whose narrow puritanism he had long bemoaned.
* * *
The stories that make up the Thousand and One Nights had been popular in the West since their first translation into a European language by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717; a number of English versions were made from Galland’s French text both in his century and the next, and the exotic and magical qualities of the tales made them staples of popular literature, especially for children. But Galland’s version was far from complete, and his choice of what stories to include was shaped partly by a passion for fairy tales that made him see the Nights chiefly as a source for them, and partly by his desire to produce a book that would not offend moral sensibilities. Very similar motives assured that the English version made from his text and even some early attempts to go back to the Arabic original in the early 1800s would suffer from many of the same limits.
Burton was not the first person to seek a more authentic rendering; in his time two English Arabists preceded him in bringing out new versions of the tales. The first was Edward W. Lane, whose earlier book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), provided a major source of knowledge about Arab and Muslim life for many in the nineteenth century, including Burton. Lane had dressed and lived in the manner of a local during the two years he spent in Cairo in the 1820s, gathering material for his book and learning Arabic. He later produced an Arabic-English dictionary still regularly used by scholars today. His translation of the Nights has both admirers and detractors (Burton among the latter), but whatever its virtues it was far from complete, leaving out whatever he considered “objectionable” or “licentious.” Much closer to what Burton had in mind was the work of a younger Arabist, John Payne, the first to produce a complete version (around four times the length of Galland’s, and three times that of Lane), of which the first volume appeared in 1882. Burton greeted it with praise, judging its success in rendering difficult passages so complete that “all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.” In a letter to Payne he acknowledged the younger man’s priority and promised not to put out his own version until the other’s was complete; the friendly relations between the two led each to dedicate a volume to the other. Despite this, much controversy has grown up around their relations, some accusing Burton of simply stealing from Payne. This judgment is almost certainly too harsh (Fawn Brodie has given a balanced and sensible defense of Burton in her biography), but there seems no doubt that Burton made considerable use of Payne’s text in producing his own, and it may well be that his own version would not have been ready for publication in 1885 (or ever) if Payne’s work had not been available to him.69
For us, however, these questions matter far less than the role the translation played in Burton’s larger involvement with Arab and Muslim culture. He saw his work on the Nights as “a natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah,” noting that while on his way he stayed for some weeks with a physician friend, John Steinhaeuser, who lived in Aden and shared his fascination for the tales, and that the two agreed to collaborate on the “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated translation” they both wished to see. The plan was for Steinhaeuser to work on prose passages and Burton on verse ones, but these hopes collapsed when Steinhaeuser died suddenly while still in his fifties. Whatever work he had done was lost, leaving Burton with the need to start pretty much from scratch. In his foreword he described the book, arduous as it appeared (especially because of the extensive apparatus of notes, many of them learned and extensive essays on matters grammatical, religious, or social), as “a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction,” especially during the years when he suffered “banishment” to West Africa and South America; it was in contrast to these other places that he described Arabia in the terms we noted earlier, as “the land of my predilection … a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.”
Burton invoked this sense of having an especially intimate connection to the Nights and its world in explaining why he thought his version of the tales was still needed despite the existence of all the earlier ones. His object was “to show what ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ really is,” not by translating the text literally, word for word, but “by writing as the Arab would have written in English.” Burton would probably have acknowledged that both Edward Lane and John Payne had the linguistic capacity to pursue such a goal, but neither in his view identified enough with the spirit and tenor of the tales to undertake it—Lane because he remained an Evangelical Christian, and Payne out of reticence. “My work claims to be 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.” The last sentence brings to mind his attempt in the pilgrimage book to convey both the workings and the spirit of what went on at Medina and Mecca through careful attention to the details of the rituals, participation in the feelings aroused in other pilgrims, and a literal and sympathetic enunciation of the prayer texts.
But the project of the Nights had a second side, namely achieving what was the “glory” of the translator: “to add something to his native tongue,” providing new and expressive metaphors and turns of speech. He hoped these novel words or phrases would enter English as equivalents for “the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term.” To offer them required that the translator gamble on the willingness of readers to accept the new coinages as an enrichment of English rather than a defection from it: “I have never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as ‘she snorted and snarked,’ fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.” Seeking to enrich his own language in this way gave his intercultural existence a new dimension. Hitherto his Arab involvements had chiefly focused on himself, expanding or deepening his personal existence; here he turned the interchange in the opposite direction, reinvesting the fruits of his efforts in the native cultural ground that was still his own.
Intertwined with this aim was the one Burton pursued in the Kasidah and Stone Talk, using an expanded consciousness to show the arbitrary nature of the moral and intellectual limits cultures impose on their members, so as to encourage a certain degree of escape from them. It was especially in the realm of erotic experience that he saw the Nights as contributing to this liberation. Exposure to Eastern ways showed the provincial nature of Western sexual mores both in regard to certain particular topics and in attitudes toward sex more generally. The two particular matters were same-sex relationships and the amatory lives of women. Burton was less than consistent in regard to the first: he employed a general argument to defend homosexuality against the notion common in his time that it was “unnatural,” countering that whatever human beings do is natural to them. But when he set out to show that same-sex relations were more common and widespread outside Europe than within it, it was only male homosexuality he considered; sex between women did not enter the picture. We may never know whether Burton himself ever engaged in sex with other men, but he clearly had a fascination with it (going back at least to his days in Sind), and in the Terminal Essay that concluded his translation of the Nights he used the diverse attitudes taken toward it in different places to underscore the arbitrary nature of cultural restrictions (he also offered some possible explanations for the differences, but we must leave them aside here). He did not recommend that Europeans follow these examples in regard to same-sex relations, but clearly thought that Westerners could profit from an understanding of Eastern attitudes toward female sexuality; these were premised on a widespread sense that women no less than men had a right to sexual satisfaction, and that men had a responsibility to provide it. Such a stance made for more harmonious and more mutually respectful relationships, raising the general level of happiness.70
All these aspects of actual sexual practice were deeply tied up in his mind with a less physical side of erotic life, namely the power of desire to nurture imagination and fantasy. In this regard linguistic norms were no less significant than behavioral ones, and Burton gave much attention to the contrast between the Western and especially British penchant for casting a veil of prudish reticence over
