The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 16 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (best love story novels in english .TXT) đ
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And now to my tale.
Mr. Henry Reeve, Editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote to me shortly before my first volume was issued to subscribers (September,â85) asking for advance sheets, as his magazine proposed to produce a general notice of The Arabian Nights Entertainments. But I suspected the man whose indiscretion and recklessness had been so unpleasantly paraded in the shape of the Greville (Mr. Worldly Wisemanâs) Memoirs, and I had not forgotten the untruthful and malignant articles of perfervid brutality which during the hot youth and calm middle age of the Edinburgh had disgraced the profession of letters. My answer, which was temporising and diplomatic, induced only a second and a more urgent application. Bearing in mind that professional etiquette hardly justifies publicly reviewing a book intended only for private reading and vividly remembering the evil of the periodical, I replied that the sheets should be forwarded but on one condition, namely, that the reviewer would not dwell too lovingly and longingly upon the âarchaics,â which had so excited the Tartuffean temperament of the chaste Pall Mall Gazette. Mr. Henry Reeves replied (surlily) that he was not in the habit of dictating to his staff and I rejoined by refusing to grant his request. So he waited until five, that is one half of my volumes had been distributed to subscribers, and revenged himself by placing them for review in the hands of the âLane-Pooleâ clique which, as the sequel proved could be noisy and combative as setting hens disturbed when their nest-egg was threatened by an intruding hand.
For the clique had appropriated all right and claim to a monopoly of The Arabian Nights Entertainments which they held in hand as a rotten borough. The âUncle and Master,â Mr. Edward William Lane, eponymous hero of the house, had retranslated certain choice specimens of the Recueil and the ânephews of their uncleâ resolved to make a private gold-mine thereof. The book came out in monthly parts at half-a-crown (1839-41) and when offered for sale in 3 vols.
royal 8 vo, the edition of 5,000 hung fire at first until the high price (3
pounds 3s.) was reduced to 27 shillings for the trade. The sale then went off briskly and amply repaid the author and the publishersâCharles Knight and Co.
And although here and there some âold Toryâ grumbled that new-fangled words (as Wezeer, Kïżœdee and Jinnee) had taken the places of his childhoodâs pets, the Vizier, the Cadi, and the Genie, none complained of the workmanship for the all-sufficient reason that naught better was then known or could be wanted. Its succes de salon was greatly indebted to the âmany hundred engravings on wood, from original designs by William Harveyâ, with a host of quaint and curious Arabesques, Cufic inscriptions, vignettes, head pieces and culs-de-lampes. These, with the exception of sundry minor accessories, [FN#447] were excellent and showed for the first time the realistic East and not the absurdities drawn from the depths of artistical ignorance and self-consciousnessâthose of Smirke, Deveria, Chasselot and Co., not to speak of the horrors of the De Sacy edition, whose plates have apparently been used by Prof. Weil and by the Italian versions. And so the three bulky and handsome volumes found a ready way into many a drawing room during the Forties, when the public was uncritical enough to hail the appearance of these scattered chapters and to hold that at last they had the real thing, pure and unadulterated. No less than three reprints of the âStandard Edition,â 1859
(the last being in â83), succeeded one another and the issue was finally stopped, not by the authorâs death (ïżœtat 75; London, August 10, 1876: net.
Hereford, September 17, 1801), nor by the plates, which are now the property of Messieurs Chatto and Windus, becoming too worn for use, but simply by deficient demand. And the clique, represented by the late Edward Lane-Poole in 1879, who edited the last edition (1883) with a Preface by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, during a long run of forty-three years never paid the public the compliment of correcting the multitudinous errors and short comings of the translation. Even the lengthy and longsome notes, into which The Nights have too often been merged, were left untrimmed. Valuable in themselves and full of information, while wholly misplaced in a recueil of folk-lore, where they stand like pegs behung with the contents of the translatorâs adversaria, the monographs on details of Arab life have also been exploited and reprinted under the âfatuousâ title, âArabian (for Egyptian) Society in the Middle Ages: Studies on The Thousand and One Nights.â They were edited by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole (Chatto and Windus) in 1883.
At length the three volumes fell out of date, and the work was formally pronounced unreadable. Goïżœthe followed from afar by Emerson, had foreseen the âinevitable increase of Oriental influence upon the Occident,â and the eagerness with which the men of the West would apply themselves to the languages and literature of the East. Such garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsoured versions and perversions like Laneâs were felt to be survivals of the unfittest. Mr. John Payne (for whom see my Foreword, vol. i. pp. xi.-xii.) resolved to give the world the first honest and complete version of the Thousand Nights and a Night. He put forth samples of his work in the New Quarterly Magazine (January-April, 1879), whereupon he was incontinently assaulted by Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, the then front of the monopolists, who after drawing up a list of fifteen errata (which were not errata) in two Nights, declared that âthey must be multiplied five hundred-fold to give the sum we may expect.â (The Academy, April 26, 1879; November 29, 1881; and December 7, 1881.) The critic had the courage, or rather impudence, to fall foul of Mr. Payneâs mode and mannerism, which had long become deservedly famous, and concludes: ââThe question of English style may for the present be dropped, as, if a translator cannot translate, it little matters in what form his results appear. But it may lie questioned whether an Arab edifice should be decorated with old English wall-papers.â
Evidently I had scant reason to expect mercy from the clique: I wanted none and I received none.
My reply to the arch-impostor, who
Spreads the light wings of saffron and of blue, will perforce be somewhat detailed: it is necessary to answer paragraph by paragraph, and the greater part of the thirty-three pages refers more or less directly to myself. To begin with the beginning, it caused me and many others some surprise to see the âThousand Nights and a Nightâ expelled the initial list of thirteen items, as if it were held unfit for mention. Cet article est principalement une diatribe contre lâouorage de Sir Richard Burton et dans le libre cet ouvrage nâest mïżœme pas mentionnïżœâ, writes my French friend. This proceeding was a fair specimen of âthat impartiality which every reviewer is supposed to possess.â But the ignoble âlittle dodgeâ presently suggested itself. The preliminary excursus (p.168) concerning the âMille et Une Nuits (read Nuit) an audacious fraud, though not the less the best story book in the world,â affords us a useful measure of the writerâs competence in the matter of audacity and ill-judgment. The honest and single-minded Galland is here (let us believe through that pure ignorance which haply may hope for âfoolâs pardonâ) grossly and unjustly vilified; and, by way of making bad worse, we are assured (p. 167) that the Frenchman âbrought the Arabic manuscript from Syriaââan infact which is surprising to the most superficial student.
âGalland was a born story teller, in the good and the bad senseâ (p. 167), is a silly sneer of the true Lane-Poolean type. The critic then compares most unadvisedly (p. 168) a passage in Galland (De Sacy edit. vol. i. 414) with the same in Mr. Payneâs (i. 260) by way of proving the âextraordinary liberties which the worthy Frenchman permitted himself to take with the Arabicâ: had he troubled himself to collate my version (i. 290-291), which is made fuller by the Breslau Edit. (ii. 190), he would have found that the Frenchman, as was his wont, abridged rather than amplified;[FN#448] although, when the original permitted exact translation, he could be literal enough. And what doubt, may I enquire, can we have concerning âThe Sleeper Awakenedâ (Lane, ii. 351-376), or, as I call it, âThe Sleeper and the wakerâ (Suppl. vol.i.1-29), when it occurs in a host of MSS., not to mention the collection of tales which Prof.
Habicht converted into the Arabian Nights by breaking the text into a thousand and one sections (Bresl. Edit. iv. 134-189, Nights cclxxii. ccxci.). The reckless assertions that âthe wholeâ of the last fourteen (Gallandian) tales have nothing whatever to do with âThe Nightsâ (p. 168); and that of the histories of Zayn al-Asnïżœm and Aladdin, âit is abundantly certain that they belong to no manuscript of the Thousand and One Nightsâ (p. 169), have been notably stultified by M. Hermann Zotenbergâs purchase of two volumes containing both these bones of long and vain contention. See Foreword to my Suppl. vol. iii. pp. viii.-xi., and Mr. W. F. Kirbyâs interesting notice of M.
Zotenbergâs epoch-making booklet (vol. vi. p. 287).
âThe first English edition was published (pace Lowndes) within eight years of Gallandâsâ (p. 170) states a mere error. The second part of Galland (6 vols.
12 mo) was not issued till 1717, or two years after the translatorâs death. Of the English editio princeps the critic tells nothing, nor indeed has anyone as yet been able to tell us aught. Of the dishonouring assertion (again let us hope made in simple ignorance) concerning âCazotteâs barefaced forgeryâ (p.
170), thus slandering the memory of Jacques Cazotte, one of the most upright and virtuous of men who ever graced the ranks of literature, I have disposed in the Foreword to my Supplemental vol. vi. âThis edition (Scottâs) was tastefully reprinted by Messrs. Nimmo and Bain in four volumes in 1883â (p.
170). But why is the reader not warned that the eaux fortes are by Lalauze (see suprïżœ, p. 326), 19 in number, and taken from the 21 illustrations in MM.
Jouaustâs edit. of Galland with preface by J. Janin? Why also did the critic not inform us that Scottâs sixth volume, the only original part of the work, was wilfully omitted? This paragraph ends with mentioning the labours of Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, concerning whom we are afterwards told (p. 186) for the first time that he âwas brilliant and laborious.â Hard-working, yes!
brilliant, by no means!
We now come to the glorification of the âUncle and Master,â concerning whom I can only say that Laneâs bitterest enemy (if the amiable Orientalist ever had any unfriend) could not have done him more discredit than this foolish friend.
âHis classical(!) translation was at once recognised as an altogether new departureâ (p. 171), and âit was written in such a manner that the Oriental tone of The Nights should be reflected in the Englishâ (ibid.). âIt aims at reproducing in some degree the literary flavour of the originalâ (p 173). âThe style of Laneâs translation is an old-fashioned somewhat Biblical languageâ
(p. 173) and âit is precisely this antiquated ringâ (of the imperfect and mutilated âBoulak edition,â unwisely preferred by the translator) âthat Lane has succeeded in preservingâ âThe measured and finished language Lane chose for his version is eminently fitted to
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