Eastern Dreams (26 page)

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.