The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 1 - Sir Richard Francis Burton [modern library classics] by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars An Orgy of Story—a Feast of Fantasy—a Sensual World of High-Stakes Storytelling In Sir Richard F. Burton’s splendid translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), clever Shahrazad (who knows countless stories and how to tell them) keeps her head on her shoulders by stringing along her misogynistic Bluebeard of a King husband by starting a compelling story one night so he must let her live the next day so he can hear the end of it the next night, and then starting a new story right after finishing the first, and so on. Many of her stories feature characters who tell stories in which characters tell stories, as when she tells one in which a reeve tells one in which a thumbless man tells one. There’s also poetry recited throughout, quoted from famous Muslim poets riffing on male or female beauty, the vicissitudes of fortune, the perfidy of human nature, and so on. Seemingly everyone can tell an entertaining story or quote an appropriate poem, and often their lives (like Shahrazad’s) depend on it. There are no unreliable narrators or tellers of tall tales: everything anyone says happened really happened, and the more outlandish (“wonderful”) something is, the more it’s believed and appreciated. Just the first volume of ten contains in its thirty-four nights things like the following: Lovesick tailors, clever fishermen, good merchants, miraculous physicians, hunchbacked dwarfs, monocular Kalandars, randy slaves, fickle Caliphs, tyrannical Sultans, treacherous Wazirs, wise Shaykhs, necromantic princesses, ensorcelled princes, calamitous crones, demanding husbands, murderous siblings, envious neighbors, beautiful youths, luminous maidens, troublesome corpses, powerful Ifrits, resentful Jinn, helpful Jinniyah, talking animals, winged horses, flying serpents… And-- Wonder-filled Baghdad, down-to-earth Cairo, blasphemous cities, sumptuous palaces, busy markets, hidden trapdoors, forbidden rooms, unknown islands, giant magnets, couplets in praise of beauty moles (for which Arabic has at least fifty different words!), pomegranate conserve, rose-flavored sherbet, fritters soaked in bees’ honey, and “A bowl of cumin ragout containing chickens’ breasts, fricandoed and flavoured with sugar, pistachios, musk and rose water” (after eating that dish, be sure to wash your hands before making love to your sweetheart)… A-and-- Executions, reprieves, revenges, murders, mutilations, amputations, petrifactions, reversals, reunions, damnations, salvations, transformations, magical combats, shopping sprees, wild carousing, and sex—lotsa sex! In his Introduction, Burton (1821-90) says he’s trying to present as accurate and complete a translation as he can, unlike earlier translators who “castrated” the original. He’s impressively open-minded: “we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.” And he seeks to approximate the original “by writing as the Arab would have written in English,” a rich English infused with archaisms and 19th-century slang and everything in between and ranging from the bawdy and earthy to the sublime and spiritual. From this: “Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see.” To this: “…the first [box] which they brought to him to open was that wherein I was; and, when I felt his hands upon it, my senses failed me and I bepissed myself in my funk, the water running out of the box.” And from this: “Then we sat talking, I and she (and I was drowned in the sea of her love, dazed in the desert of my passion for her), till the merchants opened their shops; when I rose and fetched her all she sought to the tune of five thousand dirhams.” To this: “All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks, and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.” If Burton is writing a “Plain and Literal Translation,” the original is anything but! Anyway. It is better read as a book than listened to, because 1) there are no unabridged audiobooks of the whole thing, and 2) the unabridged LibriVox reading of Vol. I leaves out Burton’s numerous, detailed, and idiosyncratic notes and is read by different readers of varying quality (most being fine but at least one being excruciatingly monotonous). And Burton’s notes are an interesting treasury of information, from varieties of “tongue kissing” to the Arabic attitude to smallpox. They explain Islamic (Persian/Egyptian/Ottoman) culture (“A large hollow navel is looked upon not only as a beauty, but in children it is held a promise of good growth”), religious references (“The new moon carefully looked for by all Moslems because it begins the Ramazan-feast”), Arabic grammar (“In Arabic the World is female”), Arabic etymologies (“straight stature like the letter I” in a story is annotated, “Arab. ‘Kamat Alfiyyah’ = like the letter Alif, a straight perpendicular stroke deriving from an Egyptian hieroglyph”), and failures in previous translations (“Lane pleasantly remarks, ‘A list of these sweets is given in the original, but I have thought it better to omit the names’ (!) Dozy does not shirk his duty”). The notes reveal Burton’s caustic wit (the note about “the Holy City” reads, “Arab. ‘Al-Kuds’ = holiness. There are few cities which in our day have less claim to this title than Jerusalem; and, curious to say, the ‘Holy Land’ shows Jews, Christians and Moslems all in their worst form”). And his 19th-century biases, (“Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts”). His views on “Eastern” and European cultures are mixed, so in one note he’ll criticize “backwards” Eastern methods of hoist-hanging criminals compared to more “civilized” Western drop-hanging and in another opine that decorative Koranic inscriptions on walls are “generally far superior” to “our frescoes.” Although at times I got exhausted by following another narrator’s story inside another narrator’s story, even when the same genre stories are juxtaposed, as with the barber’s tales of his six delusional and hapless brothers, I found pointed variations on a theme. Anyway, the nested fairytale-like stories of the Nights are rich in human nature. I read Vol. I in Tom White’s Kindle version, which inexpensively presents the first two volumes of the full Burton text with all the hyperlinked, easy to navigate notes (though without, alas, illustrations). I need a break from the rich feast of story and poetry but will surely go on to Vol. II and the rest, even if it takes me till the end of my days. View all my reviews
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