Eastern Dreams (28 page)

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.