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Richard Francis Burton: The Book of One Thousand Nights and A Night (‘The Arabian Nights’) 1885
Richard Francis Burton was a scholarly adventurer and explorer, whose life reads like a Boys Own Adventure (Boy’s Own Magazine from 1855). He was an Arabist, an ethnologist, a spy, a great swordsman and much more besides. His Arabism (he was conversant in several Middle Eastern languages as well as Arabic) led him to enter the Holy City of Mecca disguised as an Arab in 1853 - the first ‘white man’ to do so in modern times. It also led Burton to translate The Thousand Nights and One Night from the Arabic and other sources. In the 1880s he also published The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi. To the strait-laced Victorian mind, Burton’s frank and often salacious translations of the sexual practices of the Orient and especially the homosexuality of Arabic culture, were condemned as pornography and erotica. To a modern reader, his Arabian Nights is marred by his attempts to render the Tales in a language that is a composite of what he thought Medieval Arabic to be, and a kind of Middle-Ages, Chaucerian English. However Burton’s translations added to the rapidly developing canon of Folk-Lore and Fairytale, helping to introduce Arabic, Persian and Sufi lore into the mix of European tales.
As Marina Warner points out: “The confluence of the European fairy tale with the Orientalizing tale was crucial; many of the defining features of the genre crystallized in the process." While Burton was only the latest in a string of translators of these famous stories (first published in the 15th century), his became famous or infamous because of the peculiar rigidity (or hypocrisy) of Victorian culture regarding matters of sex.” (Warner: Once Upon A Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale:2014)
In his fascinating essay on this collection of stories, Jorge Luis Borges has this to say:
"The Thousand and One Nights has not died. The infinite time of the thousand and one nights continues its course. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the book was translated; at the beginning of the nineteenth (or end of the eighteenth) De Quincey remembered it another way. The Nights will have other translators, and each translator will create a different version of the book. We may almost speak of the many books titled The Thousand and One Nights: two in French, by Galland and Mardrus; three in English, by Burton, Lane, and Paine; three in German, by Henning, Littmann, and Weil; one in Spanish by Cansinos-Asséns. Each of these books is different, because The Thousand and One Nights keeps growing or recreating itself. Robert Louis Stevenson's admirable New Arabian Nights takes up the subject of the disguised prince who walks through the city accompanied by his vizier and who has curious adventures. But Stevenson invented his prince, Florizel of Bohemia, and his aide-de-camp, Colonel Geraldine, and he had them walk through London. Not a real London, but a London similar to Baghdad; not the Baghdad of reality, but the Baghdad of The Thousand and One Nights.”