The Arabian Nights
This is the "original" translation of the Arabian Nights into English, made
by Sir Richard Francis Burton.
I first got interested in the Nights
when they were mentioned en passant by Arno Schmidt; some time later, the
person of Richard Francis Burton was driven into my consciousness by being
resurrected in P.J. Farmer`s ``Riverworld''. A few years ago, I read
through the first two volumes of Burton's n+k-volume edition of the Nights
(published in Madras or some such place). It was arduous reading (of course
the surroundings didn't help; the Staatsbibliothek doesn't like rare books
to leave the reading hall ;-). To my knowledge, there is no edition of
Burton's translation in print right now. I was therefore delighted to lay
my hands on the original flat ASCII text (you can get it from a gopher server). I have
HTML'ed the text and split it up to make it better readable.
Before diving into the Universe of the Nights, you should take heed of
this Warning! These texts might not be suitable for children or
PC-challenged adults; they contain racist, sexist, and speciesist¹ language
and contents.² Burton's translation is not unchallenged -- quite to the
contrary, modern translators consider it very opinionated and tinted by his
prejudices.
To get an impression of Burton's style and mind-set, as well of Arabian
culture a century years ago, you might want to read his ``Travel to Mecca
and Medina''. Burton was one of the first Englishmen to make the hadj and
report about it. (I have read the Dover edition years ago. Anyone knows
whether there is a online edition of this travelogue?) The Encyclopedia Britannica contains a
good article on him, which notes: He also published openly, but
privately, an unexpurgated 16-volume edition of the Arabian Nights
(1885-88), the translation of which was so exceptional for its fidelity,
masculine vigour, and literary skill that it has frightened away all
competitors. [...] His Nights were praised by some for their robustness and
honesty but attacked by others as "garbage of the brothels," "an appalling
collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice.".
The Nights have a deeply nested structure; they are often stories within
stories within stories. The different sections are of greatly varying
length; the smallest one is just above 700 words, the largest is nearly
40,000 words. (In case your connection is slow (or TU Berlin's
2MBit-connection has been cancelled due to too many people reading this
page ;-), that translates to byte counts between 3k and 214k, for a total
1.2 Mbyte.) I plan to re-arrange this index so as to reflect this
nested structure. Also, there will be a short synopsis for each story.
This text seems to omit some material. The different nights (i.e., the
cliff hangers) are not spelled out explicitly. All footnotes, which, while
not strictly being part of the text, make out at least 40 per cent of
Burton's translation (they usually fill the lower third of each page, and
are set in a much smaller type), are missing.
King Shahryar decides that all women are inherently unfaithful, and ("to
make sure of his honor") starts murdering each wife after the wedding
night. This goes on for three years. The king's wazir has problems getting
new women, and tells his plight to his daugher Scheherazade, who offers
herself as bride for the night. The wazir tells a warning story:
This small story has a happy end that involves the protagonist learning
about "family discipline" (i.e., beating a wife that asks too
much). Somehow, this fails to convince Scheherazade that she should obey
her father. After some ado she gets married to the king (rather, she is
transported into his bedroom; there is not much ceremony involved). After
the act, her sister Dunyazade (don't ask how she got into the bedroom ;-)
feints sleeplessness (I would be sleepless too, if my sister was scheduled
for decapitation in the morn) and asks Scheherazade to tell a story. The
king can't sleep either; and so begins the mother of all cliff-hangers,
with the story of
Fisherman finds jar which holds Jinni and frees him; Jinn leads
Fisherman to a pond containing magic fish; Fisherman sells a fish to
Sultan; Fish exhibits strange properties when being fried; Sultan wants to
know the story behind the fish, walks through the desert and finds a palace
whose only occupant is a young man that is handicapped: his lower half is
transformed to stone. The young man tells the story of his life:
Again, a young prince with an unfaithful wife (his cousing,
even). Princes nearly slays wife's lover without her knowing it; she mourns
for three years under a pretense and builds a tomb wherein she takes her
sick and mute-stricken lover. Finally, all comes out; wife curses prince
into half-stone-ness and, being into it, transforms the city into a pond
and its citizens into fish. From then on, the young prince is tormented
daily by his wife.
The sultan kills the sick lover (great deed,
that!), removes the body, positions himself in his stead (bad lightning
conditions, obviously), tricks the evil wife into re-transforming prince
and people, and finally kills her. Happy end, next story:
Three ladies throw a party with seven guest, amongst them three one-eyed
men (the ``kalandar''s from the next three stories), a porter, and the
Caliph Harun Al Rashid (incognito, as usual) with two of his friends. The
ladies exhibit some eccentric behaviour that involves some black bitches,
the guests are becoming nosy, and everyone tells a tale:
Young prince (aren't they all?) helps his cousin and a mystery woman to
disappear in a tomb; the prince is evicted from his place after the new
ruler monoculizes him; prince and father of cousin open the tomb, find
inhabitants stricken dead; prince has to flee a second time.
Now here is some action! A prince gets mugged in faraway lands, has to
work as a woodcutter. After a year, he finds a hidden entry to an
underground cave. In the cave is a woman snapped away by an evil jinn on
her wedding night -- 25 years ago (can't be too fresh, that gal). After one
night of debauchery, the (now drunken) prince summons the jinn, who (after
some ado) kills the woman, transforms the prince into a baboon and abandons
him on a distant mountain. In this form, he walks to the next coast and is
picked up by a ship. At the next harbour, the resident king seeks a new
scribe, and the baboon manages to get the job. The king's daughter,
well-versed in magic, summons the jinn, fights him to the death in an
hour-long dramatic form-change duel (during which the baboon loses one eye,
the king half his teeth and his beard, and a eunuch his life),
de-polymorphs the prince, then dies herself.
This sea-piece starts off with nothing less than the sinking of the
magnet mountain (TM). The sole survivor and teller of the tale (need I say
he is a prince?) swims to a small island, in the midst of which is a yet
another buried trapdoor that opens to a staircase that leads down to a
subterranean hall where a youth resides in luxury. One self-fulfilling
prophesy later, the prince leaves the island and reaches the mainland,
where he stumbles through a desert ere he reaches a palace. In the palace
live ten one-eyed youths. In the course of a story too complicated to tell
here (but it should be mentioned that it involves a Roc, 40 princesses, 39
allowed and one forbidden room, and a Pegasus), the prince loses his eye
and leaves for Bagdad. This concludes the group of the three
Kalandar's tales. The seven guests of the three ladies leave the house. On
the next morning, Harun Al Rashid summons the ladies so as to inquire about
their strange behaviour.
advises us about separation of goods in matrimony, and tells us about
the dangers of fire-worship. Also, that it is a good idea to learn to
swim. Btw, the bitches are the jealous sisters of the eldest lady,
transformed by a thankful djinn.
Again, a story of crime, blood and gore! One night, Caliph Harun
al-Rashid finds a chest containing the dead body of a girl, cut into no
less than 19 pieces. The murderer is found and tells his story: Mislead by
a random slave, he killed the girl (his wife) in a fit of rage over her
alleged unfaithfulness, which he later finds out to be groundless. There is
also a nice subplot on how sitting out problems is ok if Allah is with
you. (This story is interesting in how it depicts the legendary
``justness'' of Harun al-Rashid. Maybe life was different in a time when
``easy to take offense, easy to forget'' was an accepted behaviour
model.) The story ends with the murderer buying his life with a strange
story:
This large tale (20k words) starts off with one of the most bizarre
quarrels I'v ever heard of: two brothers contending over the dower of their
to-be-married children -- which aren't even conceived yet! The brothers
part in anger; one of them stays in Cairo and marries a merchant's
daughter, the other leaves for the wide world, but doesn't get beyond
Basra, where he marries a Wazir's daughter, and settles down. Of course,
the brothers simultaneously sire a matching pair of children. 20 years later, the
exiled brother dies, his son falls from the local Sultan's favor, and a
pair of djinns carry him to his cousin (who is to be married to a hunchback
that very night) and manage to slip him into the wedding bed (this involves
a scene of high drama on the loo). Next morning the boy wakes up without
clothes in Damascus, and the girl wakes up pregnant, with his gear beside
her bed. A son is born and grows up, fatherless. Ten years pass ere the
grandfather of kid (aka, the surviving brother) takes his daughter and her
son on a journey to Basra, to find the father. Of course, they pass through
Damascus; of course, the boy meets his father (who now works as a cook) by
pure coincidence, but doesn't recognize him as such. In Basra, they pick up
the wife of the dead brother, and travel back via Damascus, where said wife
finds the lost son by means culinary. The story closes with an extended
happy end.
(a monster of a story, nearly 40,000 words)
¹ Do Djinns belong to another species than humans (they can interbreed with
us, can't they?) or another phylum, or are they throroughly non-organical
(they are made from fire, while man was made from earth)? Inquiring minds
want to know.
² There are also some rather violent scenes, but political correctness does
not seem to extend to that area.
This page was last changed on Jan 17 1994, 15:02 by mfx@pobox.com, who also
wrote the annotations (this file), and did the mark-up. Comments and
corrections welcome.