THE VICTORIAN RIVALS
What did he say to you, dear aunt?
That’s what I want to know.
What did he say to you, dear aunt?
That man at Waterloo!
An Arabian old man, a Nights old man,
As Burton, as Burton can be;
Will you ask my papa to tell my mama
The exact words, and tell them to me?
—ANONYMOUS ENGLISH VERSE, CIRCA 1885
Of the many westerners associated with the Arabian Nights, none led lives of such contrast, or possessed characters so diametrically opposed, than the Victorian Englishmen John Payne and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Their individual, daringly unexpurgated English versions of The Thousand and One Nights are milestones in the history of the work as well as significant products of Victorian literature, yet each edition could have brought its translator serious trouble.
It is difficult today to understand the potential minefield Payne and Burton trod when issuing their unabridged versions of the Nights, for while both translations were printed for private subscribers only and therefore not “published” in the usual sense of the word, there remained an element of danger to even offer for private sale books that might conceivably contravene the age’s obscenity laws. Although during its pre-European history Alf Laila wa Laila was viewed by many in the Muslim world as a compendium of coarse tales, its obscene passages were accepted as part of the work’s nature; if one didn’t like such things, one ignored them and left it at that.
Not so in Britain, where the second half of the Victorian Age saw a tightening of censorship laws regarding published works. The passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (commonly called Lord Campbell’s Act after its sponsor) gave magistrates the power to search premises suspected of offering for sale obscene articles in books or prints. If anything deemed objectionable was found, prosecution would usually follow; a conviction often meant prison with a jail term averaging eight months.
Compounding matters was the existence of vigilance associations such as the Pure Literature Society, the National Vigilance Society and the Society for the Suppression of Vice—organizations of private citizens who took it upon themselves to ferret out works they considered in violation of Lord Campbell’s Act. In this way, they acted as watchdogs for the authorities, visiting booksellers in search of offensive materials, ever on the lookout for works thought unwholesome and never averse to alerting the law. Their zeal was often the result of panting religious fervour directed against any kind of sexual representation, ensuring that Victorian writers seldom if ever used such innocuous words as “calf” or “thigh” to describe a woman’s leg for fear of prosecution. So active was the Society for the Suppression of Vice alone, that in its first 159 prosecutions against publishers for issuing questionable material, it succeeded in gaining convictions in all but five cases.
In such an atmosphere of social and legal repression, anyone looking to issue an unexpurgated English translation of the Arabian Nights ran a real risk no matter how they chose to disseminate it—something Payne and Burton knew from the beginning. Even if they did not face actual prosecution, there was always the danger that being associated with a work considered pornographic could ruin their reputations and even their livelihoods. Neither man had the security of a private income; Payne worked as a lawyer while Burton was an employee of the Foreign Office, subject to dismissal and loss of pension. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, translating The Thousand and One Nights had ceased being a pastime for pedants and oriental scholars. For anyone wishing to produce an unedited version true to the earthy Arabic original, it was now a task requiring will and, ironically, strong moral courage.
Of the two men, John Payne led the more conventional life, although it was not without its difficulties. He was born to a solidly middle-class London family in 1842, but business reversals forced Payne’s family to move to Bristol when he was thirteen, a situation that saw John yanked prematurely from school. Thereafter, he worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country—including a humiliating stint as an usher at his old school—until at nineteen he was placed in a London solicitor’s office, where eventually he qualified as a solicitor himself, and set up a practice.
That was only a livelihood, for literature remained Payne’s special passion. Despite his abortive education, he possessed an outstanding linguistic gift, learning on his own (besides the French, Latin and Greek from his schooldays) German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Persian and Arabic even as he made translations of Dante and Goethe while still in his teens. Some of this extreme work ethic may have been the result of a mildly depressive or bipolar personality. Payne’s biographer Thomas Wright describes him as having “an uncontrollable imagination and a fondness for fun [which] not infrequently went hand in hand with gloom and foreboding.” Payne’s need for constant stimulation could have been a way of coping with his depression—what Sir Winston Churchill, another depressive also known to battle his illness with a wide range of activities, called his “black dog.”
Even for a High Victorian, Payne was eccentric. Notoriously near-sighted, he was nevertheless a fine amateur musician able to play from sight; he also adored cats, revered Shakespeare to the point of idolatry and was prickly enough to quarrel at one time or another with everyone from his relatives to his fellow poet Algernon Swinburne. In his professional life Payne was an effective if unspectacular lawyer, but he was also like Antoine Galland in that his greatest devotion was reserved for literary work. Also, like Galland he never married, looking to have only found real satisfaction in the arts of translation and composing poetry.
He was no milksop, however. Even before translating the Nights, Payne flirted with the era’s obscenity laws by publishing an 1877 English anthology of work by the lusty fifteenth-century French poet-thief François Villon. Aware that he might be heading for trouble, Payne and several friends set up the Villon Society to privately print a work ordinary publishers wouldn’t touch for fear of Lord Campbell’s Act. The Villon Society appears to have been modelled on other literary vehicles of the period such as the Hakluyt and Early English Text Societies. By offering works such as The Poems of François Villon for private subscription—a commercial transaction between private citizens—matters were left in a legal grey area; should push come to shove, it could be argued in court that such arrangements did not actually violate the letter of the law by offering questionable materials for public sale.
At around the same time as his Villon translation appeared, Payne became interested in creating a complete English version of Alf Laila wa Laila, which he later recalled he began in earnest on February 5, 1877. There had been no problems with printing Villon, so Payne trusted that selling an unexpurgated edition of the Nights privately would hinder, if not actually prevent, legal trouble, and went ahead with the translation.
He did so in a characteristically eccentric manner, writing almost entirely atop the horse-drawn omnibuses that now trod around London. Liking to “segregate himself in a crowd,” Payne would simply climb aboard a “bus” without caring about its destination and remain on the top level with his materials as it wound its prescribed way through the city. It was only when conductors refused to take him any further that Payne would disembark and board another vehicle to start work anew. The John Payne translation of The Thousand and One Nights is thus not only the first unexpurgated version rendered into English but also the only edition known to have been composed almost entirely in transit.
If John Payne can be described as the hermit of English Arabian Nights translators, then Richard Francis Burton is surely its paladin. A protean figure in his own age, it is a mark of Burton’s personal power that he is fast becoming renowned in our own day as a model of extraordinary ability, someone whose talents so far outstrip the average that it seems there was very little he could not do, do better than most and then proceed to write authoritatively about it.
Few individuals have ever worked in so many fields, successfully or otherwise. At various times of his life Burton was a soldier, a traveller, a military surveyor, a stunning linguist with nearly thirty languages to his credit, an African explorer, an anthropologist, an ethnologist and a pioneering sexologist, as well as one of the founding members and first presidents of the organization that would become the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The author of over fifty books, he still found time to become a master swordsman and amateur geologist, botanist and inventor.
Although Payne and Burton had much in common, their differences make them the Mutt and Jeff duo of English Arabian Nights scholars—almost a reflection of the extremes found within the Nights itself. Whereas John Payne lived most of his life in England, Burton travelled and worked on every continent except for Australia and Antarctica. Where Payne may have been wary of sex—some think he was a little too attached to his sisters—Burton’s reputation is intimately bound up with sexual subjects, whether through his anthropological writings, a series of alleged affairs with native women or allegations of homosexuality in India. Where Payne’s interest in Muslim matters seems to have been wholly academic, Burton was personally fascinated by Islam, claiming to be a Master Sufi and making a dangerous hajj to Medina and Mecca disguised as an Afghan pilgrim.
Comparisons between Payne and Burton extend to their physical appearances. John Payne’s physique was that of a stereotypical bookworm: medium-sized, mild-looking, sporting a spade beard and a ubiquitous pair of pince-nez glasses. Richard Burton stood nearly six feet tall with broad, muscular shoulders, drooping moustachios and dark, gypsyish looks set off by a pair of famously mesmerizing eyes. The Earl of Dunraven recalled that in middle age Burton prided himself on looking like Satan, often forking his heavy chestnut beard in the middle to evoke a devilish air, while Algernon Swinburne, a close friend, noted that he had “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god.” Later portraits and photographs show evidence of two great scars, one on each cheek, the result of a nighttime raid near the East African coast during which Burton took a Somali spear through his face.
For all his abilities and accomplishments, however, and for someone so frankly ambitious, there lurked in Burton a deep streak of social immaturity that often worked against his best interests; a perverse tendency to tweak authority that he never outgrew. He gleefully admitted to every rumour and scandal, true or not, regardless of any consequences to his reputation. Such attitudes tend to backfire badly, and Burton paid a heavy price for his love of a sinister persona even as his exploits turned him into a national hero and a recognized authority on the eastern world.
Burton can also be accused of taking on too much and never fully integrating any of it. To some eyes, he spent much of his life careening from one interest to another, mastering most before moving on as if dissatisfied, then often returning to an endeavour he had abandoned years before. The ephemera of his life reflect this frankly bizarre path. Burton is at once the same individual who introduced the Swahili word safari into western usage, might have coined the term ESP (although calling it Extra-Sensuous Perception) and may have brought the confection known as “Turkish Delight” to Europe following the Crimean War. Besides gaining a maître d’armes in fencing (think of a high martial arts black belt), from youth to old age he was famous for being able to play four simultaneous games of chess while blindfolded—and win them all.
The roots of Burton’s mercurial character may lie in his unusually nomadic childhood. Excepting a single, unsuccessful year at an English school at age nine, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence roving around Europe with his family, giving him an early cosmopolitanism unusual for English youths of his day, but also ensuring that he would never fit comfortably within the rigid social structure of nineteenth-century Britain. After a short stint at Oxford ended with his more-or-less permanent suspension, Burton received a commission in the army of the Honourable East India Company and spent seven years in western India, passing six interpreter’s examinations while delving deeply into local customs.
But illness and unsavoury rumours saw him invalided home in 1849. He wrote several books based on his Indian experiences before starting a decade-long career as one of the foremost explorers of his generation, first undertaking his famous pilgrimage to Mecca (a city forbidden to non-Muslims) before twice visiting Africa in unsuccessful searches for the fabled source of the Nile. With his exploration days effectively over by 1860, Burton then married the pious upper-class Catholic Isabel Arundell and entered the British consular corps. He served in a number of posts before landing in diplomatic exile at the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste in 1872, travelling, publishing and studying as before, but with the unhappy sense that his best days lay behind him.
But even the man who coined ESP could not foresee what his future held, or know how much his posthumous fame would depend on a pipe dream he shared with a friend in 1852. While recovering from his journey to Mecca at the Red Sea port of Aden, Burton and his fellow orientalist Dr. John Steinhaeuser first conceived the idea of creating an unexpurgated English translation of the Nights. Burton later recalled that, while talking about Arabia one day, he and Steinhaeuser reached the same conclusion: that the Arabian Nights, “this wondrous treasury of Moslem folk lore … [is] familiar to almost every English child, [but] no general reader is aware of the valuables it contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists.”
Before parting, they agreed to collaborate on a “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original,” with Steinhaeuser translating the work’s prose portions and Burton the poetry. This was not the unequal division of labour it might appear; with nearly ten thousand lines of poetry in Calcutta II, and the notorious difficulty of translating the Arabic metre, Burton’s task would have been at least as difficult as Steinhaeuser’s, requiring months, if not years, to complete.
There can be no doubt that Burton grew up familiar with the Arabian Nights in the same way as other British children in the early nineteenth century. Yet it was only with Indian service and his immersion in native cultures that he came to understand the extent of the work’s true nature—the earthy and often ribald core which, while considered coffee-house entertainment in the eastern world, was sure to be deemed pornographic in Europe, especially in Victorian England. Even as he recited stories from the Nights to safari companions in Africa—referring to the book as “that wonderful work, so often translated, so much turned over, and so little understood at home”—Burton acknowledged the perceived “moral putrefaction” of the original tales, writing that while the Nights is “the most familiar of books in England, it is one of the least known, the reason being that about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation … not even the most sanguine Orientalist would dare render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder.”
It was this book that Burton and Steinhaeuser decided to translate complete into English, exchanging notes and conferring whenever they met for some years afterwards (they appear to have worked in a desultory fashion on their respective tasks). With Steinhaeuser’s premature death in 1866, however, Burton fell heir to “very little of his [Steinhaeuser’s] labours,” and thereafter was forced to work on the entire project by himself.
How much work Burton accomplished in the years following Steinhaeuser’s death is unclear. He could only work whenever he found the time amidst his other activities and projects, and he usually had at least one book either in progress or ready for the press. Even so, he makes reference to the pleasure translating these stories brought him over many a weary year, “an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction … a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency” during his official duties in the consulates of West Africa and Brazil.
It is known that while serving as British consul in Damascus in 1871 he showed Lord Redesdale “the first two or three chapters” of the work, saying that Redesdale was the only person to be shown the book-in-progress. Later, however, Burton admitted that he worked only “fitfully” on the manuscript “amid a host of obstructions,” claiming it was only in the spring of 1879 that “the tedious process of copying began and the book commenced to take finished form.” At the time, he believed an absolute minimum of a year’s hard work—perhaps two or three—were required before he could complete the translation.
Burton turned to storytelling in his later years to stave off an objectionable existence, comforting himself with fictional realities more appealing than his own. Given unimportant consular posts as the years advanced—particularly after the 1872 diplomatic recall that landed him in Trieste—his frustration found increasing solace in literary pursuits, churning out a fantastic number of works ranging from a scholarly history of the sword to a biography of his hero, the Portuguese poet Luís de Camõens. Between 1872 and his death in 1890, Burton published more than twenty books, most of them multi-volume works laced with lengthy footnotes designed to illuminate the text and serve as a forum for his endless opinions, prejudices, beliefs and theories.
One of these works proved a dry run for the Nights. In 1870, Burton published a small collection of translated Hindu folk tales that form part of the Vetala Panchavinshati, or Twenty-five Tales of a Demon, itself part of the famous eleventh-century Sanskrit folk collection known as Katha Sarit Sagara—“The Ocean of Story.” Burton translated eleven of these tales and, like Galland, added individual flourishes and asides before bringing them out as Vikram and the Vampire, following magazine serialization.
Many of the tales found within Vikram are similar in form and spirit to stories found within the Nights, wherein a frame tale provides the ready excuse for storytelling; in this case, the hero Raja Vikram’s attempts to capture and transport a chatty demon. “These tales … strung together by artificial means … are manifest precursors of the Decamerone, or Ten Days,” Burton writes. “Here was produced and published for the use of the then civilized world, the genuine Oriental apologue, myth and tale combined which, by amusing narrative and romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals….” In offering these stories to a publisher, he remarked that “They are not without a quaintish merit,” but the public did not agree; Vikram’s sales were only moderate. But it is clear the pleasure Burton derived from translating the tales prompted him to continue, in however desultory or fitful a manner, with his translation of the Nights.
Regardless of the host of projects he worked on more or less simultaneously, Burton still expected to be the first individual to produce a fully unexpurgated English translation of the Nights, continuing to work sporadically on the book until reading in a November 1881 issue of the British literary journal Athenaeum about Payne’s work. With the first volumes set to appear the next year, this was a notice announcing the near-completion of the translation Payne called The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (to differentiate their editions, Burton eventually entitled his The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night) and advertising for subscribers.
With a possible gold-mining operation in West Africa on the horizon, Burton wrote at once to the Athenaeum offering Payne precedence in the field, his good wishes and his full support in issuing an uncensored edition of the Nights, while cannily leaving the door open for his own version. “My work is still unfinished,” Burton wrote. “I rejoice, therefore, to see that Mr. John Payne has addressed himself to a realistic translation without ‘abridgements or suppressions.’ I have only to wish him success…. I want to see that the book has fair-play; and if it is not treated as it deserves I shall still have to print my own version.”
Payne, who knew Burton’s reputation as an Arabist was gained through practical experience, wrote to him immediately, suggesting collaboration and offering the older man a share of any royalties. But Burton’s reply was cagey. “Your terms about the royalty are more than liberal,” he replied. “I cannot accept them, however, except for value received, and it remains to be seen what time is at my disposal…. I must warn you that I am a rolling stone.” When they met in London in the spring of 1882, it was arranged that Burton should read the proofs of Payne’s subsequent volumes (the first was already out) for corrections and suggestions. For more than a year, as soon as the proof sheets of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night came off the press, Payne had them shipped to Burton in Trieste for the consul’s editorial advice.
Soon an admiring relationship, if not a close friendship, sprang up between the two men. Burton saw quickly that Payne was a formidable translator whose text needed few changes, and so promised not to bring out his own version before the final volume of Payne’s translation was completed and in the hands of his subscribers. In the end, Burton refused compensation for his advice, and Payne dedicated a later volume to him in the warmest terms.
What Burton did do, however, was continually prod the younger man to be more explicit in his translation. Time and again, Burton tried to nudge Payne toward greater accuracy, complaining in one letter, “You are ‘drawing it very mild.’ Has there been any unpleasantness about plain speaking? Poor Abu Hasan is (as it were) castrated. I should say ‘Be bold (Audace, etc.)…. I should simply translate every word.” In another letter, he is emphatic that an unexpurgated translation should be as literal as possible, explaining, “What I mean by literalism is literally translating every noun … so the student can use the translation. I hold the Nights [to be] the best of class books, and when a man knows it he can get on with Arabs everywhere.”
Burton was hardly shy about telling his countrymen what he thought of general British knowledge about the Muslim world. “This book is indeed a legacy which I bequeath to my fellow-countrymen,” he writes in his introduction. He adds, “Apparently England is ever forgetting that she is at present the greatest Mohammedan [sic] empire in the world,” while in the same passage strongly denouncing “the crass ignorance concerning … Oriental peoples which should most interest her [Britain], [and] expose her to the contempt of Europe as well as the Eastern world,” and advocating instruction in Arabic for imperial officials rather than the typical public school Latin and Greek.
The first volumes of John Payne’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night appeared in 1882. Nine volumes were issued over the next two years. Three additional volumes entitled Tales from the Arabic, incorporating stories from the Calcutta I and Breslau texts, appeared in 1884, with another volume entitled Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp arriving in 1889. From the start, the richness and boldness of Payne’s translation made his series much sought-after bibliographical items, with many aficionados considering Payne’s version of The Thousand and One Nights the most graceful rendering in English.
But it is still a work unwilling to go much beyond conventional boundaries. For all his boldness in issuing an uncensored edition, Payne remains curiously detached about translating the more graphic portions of the Nights, avoiding excessive explicitness. While he cuts little or nothing, Payne is coy about employing coarse words or phrases to describe scenes or acts, especially those regarding sexuality. By using such descriptions as “go into a maid” and “join thy body to mine,” his version of the Nights is literal but not especially graphic, sacrificing some of the earthiness that is so much a feature of the Arabic Nights, and which later came to distinguish—many say mar—Burton’s translation.
Despite continual badgering of Payne to be more explicit, Burton’s praise for the younger man’s work was sincere and unreserved. “He succeeds admirably in the most difficult passages,” Burton wrote, “and he often hits upon choice and special terms and the exact vernacular equivalent of the foreign word so happily and so picturesquely that all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.” This last point has proved to be a particularly loaded phrase when comparing the two editions, but more on that later. As Payne dedicated Volume 9 of his translation to Burton, besides thanking him profusely in the preface to Volume 1, Burton reciprocated by dedicating the second volume of his work to Payne (the first is dedicated to John Steinhaeuser’s memory), generously describing the gradual development of the Arabian Nights in Europe as having been “begun … by Galland, a Frenchman, continued by Von Hammer [Purgstall], an Austro-German, and finished by Mr. John Payne … an Englishman.”
Or so he said, for it is clear the aging explorer felt the English translation sweeps were not yet over. Burton watched Payne’s success with interest and probably some envy, since he and his wife were often in financial straits and he had now been working at his own version for perhaps upwards of three decades. When he learned that not only did Payne not suffer any legal repercussions for releasing an uncensored version but sold out the entire printing, while winning substantial critical praise (but not from all: as might be expected from a man who remained a virgin for life following the first sight of his wife’s pubic hair, John Ruskin took exceptional disgust), Burton reactivated plans for his own edition and forged ahead, “ordering … old scraps of translations and collating a vast heterogeneous collection of notes” he had assembled over the years.
He was aided by a device similar to Payne’s Villon Society, but clothed in much more secrecy. On a visit to India in 1876, Burton and a friend, the Bombay civil servant Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, came up with the idea for a bogus publishing society that would act as a smokescreen for translations of English versions of eastern erotica or similar works that had appeared only in edited form. At the time, Arbuthnot was engaged in translating a number of Indian works, including several heavily erotic in theme, and was unsure how to release them without running afoul of the authorities.
What was needed was some kind of shield to throw the British legal beagles off the scent, and thus was born the fictitious Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, with its headquarters located allegedly in Benares, India, but the actual printers were housed in the London suburb of Stoke Newington. The name was taken from the Hindi words for “love” and “doctrine” or “scripture” (respectively kama and shastra), giving those with some knowledge of Indian languages a hint about the sorts of works such a “Love Scripture” Society was likely to issue. Over the next seven years, the Kama Shastra Society (KSS) printed and distributed seven works under its banner, including the first English translation of the love manual the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana and Burton’s Nights.
It is a mark of the atmosphere surrounding sexual matters in late Victorian Britain that no translator’s name appeared on any of the KSS issues (except for Burton’s Nights), although it is known that most were done by either Arbuthnot or the Bombay-based Hungarian linguist Edward Rehatsek. The only printings to appear with any mention of authorship were versions of the Ananga Ranga, the first of which was produced by Burton and Arbuthnot in 1873. The two men tried having this printed in England under the generic title Kama Shastra, disguising their involvement by using their initials in reverse order: “translated by A.F.F. and B.F.R.”
They needn’t have bothered, since the printer lost his nerve after running off no more than a few copies of the proof sheets and refused to print further. It was this episode that convinced Burton and Arbuthnot of the need for a mechanism to circumvent Lord Campbell’s Act; something to protect their identity when issuing translated eastern works, even if these were only for private sale. Twelve years later, they printed the original work under its actual title of Ananga Ranga with the reversed initials intact, but all other Kama Shastra Society “issues” except for Burton’s Nights were printed anonymously.
For there were dangers. Burton and Arbuthnot knew that agents of the vice societies in London were making inquiries regarding the KSS and those behind it. Nothing came of this, but it demonstrates the risks they were taking. As a further safeguard, in some Kama Shastra works the city “Cosmopoli” is cited as the place of publication, but this is yet another smokescreen, as “Cosmopoli” is actually a mythical city in which all peoples of the world come to live together. In certain literary circles of the period, however, it was also a euphemism for “sophisticated” literature designed for worldly readers.
Burton and Arbuthnot knew what they were doing. From the outset, works issued by the non-existent Kama Shastra Society either sold well or sold out altogether. In its first two years alone, the Kama Sutra went through two printings; it was then pirated for most of the next century before finally being openly published in the 1960s. Proceeds from the sale of these works may have provided Burton with the money he needed to absorb the printing costs of his Nights. When he discovered that the best offer he could get from an interested publisher for a multi-volume translation was five hundred pounds (the bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch thought Isabel Burton mad for offering to sell all rights for a flat ten thousand pounds—perhaps half a million dollars or more today),* Burton decided to undertake the entire expense himself and release his edition as a Kama Shastra issue, eliminating any middlemen and keeping any profits for himself.
This time, however, there was a major difference. While the other KSS works all appeared as anonymous or disguised volumes, Burton decided to gamble by releasing his translation under his own name, trusting in his reputation as an orientalist and authority on indigenous “manners and customs”—often Victorian code for knowledge of sexual habits—as a selling point to subscribers who knew he would not shy away from blunt language or descriptions. But this decision also meant that he could not hide behind a cloak of anonymity, and might face trouble.
Whatever dangers existed, Burton knew his public. Unlike Payne, the retiring London solicitor, Burton’s name was as identified with the desert world of the Nights as Captain Cook’s was with the sea, and he must have guessed that a translation of the Arabian Nights by Richard Burton, the man who had travelled to Mecca and searched for the Nile, would be ready-made for English-reading audiences. He also understood that his reputation for raciness might actually help sales. From the success of the Kama Shastra works, Burton knew a market existed in Britain for eastern books dealing with the erotic. Payne’s success suggested that a fully translated version of the Nights in all its earthy glory remained to be done, and might prove even more popular and financially rewarding.
When trying to interest Quaritch in the project, Burton wrote to the publisher, “I may tell you that the work will be a wonder. Payne was obliged to ‘draw it mild’…. I have done the contrary … the tone of the book will be one of extreme delicacy and decency … broken by the most startling horrors like ‘the Lady Who Would be Rogered by the Bear’ … some parts beat Rabelais hollow….” Burton predicted confidently to Payne, “My conviction is that all the women in England will read it and half the men will cut me [dead].”
There also appears to be a second, personal reason Burton wanted to issue a new English translation so soon after Payne’s. Several references suggest that Burton was convinced a heavily annotated translation of the Nights would not be merely a worthy addition to private libraries that were not adverse to having such things among their shelves, but might act as a kind of de facto anthropological encyclopedia for English-speaking Europeans on Muslim manners (including sexual habits) not mentioned in other translations or even books devoted to Islamic culture.
His concept, then, was not only to provide an even more unexpurgated version than Payne’s, but one that included extensive annotation and appendices beyond anything in the younger man’s work. Writing to Athenaeum late in 1881 (in the same letter in which he gives Payne’s project his support), Burton remarks that he regards the Nights as a book
mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales … unique as a study of anthropology … a marvellous picture of Oriental life; its shiftings are those of the kaleidoscope. Its alternation of pathos and bathos … its contrast of the highest and purest morality with … orgies … take away the reader’s breath.
Privately, he wrote to Payne in August 1884, “I am going in for notes where they do not fit your scheme, and shall make the book a perfect repertoire of Eastern knowledge in its most esoteric form.” He elaborates on this in the foreword, writing that previous versions, no matter how charming, had degraded “a chef-d’œuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnological interest and importance to a mere fairy book….” He defended the extensive use of notes in “a book whose speciality is anthropology” by recalling previous difficulties he’d faced in publishing his researches on indigenous sexuality, hoping this new translation would be “an opportunity of noticing in explanatory notes many details of the text which would escape the reader’s observation … I am confident that they will form a repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric phase.”
Like Payne, Burton found it best to issue volumes of the standard, accepted Nights stories first before adding a series of additional volumes containing “supplementary” tales appearing in other texts. Except for one personal addition, he follows the standard sequence of stories and Nights as they appear in the Calcutta II edition. In their respective supplementary volumes, both Payne and Burton include stories found in other printed texts and manuscripts of the Nights, but which are not part of either the Bulaq or Calcutta II texts. Both “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” are part of these supplementary volumes—another indication that while they had appeared in Galland, they existed in no original Arabic manuscripts.
Unlike Payne, however, Burton chose to follow Lane by including extensive annotation with the text, explaining that where notes
did not fit into Mr. Payne’s plan. They do with mine: I can hardly imagine The Nights being read to any profit by men of the West without commentary…. These volumes … afford me a long-sought opportunity of noticing practices and customs which interest all mankind and which ‘Society’ will not hear mentioned.
In fashioning his long-sought opportunity, Burton was intent on writing as close to how an Arab might write in English as possible, producing “a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the mécanique, the manner and the matter,” of the tales, noting that “however prosy and long-drawn out be the formula, it retains the scheme of the Nights because they are a prime feature of the original.” Burton had done this previously with his translation of Camõens’s sixteenth-century Lusiads and Lyricks (1880 and 1884), constructing a pre-Spenserian English to convey the flavour of Portuguese verse at the time the poet was writing.
At the end of the Nights , Burton reiterates, almost apologetically, the reasons for his eccentric style by noting that the original Arabic
is highly composite; it does not disdain local terms, bye-words and allusions … and it borrows indiscriminately from Persian, from Turkish and from Sanscrit. As its equivalent in vocabulary, I could only devise a somewhat archaical English whose old-fashioned and sub-antique flavour would contrast with our modern and everyday speech, admitting at times even Latin and French terms … my conviction remains that it represents … the motley suit of Arab-Egyptian….
“Archaical” is absolutely right. By attempting to write as an Abbasid Arab might compose in English, Burton goes much too far. The literary style of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night is rendered in a pseudo-medieval, almost Chaucerian English that has no true equivalent in any language. Burton may have been technically right to employ such a method—to impart a sense of Arabian “timelessness,” C.M. Doughty uses much the same device to an even greater degree in his classic book Travels in Arabia Deserta—but he leaves the reader with a steep uphill climb.
Burton’s Nights is frequently charming, but it is also terrifically difficult to wade through, particularly as its sixteen volumes are comprised of an average of nearly a hundred thousand words apiece. Never overly concerned with making things easy, Burton does not hesitate to toss arcane or even newly coined words into the mix, leaving his readers to swim as best they can, hopefully clinging to a dictionary as a life raft.
Even a dictionary is not enough. Latin and French phrases are used in place of English equivalents, different spellings are given almost simultaneously, English and American slang expressions appear at jarring intervals and Burton freely admits he made up some words and phrases simply because they suited his style or he liked their sound—“she snorted and snarked,” used to describe a woman’s snoring, is a favourite example of commentators.
For his sources, Burton used a variety of texts. In Arabic, he mainly used Calcutta II, the Breslau Text and the Bulaq Text, as well as the Wortley Montagu Manuscript, which Burton worked from via photographs because he loathed the Bodleian Library. He also consulted other English translations, especially Payne’s, checking them with the Arabic texts for exactness, and appears to have been intent on maintaining a literary integrity. Once, not having an Arabic original for one story, only a French version, Burton translated the French into Arabic and then the draft Arabic translation into English, to keep intact the flow of the whole.
Payne may have translated his Nights on moving omnibuses, but Burton went a more conventional route. Besides the large study in the Trieste palazzo he shared with his wife, when in London he did much of his work at the India Office Library or the library of the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall. The club librarian, Henry Tedder, remembered the explorer working endlessly at the library’s great round table, barely pausing to eat, dressed in a white linen suit with a tiepin shaped like a sword. Tedder recalled that in conversation Burton was urbane and suave with a subtle, dry sense of humour, reminding him of a strange compound “of Benedictine monk, a Crusader, and a Buccaneer.”
According to Burton’s account, serious work began in the autumn of 1882, when he assembled his materials for the first volumes and plunged wholesale into translation. Even a heart attack early in 1883 did not slow him down; he continued working from bed, propped up on pillows with his materials spread around him like battlements. While her husband worked on the book every moment he could, Isabel Burton—at first fearful that putting his name front and centre on a controversial work might lead to trouble and jeopardize his looming Foreign Office pension—soon got behind the project, procuring Payne’s mailing list and over a period of several months sending out tens of thousands of advertising circulars promoting the forthcoming Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to prospective subscribers.
Seeing that John Payne had limited his sets to five hundred copies but was oversubscribed by more than a hundred percent, the Burtons chanced a round thousand copies for their issue, then regretted their restraint when they saw the number of subscriptions rise to more than two thousand. Like the other KSS issues, copies were priced high—a guinea a volume—a ploy as much to keep the work out of the hands of the average public, and therefore from the immediate attention of the vice societies, as it was for profit and to cover printing and distribution.
Payne may have suffered no legal woes from his translation, but that did not mean the Burtons were safe. Burton’s version of the Nights does not cloud words or passages as Payne’s is content to do, but goes for as literal a rendering of the original as is possible; a rendering that most researchers admit actually over-emphasizes the coarse passages. In “The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince,” a man describes a woman in the gallant terms of “O thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores ever futtered by Negro slaves who are hired to have at thee!” The extensive use of ribald footnotes, a long “Terminal Essay” on the history and social manners of the Nights (including an extended look at homosexuality by period and region) and multiple appendices on everything from recipes for aphrodisiacs to harem lesbian practices, left Burton all the more open to prosecution.
There were hints of potential trouble in the months leading up to the appearance of the first volumes. All were printed by the Waterlow Publishing Company of London and bound in black and gold—the colours of the Abbasid caliphate—and each contained a flyer requesting that the work not be exposed for sale in public places or be permitted to fall into the hands of other than students of Muslim customs—inserted, no doubt, for legal protection, but also as a likely publicity ploy.*
But when she was in London during the summer of 1885 to see the first volumes through the press, there were times when Isabel Burton felt certain she was being followed by figures she feared were agents of the vice organizations, eager to investigate rumours her husband was about to publish an erotic edition of the Arabian Nights. The Burtons even consulted a criminal lawyer specializing in cases involving Lord Campbell’s Act, but were advised before any trouble came their way that John Payne would have to be charged first; otherwise no one could prove animus nocendi or “intent to harm.” Ready and perhaps even eager for trouble, Burton told his wife, “I don’t care a button about being prosecuted, and if the matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that, before they condemn me, they must cut half of them out, and not allow them to be circulated to the public.”
Their fears were unfounded. The first volumes of Richard Francis Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night appeared in September 1885 and proved one of the literary sensations of the decade. Its success may have been helped by a curious piece of synchronicity. The same month as the first volume was released, H. Rider Haggard scored a massive hit with the publication of his classic adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines. With Africa and African travellers already on the public’s mind, this might have given Burton’s work an added boost via his reputation as one of Britain’s premier Nile explorers.
At the end of the day, Richard Burton followed John Payne’s success by seeing a gamble pay off handsomely. The first volumes of his translation, fully entitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, With Introductory Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights, won him immense critical and popular praise. The anonymous verse presented at the beginning of this chapter made its way around London, wittily underscoring the racy appeal of his new edition of one of the most familiar books in Britain.
Most reviewers awarded him unreserved praise. The St. James Gazette referred to Burton’s Nights as “one of the most important translations to which a great English scholar has ever devoted himself.” The Morning Advertiser called it “simply priceless.” Even in the United States—where a rumour that U.S. Customs was going to forbid importation of the work at New York harbour proved untrue—most newspapers and journals gave Burton high marks for his knowledge and audacity.
A mark of Burton’s success came in a popular British magazine. In its October 24 issue of 1885, Vanity Fair published a fine profile of Burton at sixty-four, calling his translation “the most complete, laborious, uncompromising, and perfect translation of that collection of stories known to us as ‘The Arabian Nights,’” while contributing a warm appreciation of Burton himself:
As a bold astute traveller, courting danger … Captain Burton has few equals; as a Master of Oriental languages, manners, and customs, he has none. He is still very young … vigorous, full of anecdote and playful humour…. He is a wonderful man.
Of course, there were dissenters. The Pall Mall Gazette published two articles by John Morley under the headings “Pantagruelism or Pornography” and “The Ethics of Dirt.” There were others, but the greatest outcry came from Stanley Lane-Poole in the Edinburgh Review (whose editor, Henry Reeve, had been enemies with Burton for years), which harrumphed in a long, hostile article that “Probably no European has ever gathered such an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice. It is a work which no decent gentleman will long permit to stand upon his shelves…. Galland is for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study, and Burton for the sewers.”
These comparatively few naysayers did not dampen the Burtons’ triumph. The ten volumes of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night were released between 1885 and 1886, followed by the six-volume Supplemental Nights. Together, all sixteen volumes earned the Burtons some sixteen thousand guineas. Once the six thousand guineas spent on advertising, printing and distribution were subtracted, this left ten thousand guineas as pure income (in today’s figures, anywhere from half to upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars), enough for husband and wife to live comfortably for Richard’s remaining years. By comparison, John Payne made somewhere in the realm of four thousand pounds for his translation—hardly a miserable return, but nowhere in the same financial league.
All the attention seemed to bemuse Burton. Although delighted with the praise and unaccustomed profit, he still could not refrain from a sardonic jab at the conventional society he alternately courted and despised. “I struggled for forty-seven years,” he told his wife. “I distinguished myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a ‘Thank you,’ not a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age and immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we shall never be without money.”
Not entirely true, and not quite the last honour. Early in 1886, the couple were in Tangiers, celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, when they learned that he had been named a K.C.M.G.—a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. Queen Victoria had approved the knighthood in January, making them Sir Richard and Lady Burton.
But Burton was still in Trieste, stuck as uncomfortably between East and West in fact as perhaps he was in character, and his health was failing. As the 1880s wore on, his iron constitution began giving way as heart disease, gout, liver problems and the aftereffects of a multitude of diseases—including syphilis contracted in Egypt and crippling malaria in East Africa—combined to break down what had once been a legendarily rugged physique. His breathing became troubled (the 1883 heart attack was followed by a second four years later), and he began having trouble performing the simplest tasks.
In the autumn of 1890, while working on an annotated translation of the Arab love treatise The Scented Garden, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton died at his Trieste palazzo at the age of sixty-nine. Because he passed away a few months short of his retirement, he lost not only his consular salary, but also the government pension Isabel Burton had been so fretful about when her husband’s Nights came out. After the funeral, Lady Burton had her husband interred in England, within a marble mausoleum shaped like an Arab tent, in a Catholic cemetery in Mortlake, Surrey, where she joined him on her own death six years later.
For all the flaws of text and translator, the Richard Burton Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night remains the most celebrated, eccentric and epic version of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to appear in English, or perhaps any language.
It is also the most controversial English edition in existence, not because of its unexpurgated nature (if anything, the work’s reputation as the most risqué version in English is part of its mystique), but for Burton’s sources. Charges of plagiarism have been levelled at Burton from partisans of Payne, especially from Payne’s friend and biographer, Thomas Wright, who wrote an entire biography of Burton mainly to show how the older man “stole” from Payne. Some authorities, like the American mythologist Joseph Campbell, have accepted these claims completely even as others, among them Burton’s biographer Fawn Brodie, have tried to examine and discredit them.
As part of his attack, Wright inserted pages in his biography where he compares Payne and Burton’s translations side by side, and it is true that in many instances, the two texts are nearly identical. That Burton used Payne’s translation is unarguable, since pages exist showing he had at least one copy of Payne’s Tales from the Arabic that he marked and annotated while preparing his own edition. That said, the accusations of deliberate plagiarism seem tenuous. As a friend and ardent admirer of Payne, Wright may have been trying to give the Payne translation an added gloss by running down Burton’s more celebrated work. Unlike Payne and Burton, however, Wright did not know Arabic and was not a translator. Unfamiliar with the difficulties of finding the right word or phrase to convey meaning and intent from one language to another, he checked the English versions of both texts, found passages similar and in some instances even identical, and cried theft.
Still, the American orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald, who did know Arabic intimately and considers Burton’s Nights “his great work,” also believed Burton’s edition was dependent on Payne’s to a significant degree, even while admitting the explorer “knew ‘The Nights,’ after his erratic fashion, as no other European ever did.” Among other Arabists, Robert Irwin thinks at least a large portion of Burton’s translation is little more than disguised Payne, and Husain Haddawy is adamant that Burton consistently copied his predecessor extensively while tarting things up with his own insertions.
As is often the case, the actual truth may lie somewhere among these various viewpoints. While it seems accurate to say that Burton consulted Payne extensively, using selections of the other man’s work in his own translation, he does give credit (as he does other sources and assistants) by inserting such footnotes as “I give Payne by way of example” or “I quote Payne.” And the Payne version was not the only English text Burton used while translating; in addition to printed and manuscript Arabic sources, he also employed the Torrens and Lane editions (whom he also cites), and there is general agreement that his rendering of the poetry is, whatever its literary worth, entirely his own translation.
Thomas Wright also fails to point out that, eventually, Burton translated more stories than his predecessor, as well as more of the poetical refrains and decidedly more of the ribald passages (which Payne only translated if they also appear in the Bulaq and Breslau editions). In tales such as “Aladdin,” Burton’s version actually predates Payne’s translation, but with the same striking similarities of text that Wright believed were proof of plagiarism. The main body of the two translations contains the same number of stories translated from Calcutta II (not including incidental tales, 169 stories spread over 1001 Nights in Burton and Payne, respectively; a single difference being “How Abu Hasan Broke Wind,” more of which below), but in their respective supplementary volumes, Burton translated significantly more stories for his six-volume Supplementary Nights than Payne did for his three-volume Tales from the Arabic (sixty-one stories to Payne’s twenty, plus two more for the separate volume including “Aladdin”).
Furthermore, Burton provides variations of tales that have more than one circulating version (such as Sindbad’s seventh and final voyage), plus many others contributed by the folklorist W.A. Clouston. Did Richard Burton use John Payne’s version of the Nights for his own translation? Yes, it seems a certainty—but not always, not entirely, not without accreditation and usually not without first checking the choice of words with other versions, both Arabic and European.
It is also a feature of Burton’s translation that he goes much further than Payne in accentuating the bawdiness found within the Nights, to the point where Burton undoubtedly added another story to his scheme and intent. Robert Irwin informs us that “How Abu Hasan Broke Wind” is not found in any other collection of the Nights prior to Burton’s, but appears to be an old European story that Burton Arabized and inserted into his version as a humorous anecdote. In spite of this overreliance on the erotic and bawdy, however, Burton is capable of writing elegant passages, as in his famous description of a girl in the 421st Night, echoing the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon:
The girl is soft of speech, fair of form like a branchlet of basil, with teeth like chamomile-petals and hair like halters wherefrom to hang hearts. Her cheeks are like blood-red anemones and her face like a pippin: she has lips like wine and breasts like pomegranates and a shape supple as a rattan cane. Her body is well-formed with sloping shoulders dight; she hath a nose like the edge of a sword shining bright and a forehead brilliant white and eyebrows which unite and eyes stained by Nature’s hand black as night.
What is beyond question is Burton’s love of the Nights. Writing that “every man at some … turn of his life has longed for the supernatural powers and a glimpse of Wonderland,” Burton reveals that here
he is in the midst of it. Here he sees mighty spirits summoned to work the human mite’s will … who can transport him in an eye-twinkling whithersoever he wishes … here he finds maga and magicians who can make kings of his friends, slay armies of his foes and bring any number of beloveds to his arms.
The reader’s mind, he says, is “dazzled by the splendours which flash before it; by the sudden procession of Jinns … demons and fairies … by good wizards and evil sorcerers … by magic rings and slaves and by talismanic couches which rival the carpet of Solomon.”
Splendours Burton provides aplenty, but what really distinguishes his edition from other English versions is not only the explicitness of his translation but his annotations and the truly massive Terminal Essay that takes up almost 240 of Volume 10’s 532 pages—the perfect vehicle for presenting a lifetime of accumulated knowledge of the peoples of the world, particularly but not exclusively those of Islam. As a Victorian, Burton had his full share of prejudices that found their way into his translation—a good deal of misogyny and Afrophobia, plus a fair slice of the virulent anti-Semitism he shared with the Victorian officer class—but the overall impression is that he has thrown open the floodgates of his knowledge to escort readers through the maze of an oriental phantasmagoria where fancy and fact meet in a new reality. Of English translators, Burton may be said to take the greatest delight in acting the role of literary tour guide through The Thousand and One Nights. After a lifetime spent erratically absorbing knowledge and expertise, he finally hit upon the perfect vehicle to exhibit his erudition.
Not all researchers are enamoured. The Baghdad-born American academic Husain Haddawy describes the Burton edition as a “literary Brighton Pavilion,” a reference to the faux-oriental structure created for Britain’s Prince Regent (later George IV). This is not meant as a compliment, implying as it does that the Burton translation is little more than an ornate oddity; arresting to the eye, but still no better than an approximate copy of something far grander. As always when dealing with the multifarious editions of the Arabian Nights, it is left to the reader to make up his or her own mind about their worth.
John Payne outlived Burton by nearly thirty years, dying in 1919 at the age of seventy-seven. In his later years he may have experienced some jealousy over the fame of Burton’s translation and the relative obscurity of his own. When Thomas Wright wrote his rather hostile biography of Burton in the early twentieth century, Payne—although at first reluctant to co-operate—provided Wright with many anecdotes and examples of his and Burton’s correspondence. Payne later praised the younger man for the accuracy of his portrayal of the late explorer, but it is perhaps too much to say that he consciously collaborated on Wright’s literary hatchet job.
That said, any jealousy on Payne’s part would not be surprising, since his Nights, while respected and financially rewarding, did not enjoy the same reputation as Burton’s version, and he saw no official recognition for his many literary efforts. Few today beyond the world of Arabian Nights enthusiasts know the name of John Payne or have read his translation, yet Richard Burton’s name has survived for more than a century as the man who gave the English-speaking world the “real” Arabian Nights in all its ribald glory. A number of editions of the Burton text are available today, and original copies of the Kama Shastra Society edition fetch high prices at auctions. Payne’s work, on the other hand, seldom appears.
Personal considerations aside, for their efforts at providing the English language with censor-free versions of The Thousand and One Nights at a time of social repression, both John Payne and Richard Francis Burton deserve credit and respect—even a measure of literary immortality—for daring to remind the West there is more to the Arabian Nights than simple fairy stories for the young in age and heart. By transmitting the unexpurgated Nights to the English-speaking world in their individual ways, both men brought needed attention to the sophisticated literary merits of the work, redrawing the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments into its original role as literature of, and for, adults of all ages.
*Quaritch later said that turning down the Burtons’ offer was the worst business mistake of his life.
*Burton also mock-gravely warns his readers about an old superstition saying anyone who dares read the entire Nights will die as a result.