Eastern Dreams (29 page)

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 of 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.

Not all researchers are enamoured. The Baghdad-born American academic Husain Haddawy describes the Burton edition as a “
literary Brighton Pavilion,” a reference to the faux-oriental structure created for Britain's Prince Regent (later George IV). This is not meant as a compliment, implying as it does that the Burton translation is little more than an ornate oddity; arresting to the eye, but still no better than an approximate copy of something far grander. As always when dealing with the multifarious editions of the
Arabian Nights
, it is left to the reader to make up his or her own mind about their worth.

John Payne outlived Burton by nearly thirty years, dying in 1919 at the age of seventy-seven. In his later years he may have experienced some jealousy over the fame of Burton's translation and the relative obscurity of his own. When Thomas Wright wrote his rather hostile biography of Burton in the early twentieth century, Payne—although at first reluctant to co-operate—provided Wright with many anecdotes and examples of his and Burton's correspondence. Payne later praised the younger man for the accuracy of his portrayal of the late explorer, but it is perhaps too much to say that he consciously collaborated on Wright's literary hatchet job.

That said, any jealousy on Payne's part would not be surprising, since his
Nights
, while respected and financially rewarding, did not enjoy the same reputation as Burton's version, and he saw no official recognition for his many literary efforts. Few today beyond the world of
Arabian Nights
enthusiasts know the name of John Payne or have read his translation, yet Richard Burton's name has survived for more than a century as the man who gave the English-speaking world the “real”
Arabian Nights
in all its ribald glory. A number of editions of the Burton text are available today, and original copies of the Kama Shastra Society edition fetch high prices at auctions. Payne's work, on the other hand, seldom appears.

Personal considerations aside, for their efforts at providing the English language with censor-free versions of
The Thousand and One Nights
at a time of social repression, both John Payne and Richard Francis Burton deserve credit and respect—even a measure of literary immortality—for daring to remind the West there is more to the
Arabian Nights
than simple fairy stories for the young in age and heart. By transmitting the unexpurgated
Nights
to the English-speaking world in their individual ways, both men brought needed attention to the sophisticated literary merits of the work, redrawing the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
into its original role as literature of, and for, adults of all ages.

*
Quaritch later said that turning down the Burtons' offer was the worst business mistake of his life.

*
Burton also mock-gravely warns his readers about an old superstition saying anyone who dares read the entire
Nights
will die as a result.

Chapter 8

THE
ARABIAN NIGHTS
TODAY

And I threw myself down … on the raft … whilst the
stream ceased not to carry me along …

—“
THE SIXTH VOYAGE OF SINDBAD THE SEAMAN
”

The restoration of the
Arabian Nights
as earthy folklore marked the peak of the book's fame in the West, but not its status. Even as the
Nights
reached its greatest popularity near the end of the Victorian Era, becoming after the Bible “
the most popular book in the world … the only book … that … is a favourite with all ranks and times of life,” events were underway that would see it relinquish its place as a premier fabulist work. Henceforth the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
would be acknowledged as a classic of world literature, but would never again be so universally read, nor so treasured.