The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

Did You Know?

• In 1982, the IAU began naming features on Saturn's moon Enceladus after characters and places in Burton's translation.
• Burton's Terminal Essay in volume 10 contains a 14,000-word section entitled 'Pederasty', where he postulated that male homosexuality was prevalent in an area he named the 'Sotadic zone'.
• Jorge Luis Borges wrote a celebrated essay on 'The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights' that discusses Burton's translation.

Background

Burton, an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author, was best known for travelling in disguise to Mecca in 1853 and for journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first European to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. One of the great Arabists of his day, he had long wanted to publish an unexpurgated version of the Arabian Nights stories, as earlier English translations by Edward Lane were highly abridged and bowdlerised.

In 1863 he co-founded the Anthropological Society of London with Dr. James Hunt, aiming to publish curious information on social and sexual matters. Burton wrote numerous travel books that included sexual curiosa in footnotes and appendices, and his risqué works were published under the fictitious Kama Shastra Society, created with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot to avoid obscenity laws. These included The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (1886).

Plagiarism controversy

John Payne and Burton collaborated on their translations of the Nights for over half a decade, each respecting the other's scholarship, but Payne believed Burton had plagiarised his manuscripts when sent to Trieste for checking. In 1906, biographer Thomas Wright claimed Burton had plagiarised most of his translation from Payne, asserting that Burton had taken at least three-quarters of his work from Payne. Norman Mosley Penzer, in his 1923 annotated bibliography, strongly contradicted Wright's claims, arguing that it was usual for translators to study earlier translators and citing examples of similarities in stories Payne translated after Burton's version. The allegation is examined in detail in an appendix to Fawn Brodie's 1967 biography of Burton, The Devil Drives.

Style

In translating the Nights, Burton attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic, drawing on Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and Sir Thomas Urquhart's 1653 translation of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. According to British historian and Arabist Robert Irwin, Burton shared Payne's enthusiasm for archaic and forgotten words, achieving a composite mock-Gothic style combining Middle English, the Authorized Version of the Bible, and Jacobean drama. Modern readers may find his Victorian vulgarisms jarring, and his vocabulary ranges widely from erudite terms like 'chevisance' and 'fortalice' to plain earthy language, creating a linguistic Never Never Land for characters like Harun al-Rashid and Sinbad.

Editions

The first series of 1885 comprised ten volumes with illustrations. The supplemental series of 1886–1888 consisted of six volumes with illustrations, though the large third volume was often split in later editions, making it a seven-volume series. The volumes were printed by the Kama Shastra Society in a subscribers-only edition of one thousand copies, with a guarantee of no larger printing. To confound litigation, the title pages claimed printing in 'Benares', but it was actually done by Miller & Richard at Stoke Newington. A later edition prepared for household reading by Justin Huntly McCarthy was published as Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights (1886–1887) in six volumes.