The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

Burton English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights
the famous translation by Burton

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is the only complete English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights (the Arabian Nights) to date – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (8th−13th centuries) – by the British explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). It stands as the only complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition (Egyptian recension) of the "Arabian Nights". Burton's translation was one of two unabridged and unexpurgated English translations done in the 1880s; the first was by John Payne, under the title The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1882–1884, nine volumes). Burton's ten volume version was published almost immediately afterward with a slightly different title. This, along with the fact that Burton closely advised Payne and partially based his books on Payne's, led later to charges of plagiarism. Owing to the sexual imagery in the source texts (which Burton made a special study of, adding extensive footnotes and appendices on Oriental sexual mores) because “its surface is so strange and mysterious that it was given the Arabian Nights as a name bank, linking fantasy landscape with a literary fantasy”. (See List of geological features on Enceladus.)

Burton – an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author – was best known in his lifetime for travelling in disguise to Mecca (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 (1857–58). One of the great Arabists of his day, he had long wanted to publish an unexpurgated version of the Arabian Nights stories. The first translations into English, notably that by Edward Lane (1840, 1859), were highly abridged and heavily bowdlerised, which irritated Burton. In 1863 Burton co founded the Anthropological Society of London with Dr. James Hunt. In Burton's own words, the main aim of the society (through the publication of the periodical Anthropologia) was "to supply travelers with an organ that would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscript and print their curious information on social and sexual matters". Burton had written numerous travel books which invariably included sexual curiosa in extensive footnotes and appendices. His best known contributions to literature were those considered risqué or even pornographic at the time and which were published under the auspices of the "Kama Shastra Society", a fictitious organisation created by Burton and Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot as a legal device to avoid the consequences of current obscenity laws. (Burton and Arbuthnot were the only members of the "Society".) These works included The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), published just before his Nights, and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (1886), published just after it.

The volumes were printed by the Kama Shastra Society in a subscribers only edition of one thousand with a guarantee that there would never be a larger printing of the books in this form. To confound possible litigation, the title pages claimed the printing had been done in "Benares", but this was a subterfuge. In reality, it was done by Miller & Richard (a Scottish firm) at Stoke Newington.

The stories collected in the Nights are often sexual in content and were considered pornography at the time of Burton's publication. The Terminal Essay in volume 10 of Burton's Nights contains a 14,000 word section entitled "Pederasty" (Volume 10, section IV, D). Here Burton postulated that male homosexuality was prevalent in an area of the southern latitudes named by him the "Sotadic zone".

John Payne and Burton collaborated on their respective translations of the Nights for more than half a decade, and each respected the other's scholarship, but Payne believed that Burton had plagiarised his manuscripts when he sent them to Trieste to be checked. In 1906, a biographer of Burton, Thomas Wright, made the claim that Burton had plagiarised most of his translation from Payne. Burton's most recent biographer (1998) summarises the situation as follows. He [Wright] made a comparison of the respective versions of the Nights by Burton and Payne. We know, not only from Richard's and Isabel's writings but from the statements of people who met him through the years, that Burton had been collecting manuscripts of the Nights stories and translating them, on and off, for over twenty five years before he met Payne. So Wright's claim that Burton had not done his own translation, but had "taken from Payne at least three quarters of his entire work", is extraordinary. Norman Mosley Penzer, in his 1923 Annotated Bibliography of Burton's works, takes great umbrage at "Wright's futile efforts to glorify Payne and scoff at Burton", contradicting several of his examples point by point. In Burton's defence, Penzer asserts that it is usual for translators to study and follow in the footsteps of earlier translators and cites examples of similarities in the stories Payne translated after Burton had published his version. The "plagiarism" allegation is also examined in detail in an appendix to Fawn Brodie's 1967 biography of Burton, The Devil Drives.

In translating the Nights, Burton attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic. In doing so, he drew upon Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and the 1653 English translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of the first three books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532 1546). According to British historian and Arabist Robert Irwin: Burton shared [John] Payne's enthusiasm for archaic and forgotten words. The style Burton achieved can be described as a sort of composite mock Gothic, combining elements from Middle English, the Authorized Version of the Bible and Jacobean drama. Most modern readers will also find Burton's Victorian vulgarisms jarring, for example ‘regular Joe Millers’, ‘Charleys’, and ‘red cent’. Burton's translation of the Nights can certainly be recommended to anyone wishing to increase their word power: ‘chevisance’, ‘fortalice’, ‘kemperly’, ‘cark’, ‘foison’, ‘soothfast’, ‘perlection’, ‘wittol’, ‘parergon’, ‘brewis’, ‘bles’, ‘fadaise’, ‘coelebs’, ‘vivisepulture’, and so on. ‘Whilome’ and ‘anent’ are standard in Burton's vocabulary. The range of vocabulary is wider and stranger than Payne's, lurching between the erudite and the plain earthy, so that Harun al Rashid and Sinbad walk and talk in a linguistic Never Never Land.

Many early commentators on Burton's Nights criticised his eccentric "mixture of obsolete words, mediaeval phrases, modern slang, Americanisms, and foreign words and expressions". Jorge Luis Borges, however, wrote a celebrated essay on "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights" in which – while he chastises Burton for his distortions and "indulgent loitering" — he allows that "the problems that Burton resolved are innumerable" and delights in his careful use of an extravagantly exotic vocabulary in which each word "is indubitably the mot juste." In summarising his use of language, Borges concluded that "In some way, the almost inexhaustible process of English is adumbrated in Burton – John Donne's hard obscenity, the gigantic vocabularies of Shakespeare and Cyril Tourneur, Swinburne's affinity for the archaic, the crass erudition of the authors of 17th century chapbooks, the energy and imprecision, the love of tempests and magic."

Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights Translated Literally from the Arabic (1886 1887); Prepared for Household Reading by Justin Huntly McCarthy, M. P.; 6 vols. ; London: Waterlow & Sons, Limited, London Wall. This edition is ostensibly the “family” version of Burton's translation. (In her "Preface", Lady Burton guarantees that "no mother shall regret her girl's reading this Arabian Nights".) It is a much bowdlerized version of the original edition and was not a commercial success. It excises 215 of the original 3,215 pages, including Burton's defense of turpiloquium in his "Foreword", all sexually explicit commentary, and the two final essays on "Pornography" and "Pederasty." Lady Burton merely lent her name to this expurgated edition. As she stated before his death, "I have never read, nor do I intend to read, at his own request, and to be true to my promise to him, my husband's Arabian Nights."

1894 H. S. Nichols & Co, London, edition by Leonard C. Smithers, 12 Volumes. This edition "omits given passages in dreadful taste, whose elimination will be mourned by no one". 1897 H. S. Nichols & Co, London, "Illustrated Library Edition", 12 Volumes. With 142 original illustrations, including a portrait of Burton, reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Albert Letchford with one set of the original 71 illustrations presented as included by the publisher and another set individually hand coloured. Text. Nichols' scarce and handsome second edition is lightly expurgated, with the same cuts as the 1894 edition, but far fewer than in Lady Burton's Edition. Illustrations. This is the first edition to include the illustrations by Letchford. In 1896, two years after their first edition of Burton's Nights, the Nichols Smithers duo commissioned Burton's close friend, Albert Letchford, to paint 65 illustrations for another edition as well as a portrait of Burton, and soon after commissioned for five more. Burton and Letchford had met several years before when the latter was 18 and in Florence beginning his art education. They discussed the possibility of illustrating the Nights. Burton's suggestion of illustrating the Nights had appealed greatly to Letchford on account of the unlimited scope such a subject would give to an artist who loved the East and had a boundless imagination. Letchford commenced study of Eastern images for his paintings, though only one of the illustrations was painted in Burton's lifetime.