the workman was compelled to avoid the "objectionable" and aught "approaching to licentiousness." He converts the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters, arbitrarily changing the division and, worse still, he converts some chapters into notes. He renders poetry by prose and apologises for not omitting it altogether: he neglects assonance and he is at once too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He hadsmall store of Arabic at the time--Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary--and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style
of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of "The Nights;"
re-published, as these notes have been separately (London,
Chatto, 1883), they are an ethnological text book.
10
Mr. John Payne has printed, for the Villon Society and for
private circulation only, the first and sole complete translation
of the great compendium, "comprising about four times as much matter as that of Galland, and three times as much as that of any other translator;" and I cannot but feel proud that he has
honoured me with the dedication of "The Book of The Thousand Nights and One Night." His version is most readable: his English, with a sub-flavour of the Mabinogionic archaicism, is admirable; and his style gives life and light to the nine volumes whose
matter is frequently heavy enough. He succeeds admirably in the most difficult passages 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. But the learned and versatile author bound himself to issue only five hundred copies, and "not to reproduce the work in its complete and uncastrated form." Consequently his excellent version is caviaire to the general--practically unprocurable.
And here I hasten to confess that ample use has been made of the three versions above noted, the whole being blended by a callida junctura into a homogeneous mass. But in the presence of so many predecessors a writer is bound to show some raison d'etre for making a fresh attempt and this I proceed to do with due reserve.
Briefly, the object of this version is to show what "The Thousand Nights and a Night" really is. Not, however, for reasons to be more fully stated in the Terminal Essay, by straining verbum reddere verbo, but by writing as the Arab would have written in
11
English. On this point I am all with Saint Jerome (Pref. in Jobum) "Vel verbum e verbo, vel sensum e sensu, vel ex utroque commixtum, et medic temperatum genus translationis." My work claims to be a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the mecanique,
the manner and the matter. Hence, however prosy and long drawn out be the formula, it retains the scheme of The Nights because they are a prime feature in the original. The Rawi or reciter, to whose wits the task of supplying details is left, well knows
their value: the openings carefully repeat the names of the dramatic personae and thus fix them in the hearer's memory. Without the Nights no Arabian Nights! Moreover it is necessary to retain the whole apparatus: nothing more ill advised than Dr. Jonathan Scott's strange device of garnishing The Nights with fancy head pieces and tail pieces or the splitting up of
Galland's narrative by merely prefixing "Nuit," etc., ending moreover, with the ccxxxivth Night: yet this has been done, apparently with the consent of the great Arabist Sylvestre de Sacy (Paris, Ernest Bourdin). Moreover, holding that the translator's glory is to add something to his native tongue,
while avoiding the hideous hag like nakedness of Torrens and the bald literalism of Lane, I have carefully Englished the
picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness; for instance, when the dust cloud raised by a tramping host is described as "walling the horizon." Hence peculiar attention has been paid to the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term; and I have
never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as "she snorted
and sparked," fully to represent the original. These, like many
12
in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.
Despite objections manifold and manifest, I have preserved the balance of sentences and the prose rhyme and rhythm which Easterns look upon as mere music. This "Saj'a," or cadence of the cooing dove, has in Arabic its special duties. It adds a sparkle
to description and a point to proverb, epigram and dialogue; it corresponds with our "artful alliteration" (which in places I have substituted for it) and, generally, it defines the
boundaries between the classical and the popular styles which jostle each other in The Nights. If at times it appear strained and forced, after the wont of rhymed prose, the scholar will
observe that, despite the immense copiousness of assonants and consonants in Arabic, the strain is often put upon it
intentionally, like the Rims cars of Dante and the Troubadours. This rhymed prose may be "un English" and unpleasant, even irritating to the British ear; still I look upon it as a sine qua
non for a complete reproduction of the original. In the Terminal
Essay I shall revert to the subject.
On the other hand when treating the versical portion, which may represent a total of ten thousand lines, I have not always bound myself by the metrical bonds of the Arabic, which are artificial
in the extreme, and which in English can be made bearable only by a tour de force. I allude especially to the monorhyme, Rim continuat or tirade monorime, whose monotonous simplicity was preferred by the Troubadours for threnodies. It may serve well
for three or four couplets but, when it extends, as in the
13
Ghazal-cannon, to eighteen, and in the Kasidah, elegy or ode, to more, it must either satisfy itself with banal rhyme words, when the assonants should as a rule be expressive and emphatic; or, it must display an ingenuity, a smell of the oil, which assuredly
does not add to the reader's pleasure. It can perhaps be done and it should be done; but for me the task has no attractions: I can fence better in shoes than in sabots. Finally I print the
couplets in Arab form separating the hemistichs by asterisks.
And now to consider one matter of special importance in the book--its turpiloquium. This stumbling-block is of two kinds,
completely distinct. One is the simple, naive and child like indecency which, from Tangiers to Japan, occurs throughout general conversation of high and low in the present day. It uses, like the holy books of the Hebrews, expressions "plainly descriptive of natural situations;" and it treats in an unconventionally free and naked manner of subjects and matters which are usually, by common consent, left undescribed. As Sir William Jones observed long ago, "that anything natural can be offensively obscene never seems to have occurred to the
