One Thousand and One Nights, page 1258
“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” (). 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. “ (, for vol. i. 260), and “Jamshah” (, 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” (). “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 peppers”’ (, 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, 144-145) 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” (); yet no one finds fault with it in the older English authors (Terminal Essay, ), 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) may be 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” (). 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 (Anapaests and Iambs, Terminal Essay, x. 253), and the Tawíl or long measure (ibid. p, 255), which Mr. Lyall (Translations of Ancient Arab. Poetry, p. xix.) 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: camp. 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” (). 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 carnelian 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. ).
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 (), 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 naive 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.453
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 solo 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. xvii.). 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 end no “kidneys”; hips and no “haunches”; a bust and no “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’ (). 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 catch-words, 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 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 (), 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.
“Captain Burton’s experience in the East seems to have obliterated any (all?) sentiments of chivalry, for he is never weary of recording disparaging estimates of women, and apparently delights in discovering evidence of ‘feminine devilry”’ (). This argumentum ad feminam is sharpish practice, much after the manner of the Christian “Fathers of the Church” who, themselves vehemently doubting the existence of souls non- masculine, falsely and foolishly ascribed the theory and its consequences to Mohammed and the Moslems. And here the Persian proverb holds good “Harf-i-kufr kufr níst” — to speak of blasphemy is not blasphemous. Curious readers will consult the article “Woman” in my Terminal Essay (x. 167), which alone refutes this silly scandal. I never pretended to understand woman, and, as Balzac says, no wonder man fails when He who created her was by no means successful. But in The Nights we meet principally Egyptian maids, matrons and widows, of whose “devilry” I cannot speak too highly, and in this matter even the pudibund Lane is as free-spoken as myself. Like the natives of warm, damp and malarious lowlands and river-valleys adjacent to rugged and healthy uplands, such as Mazanderán, Sind, Malabar and California, the passions and the sexual powers of the females greatly exceed those of their males, and hence a notable development of the crude form of polyandry popularly termed whoredom. Nor have the women of the Nile valley improved under our rule. The last time I visited Cairo a Fellah wench, big, burly and boisterous, threatened one morning, in a fine new French avenue off the Ezbekiyah Gardens, to expose her person unless bought off with a piastre. And generally the condition of womenkind throughout the Nile-valley reminded me of that frantic outbreak of debauchery which characterised Afghanistán during its ill-judged occupation by Lord Auckland, and Sind after the conquest by Sir Charles Napier.
“Captain Burton actually depends upon the respectable and antiquated D’Herbelot for his information” (). This silly skit at the two great French Orientalists, D’Herbelot and Galland, is indeed worthy of a clique which, puff and struggle however much it will, can never do a tithe of the good work found in the Bibliothéque Orientale. The book was issued in an unfinished state; in many points it has been superseded, during its life of a century and a half, by modern studies, but it is still a mine of facts, and a revised edition would be a boon to students. Again, I have consulted Prof. Palmer’s work, and the publications of the Palæographical Society (); but I nowhere find the proofs that the Naskhi character (vol. i. 128) so long preceded the Cufic which, amongst vulgar Moslems, is looked upon like black letter in Europe. But Semitic epigraphy is only now entering upon its second stage of study, the first being mere tentative ignorance: about 80 years ago the illustrious De Sacy proved, in a learned memoir, the non-existence of letters in Arabia before the days of Mohammed. But Palmer454 , Halevy, Robertson Smith, Doughty and Euting have changed all that, and Herr Eduard Glaser of Prague is now bringing back from Sana’á some 390 Sabaean epigraphs — a mass of new-old literature.
And now, having passed in review, and having been much scandalised by the “extravagant claims of the complete translations over the Standard Version” — a term which properly applies only to the Editio princeps, 3 vols. 8vo — the Edinburgh delivers a parting and insolent sting. “The different versions, however, have each its proper destination — Galland for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study, and Burton for the sewers” (). I need hardly attempt to precise the ultimate and well merited office of his article: the gall in that ink may enable it hygienically to excel for certain purposes the best of “curl-papers.” Then our critic passes to the history of the work concerning which nothing need be said: it is bodily borrowed from Lane’s Preface (pp. ix. xv.), and his Terminal Review (iii. 735-47) with a few unimportant and uninteresting details taken from Al-Makrízí, and probably from the studies of the late Rogers Bey (p-92). Here the cult of the Uncle and Master emerges most extravagantly. “It was Lane who first brought out the importance of the ‘Arabian Nights’ as constituting a picture of Moslem life and manners” (); thus wholly ignoring the claims of Galland, to whom and whom alone the honour is due. But almost every statement concerning the French Professor involves more or less of lapse. “It was in 1704 that Antoine Galland, sometime of the French embassy at Constantinople, but then professor at the Collége de France, presented the world with the contents of an Arab Manuscript which he had brought from Syria and which bore the title of ‘The Thousand Nights and One Night’” (), thus ignoring the famous Il a fallu le faire venir de Syrie. At that time (1704) Galland was still at Caen in the employ of “L’intendant Fouquet”; and he brought with him no MS., as he himself expressly assures us in Preface to his first volume. Here are two telling mistakes in one page, and in the next () we find “As a professed translation Galland’s ‘Mille et une Nuits’ (N.B. the Frenchman always wrote Mille et une Nuit)455 is an audacious fraud. “It requires something more than” audacity “to offer such misstatement even in the pages of the Edinburgh, and can anything be falser than to declare “the whole of the last fourteen tales have nothing whatever to do with the ‘Nights’”?
