Notes

Introduction: Stories from the Past

p. 7, “a revelation in romance”: Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, hereafter Nights, 10 vols. (London: Printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1885–86), X, 99.

p. 7, “something so new, so unconventional”: ibid.

Chapter 1: A Spectral Work

p. 17, “a Paris of the ninth century”: Nights, X, 173.

p. 20, “Such the gay Splendor, the luxurious State”: James Thomson, “Castle of Indolence,” 1748, in Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187.

p. 20, “to solace himself in the city”: Nights, I, 95.

p. 21, “the silken sail of infancy”: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” in Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1905), 17.

p. 21, “Thereon his deep eye stirr’d”: ibid., 21.

p. 22, “marks his reign with a stain of infamy”: Nights, X, 136–37.

p. 22, “For it was in the golden prime”: Tennyson, “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” passim.

p. 24, “It is not merely a simple narrative”: Alexander Russell, A Natural History of Aleppo (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 148–49.

p. 24, “in the midst of some interesting adventure”: ibid.

p. 28, “examples of the excellencies”: Nabia Abbot, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies VIII, no. 3 (July 1949), 133.

p. 28, “and Scheherazade related to her a tale of elegant beauty”: ibid.

p. 31, “truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling”: Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), Vol. 2, 713–14.

p. 41, “die as ransom for others”: Nights, I, 15.

Chapter 2: A Frenchman Abroad

p. 54, “Made for letters”: Nights, X, 96.

p. 56, “orner nostre France”: Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Antoine Galland, n.d. Quoted in Charles Schefer (ed.), Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son séjour à Constantinople, 1672–73, 2 vols. (Paris: Charles Schefer, 1881), II, 275.

p. 63, “marvels of the East”: Galland, Bibliothèque orientale (Paris: Compagnie des libraries,1697), preface, n.p.

p. 64, “my native place”: Nights, VI, 4.

p. 65, “One day my mind will become possessed”; “seized with longing for travel and diversion”: ibid., 14, 23.

p. 66, “Know … that my story is a wonderful one”: ibid., 4.

p. 68, “Three or four days ago, a friend from Aleppo”: Galland to Pierre-Daniel Huet, October 13, 1701. Quoted in Muhammad Abd al-Halim, Antoine Galland: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1964), 414.

p. 68, “collection of stories people recite in that country”: ibid.

p. 68, “I have only four or five hundred”: Galland to Gisbert Cuper, n.d., 1702. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 191.

Chapter 3: The Coming of the Nights

p. 70, “I have finished a clean copy”: Galland to Pierre-Daniel Huet, August 1702. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 267.

p. 70, “surprising quantity and diversity of narratives”: Antoine Galland, Les mille et une nuits, hereafter Nuits, 9 vols. (Paris: Chez le normant, 1806), I, xxix.

p. 70–71, “I say ample collection because the Arabic original”: ibid., xxix–xxx.

p. 71, “All the Orientals, Persians, Tartars and Indians”: ibid., xxxi.

p. 71, “profit from the examples of virtues and vices”: ibid., xxxii.

p. 72, “Verily the works and words of those gone before us”: Nights, I, 1.

p. 74, “tales just as good as the fairy stories”: Galland to Huet, February 25, 1701. Quoted in Abd al-Halim, 261.

p. 78, “Provençal and French tolerably well”: Galland journal entry for March 17, 1709. Quoted in Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights, hereafter Thousand (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 31–32.

p. 78, “some wonderful Arabic stories”: Galland journal entry for March 25, 1709. Quoted in ibid., 32.

p. 79, “written for me almost a year ago”: Galland journal entry for November 3, 1710. Quoted in ibid., 32.

p. 79, “I have finished the translation”: Galland journal entry for January 10, 1711. Quoted in ibid.

p. 83, “more remarkable for decision, action and manliness than the male”: Nights, X, 192.

p. 87, “not part of the Nights”: Galland, Nuits, V, i.

p. 87, “the infidelity done to him”: Galland, Nuits, V, ii.

p. 88, “a high degree that art of telling a tale”: Nights, X, 95.

p. 90, “It is sufficient that readers be informed of the intention of the Arab author”: Galland, Nuits, IV, i.

p. 92, “that nonsense work brings me more honour”: Galland to Gispert Cuper, July 10, 1705. Quoted in Mahdi, Thousand, 205–6, n86.

p. 94, “simple in life and manners”: Nights, X, 103.

p. 95, “this excellent man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and litterateur”: ibid., 96.

p. 96, “the glamour of imagination, the marvel of the miracles”: ibid., 99.

Chapter 4: “These Idle Deserts”

p. 98, “pitchforked into Gallic English”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” Part One, The Nation 71 (August 30, 1900), 167.

p. 99, “Arabian Nights Entertainments: consisting of one thousand and one stories”: Antoine Galland, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: 1706). Title page.

p. 99, “Read Sindbad and you will be sick of Aeneas”: Horace Walpole to Mary Berry, June 30, 1789. Quoted in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), XI, 20.

p. 100, “store house of ingenious fiction”: Henry Weber, Tales of the East, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1812), I, i.

p. 103, “senseless stories that mean nothing”: Voltaire, Zadig, and Other Tales, trans. Robert Bruce Boswell (London: G. Bell, 1910), 50.

p. 103, “Monsters and monsterland were never more in request”: Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Advice to an Author,” section iii, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols., ed. John M. Robertson (Gloucester, Mass: P. Smith, 1963), I, 221–25.

p. 104, “the product of some Woman’s imagination”: Bishop Francis Atterbury to Alexander Pope, September 28, 1720. Quoted in Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 4 vols., ed. George Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), II, 53–56.

p. 104, “whether the tales be really Arabick”: James Beattie, On Fables and Romance (London: 1783). Quoted in Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, hereafter Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2004), 17.

p. 106, “the Arabian and Turkish Tales were owing to your Tale of a Tub”: Dedication of Charles Gildon’s Golden Spy: or a Political Journey of British Nights’ Entertainments (1709) to Jonathan Swift.

p. 106, “the Arabian Tales was the fairy godmother”: Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 243.

p. 114, “Visions of palaces underground”: Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, 2 vols. (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849), I, 25.

p. 115, “will always please by the moving picture of human manners”: Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: Nelson, 1966), 36.

p. 115, “most freely … and the work of his manhood”: G.M. Young, Gibbon (London: P. Davies, 1932), 13–14.

Chapter 5: The Nights and the Romantic Spirit

p. 119, “a little yellow canvas-covered book”: William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Book V, 194.

p. 120, “made so deep an impression on me”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), I: 1785–1800, 347–48.

p. 120, “of Faery Tales, and Genii etc.”: ibid., 354.

p. 122, “Lady M.W. Montague … History of the Turks”: Quoted in Leslie A. Marchand, Byron (London: John Murray, 1971), 14.

p. 122, “had much influence on my subsequent wishes”: ibid.

p. 122, “For correctness of costume”: Byron’s note to Line 1328 of the original edition of “The Giaour” (London: John Murray, 1813).

p. 123, “stories from the Persian”: Byron, Don Juan, 1821 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1996), Canto III, XXXV; 165.

p. 124, “Oh! That the Desert”: Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” 1812–18, in The Works of Lord Byron (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), Canto IV, CLXXVII; 243.

p. 127, “so positively marvellous”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” 1838, in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 612.

p. 128, “so vast it is not necessary to have read it”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights,” 1936, in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1984), 57.

p. 129, “The Desert is pre-eminently the Land of Fancy”: Richard F. Burton, The Gold Mines of Midian (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1878), 357.

Chapter 6: Searching for the Nights

p. 131–32, “Oh, now all common things”: Charles Dickens, “The Christmas Tree,” 1850, in Christmas Stories (London: Dent, 1965), 9–10.

p. 133, “vapid, frigid, and insipid”: Nights, X, 110–11.

p. 135 (n.), “vainly troubled friends and correspondents”: ibid., 93n.

p. 137, “We are … as much acquainted”: Richard Hole, Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: T. Cadell Jr., and W. Davies, 1797), 10.

p. 137, “the same resemblance … as an oriental mosch”: ibid., 17.

p. 138, “probably a tissue of tales invented at different times”: Weber, Tales of the East, I, vii.

p. 138, “Enchanted Horse [is] evidently [the same as] the Horse of Chaucer”: ibid., I, xxxiii.

p. 140, “the learned Baron’s”: Nights, X, 78.

p. 153–54, “I am told they have no balls”: Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 138–39.

p. 157, “a most valuable, praiseworthy, painstaking, learned and delightful work”: James Henry Leigh Hunt, “New Translations of the Arabian Nights,” London and Westminster Review, 1839. XXXIII, Art. iii, 113.

p. 157, “excessively perverted the work”: Edward William Lane, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, hereafter Arabian Nights (London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1859), 7.

p. 157, “lameness, puerility and indecency”: Stanley Lane-Poole, Preface to Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1859). Quoted in Irwin, Companion, 24.

p. 158, “amiable and devoted Arabist”: Nights, I, xii; “garbled and mutilated”: Richard F. Burton, Supplemental Nights, 6 vols., hereafter Supplemental Nights (London: Printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1886–88), VI, 422.

p. 158, “the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters”: Nights, I, xii.

p. 158, “When he [Lane] pronounces The Nights”: Nights, X, 79.

p. 159, “right to omit such tales, anecdotes, etc.”: Arabian Nights, 12.

Chapter 7: The Victorian Rivals

p. 163, “an uncontrollable imagination and a fondness for fun”: Thomas Wright, Life of John Payne (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1919), 15.

p. 164, “segregate himself in a crowd”: ibid., 76.

p. 165–66, “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god”: quoted in Arthur Symons, “A Neglected Genius: Sir Richard Burton,” Dramatis Personae (London: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923), 23.

p. 167, “this wondrous treasury of Moslem folk lore”: Nights, I, ix.

p. 167, “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy”: ibid.

p. 168, “that wonderful work, so often translated”: Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, 2 vols. (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1894), I, 26.

p. 168, “moral putrefaction … the most familiar of books”: ibid.

p. 168, “very little of his [Steinhaeuser’s] labours”: Nights, I, ix.

p. 169, “an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction”: ibid., vii.

p. 169, “the first two or three chapters”: Lord Redesdale, Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1915), II, 573.

p. 169, “fitfully … amid a host of obstructions”: Nights, I, ix.

p. 170, “These tales … strung together”: Richard F. Burton, Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1894), xviii.

p. 170, “Here was produced and published for the use of the then civilized world”: ibid.

p. 170, “They are not without a quaintish merit”: Huntington Library Collection. Quoted in Mary Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 470.

p. 171, “My work is still unfinished”: Athenaeum, no. 2822 (November 5, 1881), 703.

p. 171, “Your terms about the royalty”: Burton to Payne, March 20, 1882. Quoted in Wright, Life of Sir Richard Burton, 2 vols., hereafter Life of Burton (London: Burt Franklin, 1968), II, 35.

p. 172, “You are ‘drawing it very mild’”: Burton to Payne, May 12, 1883. Quoted in ibid., 42.

p. 172, “What I mean by literalism”: Burton to Payne, Oct. 1, 1883. Quoted in ibid.

p. 172, “This book is indeed a legacy”: Nights, I, xxiii.

p. 173, “He succeeds admirably”: ibid., I, xiii.

p. 173, “begun … by Galland, a Frenchman”: ibid., X, 95.

p. 174, “ordering … old scraps of translations”: Supplemental Nights, VI, 390.

p. 177, “I may tell you that the work”: Burton to Bernard Quaritsch, n.d. Quoted in Lovell, 670.

p. 177, “My conviction is that all the women”: Burton to Payne, September 9, 1884. Quoted in Life of Burton, II, 54.

p. 177–78, “mutilated in Europe to a collection of fairy tales”: Athenaeum, no. 2822 (November 5, 1881), 703.

p. 178, “I am going in for notes”: Burton to Payne, August 12, 1884. Quoted in Wright, Life of John Payne, 80.

p. 178, “a chef-d’oeuvre of the highest”: Nights, I, xi.

p. 178, “a book whose speciality is anthropology”: ibid., I, xviii.

p. 178, “an opportunity of noticing in explanatory notes”: ibid., I, xix.

p. 179, “did not fit into Mr. Payne’s plan”: ibid., I, xviii.

p. 179, “a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book”: ibid., I, xiii.

p. 179, “is highly composite; it does not disdain”: Supplemental Nights, VI, 410–11.

p. 180, “she snorted and snarked”: Nights, I, xiv.

p. 181, “of Benedictine monk, a Crusader, and a Buccaneer”: Quoted in Life, II, 85.

p. 182, “O thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores”: Nights, I, 76.

p. 183, “I don’t care a button”: Quoted in Lady Isabel Burton, Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893), II, 284.

p. 183–84, “one of the most important translations”: St. James Gazette, September 12, 1885. Quoted in Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 290.

p. 184, “simply priceless”: The Morning Advertiser, September 15, 1885. Quoted in Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 288.

p. 184, “the most complete, laborious, uncompromising, and perfect translation”: Vanity Fair, no. XXXIV (October 24, 1886), 233.

p. 184, “As a bold astute traveller, courting danger”: ibid.

p. 184, “Probably no European has ever gathered”: Stanley Lane-Poole, “The Arabian Nights,” Edinburgh Review, CVIIV (July 1886), 184.

p. 185, “I struggled for forty-seven years”: Life of Sir Richard F. Burton, II, 442.

p. 187, “his great work”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” The Nation, 71, Part One (August 30, 1900), 168.

p. 189, “The girl is soft of speech”: Nights, V, 159.

p. 189, “every man at some … turn”: ibid., X, 124–25.

p. 189–90, “dazzled by the splendours which flash before it”: ibid.

p. 190, “literary Brighton Pavilion”: Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), xxv.

Chapter 8: The Arabian Nights Today

p. 192, “the most popular book in the world”: James Henry Leigh Hunt, “New Translations of the Arabian Nights,” London and Westminster Review XXXIII, Art. iii, 106.

p. 193, “ceased to be part of the common literary culture”: Irwin, Companion, 274.

p. 197, “Where they’ll cut off your nose if they don’t like your face”: “Arabian Nights,” from Aladdin. Music and lyrics by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The author heard the original lyric in-theatre early in 1993 before the change.

p. 205, “the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice”: Abbot, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights,’” 133.

p. 206, “neutral territory … between the real world”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Introductory Essay: The Custom-House,” in The Scarlet Letter (New York: Rinehart, 1961), 31.

p. 207, “Much the best version”: T.E. Lawrence to Jonathan Cape, June 4, 1923. Quoted in Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1989), 719.

p. 207, “The correctness of Mardrus”: ibid.

p. 207, “beneath criticism”: Duncan Black MacDonald, “On Translating the Arabian Nights,” Part Two, The Nation (September 6, 1900), 185.

p. 208, “For the first time in Europe”: J.C. Mardrus, Arabian Nights (Le livre des mille et une nuits), 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), I, i.

p. 212–13, “Then there lived after them a wise ruler”: Nights, X, 61–62.

Chapter 9: Infinite Delights

p. 217, “there is divinity (the proverb says luck)”: Nights, X, 75.