it seems curious that his
services could not have been utilised in the Soudan, when the want of
competent Arabic scholars was so severely felt.
FIGARO, _September 19th, 1885_.
A laboured attempt is made in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ to show that the
publication of the first volume of Captain Burton’s edition of the
_Arabian Nights_ is a greater outrage on decency than that of the
revelations of Mr. Stead and his associates. The comparison is monstrous
and absurd. Captain Burton’s great work is only intended for men and for
students who desire to acquire a masterly knowledge of Egyptian Arabic;
subscribers only can obtain copies, and but a thousand have been
printed.
* * * * *
I am glad to be able to testify to the ability with which Captain Burton
has discharged the first portion of his Herculean task. The second
volume will be looked forward to with much interest, though I hope
attention will be paid to the translator’s appeal. Captain Burton says
that nothing could be more repugnant to his feelings than the idea of
these pages being placed in any other hands than the class for whose
especial use the book has been prepared.
NOTTINGHAM JOURNAL, _September 19th, 1885_.
But to scholars and men who have sufficient love of the soul of these
sweet stories to discern the form in its true proportions, the new
edition will be welcome. From an Oriental point of view the work is
masterly to a degree. The quatrains and couplets, reading like verses
from Elizabethan mantels, and forming a perfect rosary of Eastern lore,
the constant succession of brilliant pictures, and the pleasure of
meeting again our dear old friend Shahrázád, all these combine to give a
unique charm and interest to this “perfect expositor of the mediæval
Moslem mind.”
DAILY EXCHANGE, _September 19th, 1885_.
The first volume of Captain Burton’s _Thousand Nights and a Night_,
printed at Benares by the Kamashastra Society for subscribers only, has
been delivered to the latter. If the other nine portions equal the
first, English literature will be the richer by a work the like of which
is rare. The English is strong and vitally idiomatic. It is the English
of Shakespeare and Jeremy Taylor, the English of Robert Browning, with a
curiously varied admixture of modern colloquial phraseology. I confess
that I was not prepared, familiar as I was with Captain Burton’s other
work, to find so perfect a command of clear and vigorous style on the
part of the great traveller and Oriental scholar. Mrs. Grundy would have
protested against the public issue of _The Book of a Thousand Nights and
a Night_, and Mrs. Grundy would have had reason as well as propriety on
her side; but I must say that the tone of the work is singularly robust
and healthy. What a treasure-house Captain Burton has opened! Until he
turned the key we knew little or nothing of _The Nights_, the Villon
Society’s issue notwithstanding, and the notes which he has added to the
work have a value which is simply unique.
CONTINENTAL TIMES, _September 26th, 1885_.
I have been favoured, if that is the right word to use, with a sight of
Captain Burton’s new translation of the _Arabian Nights_. It is a
sumptuous work, in an exquisite binding of gold and black, with broad
pages and fine large type, such an edition as a scholar and a book lover
finds after his own heart. Moreover, the translation is a wonderful bit
of English. Captain Burton has by a fanciful, but on the whole, true
impulse, chosen to tell the story in old English, not the English of
Chaucer, but of a sufficiently archaic type. The choice of an idiom
which in some degree recalls the air of the Canterbury Tales and the
Decameron—to say nothing of Pantagruel and Panurge—softens the grossness
of some of the stories, and gives an additionally quaint charm to the
others. No one, however, will recognise at first sight the book of his
childhood. The solemn invocation of Allah on the first page, the
spelling of Vizier as Wazir, and of genie as Jinni, as well as the
terrible frankness of some of the tales, all seem to transport us into
another land than that through which we floated on the “silken sale of
infancy.” On the whole, Captain Burton is right in strictly confining
his work to the library and the student. The reading of it by the public
generally can only spoil an immortal work for our boys and girls.
MONTREAL DAILY HERALD, _September 21st, 1885_.
Captain Burton has translated the _Arabian Nights_, but will only
publish it for private distribution. A correspondent says that “all
these years we have been reading Lane’s turgid emasculated selections we
have been kept in the dark as to their singular beauty and vitally human
strength. I have been amazed at the _Nights_ as englished by Captain
Burton in strong, vital, picturesque prose. The stories, instead of
being pieces of wild extravagance, unreal and theatrically tinselly,
with the limelight instead of daylight, and paste instead of diamonds,
are full of abounding life.”
THE BAT, _September 29th, 1885_.
Captain Burton, in his way, renders a gigantic service to all students
of literature who are not profound Orientalists, and to many who are, by
giving them a literal, honest, and accurate translation of the _Arabian
Nights_. * * * Some idiotic persons here and there, and certain journals
which have earned an infamous notoriety by doing their best to deprave
public morals, have raised a foolish clamour against Captain Burton and
his translation. Journalists, who had no objection to pandering to the
worst tastes of humanity at a penny a copy, are suddenly inspired by
much righteous indignation at a privately printed work which costs a
guinea a volume, and in which the manners, the customs, and the language
of the East are boldly represented as they were and as they are. Such
critics Captain Burton, and the readers of Captain Burton’s translation,
can afford to despise and to ignore. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_
has been the playbook of generations, the delight of the nursery and the
school-room for nearly two hundred years. Now it is high time that
scholars and students should be allowed to know what the Arabian Nights
Entertainment really is. Lovers of Arabic have long since known
something of the truth concerning the Alif Laila. It need no Burton, it
needed no Payne, to tell the masters of Oriental languages that _The
Thousand Nights and a Night_ was a very different thing from what either
Galland or Lane had made it out to be. Mr. Payne, in his way, rendered
no slight service, Captain Burton, in his way, renders a gigantic
service to all students of literature who are not profound Orientalists,
and to many who are, by giving them a literal, honest, and accurate
translation of the ‘_Arabian Nights_.’ * * * The blatant buffoons who
have spoken of Captain Burton’s work indifferently only show their own
ignorance of the literature of the East. Captain Burton’s work is well
worth the price he charges for it to students of Eastern literatures and
Eastern manners, and Eastern customs; but the misguided lunatic who
invests in it in the hope of getting hold of a good thing, in the
Holywell Street sense of the term, will find indeed that the fool and
his money are soon parted.
THE ACADEMY, _October 3rd, 1885_.
As Capt. Richard F. Burton’s translation of _The Thousand and One
Nights_ is likely for several reasons to awaken a literary controversy,
the following letter from Mr. John Addington Symonds in the _Academy_ of
October 3, will be read with interest. The subject upon which it touches
is an important one, and one which must be regarded from a scholarly as
well as a moral point of view. Mr. Symonds writes like the scholar that
he is; we shall soon see how the moralists write, and if they say
anything to the point we shall copy it:—
AM HOF, DAVOS PLATZ, Switzerland, _September 27th, 1885_.
“There is an outcry in some quarters against Capt. Burton’s
translation of the _Arabian Nights_. Only one volume of the work has
reached me, and I have not as yet read the whole of it. Of the
translator’s notes I will not speak, the present sample being
clearly insufficient to judge by; but I wish to record a protest
against the hypocrisy which condemns his text. When we invite our
youth to read an unexpurgated Bible (in Hebrew and Greek, or in the
authorised version), an unexpurgated Aristophanes, an unexpurgated
Juvenal, an unexpurgated Boccaccio, an unexpurgated Rabelais, an
unexpurgated collection of Elizabethan dramatists, including
Shakespeare, and an unexpurgated Plato (in Greek or in Prof.
Jowett’s English version), it is surely inconsistent to exclude the
unexpurgated _Arabian Nights_ whether in the original or in any
English version, from the studies of a nation who rule India and
administer Egypt.
“The qualities of Capt. Burton’s translation are similar to those of
his previous literary works, and the defects of those qualities are
also similar. Commanding a vast and miscellaneous vocabulary, he
takes such pleasure in the use of it that sometimes he transgresses
the unwritten laws of artistic harmony. From the point of view of
language, I hold that he is too eager to seize the _mot propre_ of
his author, and to render that by any equivalent which comes to hand
from field or fallow, waste or warren, hill or hedgerow, in our
vernacular. Therefore, as I think, we find some coarse passages of
the _Arabian Nights_ rendered with unnecessary crudity, and some
poetic passages marred by archaisms and provincialisms. But I am at
a loss to perceive how Burton’s method of translation should be less
applicable to the _Arabian Nights_ than to the _Lusiad_. So far as,
I can judge, it is better suited to the _naïveté_ combined with
stylistic subtlety of the former than to the smooth humanistic
elegancies of the latter.
“This, however, is a minor point. The real question is whether a
word for word version of the _Arabian Nights_, executed with
peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into
Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of
pretence be classed with ‘the garbage of the brothels.’ In the lack
of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our
middle-class _censores morum_ strain at the gnat of a privately
circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily
swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of
Greek and Latin literature. When English versions of Theocritus and
Ovid, of Plato’s _Phaedrus_ and the _Ecclesiazusae_, now within the
reach of every school-boy, have been suppressed, then and not till
then can a “plain and literal” rendering of the _Arabian Nights_ be
denied with any colour of consistency to adult readers. I am far
from saying that there are not valid reasons for thus dealing with
Hellenic and Graeco-Roman and Oriental literature in its totality.
But let folk reckon what Anglo-Saxon Puritanism logically involves.
If they desire an Anglo-Saxon Index Librorum Prohibitorum, let them
equitably and consistently apply their principles of inquisitorial
scrutiny to every branch of human culture.
“JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.”
THE LINCOLN GAZETTE, _Saturday, October 10, 1885_.
_THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT._
FIRST NOTICE.
Everything comes to him who waits—even the long-promised,
eagerly-expected “Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights,”
by Richard F. Burton. It is a whole quarter of a century since this
translation of one of the most famous books of the world was
contemplated, and we are told it is the natural outcome of the
well-known Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca. Of Captain Burton’s fitness
for the task who can doubt. It was during that celebrated journey to the
tomb of the Prophet that he proved himself to be an Arab—indeed, he
says, in a previous state of existence he was a Bedouin. Did he not for
months at a stretch lead the life of a Son of the Faithful, eat, drink,
sleep, dress, speak, pray like his brother devotees, the sharpest eyes
failing to pierce his disguise? He knows the ways of Eastern men—and
women—as he does the society of London or Trieste. How completely at
home he is with his adopted brethren he showed at Cairo, when, to the
amazement of some English friends who were looking on at the noisy
devotions of some “howling” Dervishes, he suddenly joined the shouting,
gesticulating circle, and behaved as if to the manner born. He has
qualified as a “Howler,” he holds a diploma as a master Dervish (see
vol. iii. of his “Pilgrimage”), and he can initiate disciples. Clearly,
to use a phrase of Arabian story, it was decreed by Allah from the
beginning, and fate and fortune have arranged, that Captain Burton
should be the one of all others to confer upon his countrymen the boon
of the genuine unsophisticated _Thousand Nights and a Night_. In the
whole of our literature no book is more widely known. It is spread
broadcast like the Bible, Bunyan and Shakespeare; yet although it is in
every house, and every soul in the kingdom knows something about it, yet
nobody knows it as it really exists. We have only had what translators
have chosen to give—selected, diluted and abridged transcripts. And of
late some so-called “original” books have been published containing
minor tales purloined bodily from the _Nights_. There have been many
versions, beginning with the beautiful Augustan French example of
Professor Galland, but all have failed, or rather no one has attempted,
to reproduce the great Oriental masterpiece. Judged by the number of
editions—a most fallacious test of merit—Lane’s three volumes, on the
whole, have found greatest favour with the British public. He was too
timid to give to the world the full benefit of his studies, and he kept
a drawing-room audience in view. He was careful to adapt his picture to
the English standard of propriety, and his suppressions and omissions
are on a wholesale scale. Lord Byron said of English novelists that they
give a full length of courtship and but a bust of marriage. Mr. Lane
thought it expedient draw a tight veil, to tell only half the truth—in
short he stops at the bust. Moreover he destroyed all the _mécanique_ of
his original, and cruelly altered the form. He did away with the
charming and dramatic framework of the tales, turned the _Arabian
Nights_ into the Arabian Chapters, and too often into the Arabian Notes.
The first sole and complete translation was furnished recently by Mr.
John Payne, whose “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night” is
dedicated to Captain Burton. Mr. Payne printed 500 copies for private
circulation, a mere drop in the ocean. His edition was instantly
absorbed, clutched with avidity, and is unprocurable—unless, as has
happened several times, a stray copy finds its way into the market, and
is snatched up at a fancy price. It so happened that Mr. Payne and
Captain Burton applied themselves to the same task quite unconscious of
each other’s labour. They were running on the same rails like Adams and
Leverrier, the joint discoverers of Neptune, or like Darwin and Wallace,
who simultaneously evolved the theory of Natural Selection. Hearing of a
competitor, Captain Burton, who was travelling to the Gold Coast, he
freely offered his fellow worker precedence. Mr. Payne’s production
served to whet curiosity, and the young scholars of the day applied
themselves to Arabic in order to equip their minds, and to be in a more
blissful state of preparation for the triumphant edition to follow.
Captain Burton’s first volume in sombre black and dazzling gold—the
livery of the Abbasides—made its appearance three weeks ago, and divided
attention with the newly-discovered Star. It is the first volume of ten,
the set issued solely to subscribers. And already, as in the case of Mr.
Payne’s edition, there has been a scramble to secure it, and it is no
longer to be had for love or money. The fact is, it fills a void, the
world has been waiting for this _chef d’œuvre_, and all lovers of the
_Arabian Nights_ wonder how they have got on without it. We must break
off from remarks to give some idea of the originality of the style, of
the incomparable way in which the very essence and life of the East is
breathed into simple straightforward Anglo-Saxon English. In certain of
Captain Burton’s books he borrows words from all languages, there are
not enough for his use, and he is driven to coin them. But in the
character of Arabian story-teller he is simplicity itself, and whilst
avoiding words of length, he introduces just enough of antique phrase as
gives a bygone and poetic flavour. The most exacting and the most
fastidious will be satisfied at the felicitous handling of immortal
themes. A delightful characteristic is the division of the text into
Nights. Lane and Payne, for peculiar reasons of their own, have both
omitted to mark the breaks in the recital. But now for the first time
the thread on which all is strung is clearly kept in view, and justice
is done to the long drawn out episode of the young wife who saves her
own neck and averts a wholesale massacre of maidens by her round of
stories within stories. This is how Shahrazad begins her discourses:—
“But when it was midnight Shahrazad awoke and signalled to her sister
Dunyazad, who sat up and said, ’Allah upon thee, O my sister, recite to
us some new story, delightsome and delectable, wherewith to while away
the waking hours of our latter night.’ ‘With joy and goodly gree,’
answered Shahrazad, ‘if this pious and auspicious King permit me.’ ‘Tell
on,’ quoth the King, who chanced to be sleepless and restless, and
therefore was pleased with the prospect of hearing her story. So
Shahrazad rejoiced; and thus on the first night of the Thousand Nights
and a Night, she began with the
TALE OF THE TRADER AND THE JINNI.”
“It is related, O auspicious King, that there was a merchant of the
merchants who had much wealth and business in various cities. Now on a
day he mounted horse and went forth to recover monies in certain towns,
and the heat sore oppressed him; so he sat beneath a tree, and putting
his hand into his saddle-bags, took thence some broken bread and dry
dates and began to break his fast.”
The recital proceeds until
“Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day, and ceased to say her permitted
say. Then quoth her sister to her, ‘How fair is thy tale, and how
grateful, and how sweet and how tasteful!’ And Shahrazad answered her,
‘What is this to that I could tell thee on the coming night were I to
live and the King would spare me?’ Then said the King in himself, ’By
Allah, I will not slay her until I have heard the rest of her tale.’
Then the King went forth to his audience-hall, and the Wazir went with
his daughter’s shroud under his arm. The King issued his orders, and
promoted this and deposed that, until the end of the day; and he told
the Wazir no whit of what had happened. But the Minister wondered
thereat with exceeding wonder; and when the Court broke up King Shahryar
entered his palace.
Now when it was the Second Night,
said Dunyazad to her sister Shahrazad, ‘O my sister, finish for us that
story of the Merchant and the Jinni;’ and she answered, ‘With joy and
goodly gree, if the King permit me.’”
The first volume takes us through the mazes of the stories included in
the Tales of “The Trader and the Jinni,” “The Fisherman and the Jinni,”
“The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” “The Tale of the Three
Apples,” “The Tale of Nur Al-Din Ali and his Son Badr Al-Din Hassan,”
and “The Hunchback’s Tale.” The reader most familiar with the ordinary
versions at once is in a new atmosphere. The novelty is startling as it
is delightful. We are face to face with the veritable East, where Cairo,
Damascus, and Baghdad are known to us as London or Lincoln. The whole
life of the people is represented, nothing is passed over or omitted.
The picture is complete, and contains everything as the “white contains
the black of the eye,” a phrase which, by-the-bye, in Arabic is all
contained in one word. We have before alluded to the strength and beauty
of the style. The felicities of expression are innumerable. What could
be better than the terms to express grief and joy, “his breast
broadened,” “his breast straitened,” or the words used of a person in
abject terror, “I died in my skin,” or the cruelty of the scourger who
persevered “till her forearm failed,” or the expression of despair “The
light before his face became night,” or the grand account of the desert
storm “when behold a dust cloud up-flew and grew until _it walled the
horizon from view_.” Another speciality of Captain Burton’s edition is
the Notes. He is celebrated for sowing the bottom of his pages with
curiously illuminating remarks, and he has here carried out his custom
in a way to astonish. He tells us that those who peruse his notes in
addition to those of Lane would be complete proficients in the knowledge
of Oriental practices and customs. Lane begins with Islam from Creation
to the present day, and has deservedly won for his Notes the honour of a
separate reprint. Captain Burton’s object in his annotations is to treat
of subjects which are completely concealed from the multitude. They are
utterly and entirely esoteric, and deal with matters of which books
usually are kept clear. Indeed he has been assured by an Indian officer
who had been 40 years in the East, that he was entirely ignorant of the
matters revealed in these Notes. Without these marvellous elucidations
the _Arabian Nights_ would remain only half understood, but by their aid
we may know as much of the Moslems as the Moslems know of themselves.
LINCOLN GAZETTE, _October 17_.—No. 2.
SECOND NOTICE.