The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (essential reading TXT) 📖

“City of the Saints,” p. 136.

 

[FN#195] Lit. meaning smoke: hence the Arabic “Dukh�n,” with the same signification.

 

[FN#196] Unhappily the book is known only by name: for years I have vainly troubled friends and correspondents to hunt for a copy. Yet I am sanguine enough to think that some day we shall succeed: Mr. Sidney Churchill, of Teheran, is ever on the look-out.

 

[FN#197] In � 3 I shall suggest that this tale also is mentioned by Al-Mas’udi.

 

[FN#198] I have extracted it from many books, especially from Hoeffer’s Biographie G�n�rale, Paris, Firmin Didot, mdccclvii.; Biographie Universelle, Paris, Didot, 1816, etc. etc. All are taken from the work of M. de Boze, his “Bozzy.”

 

[FN#199] As learning a language is an affair of pure memory, almost without other exercise of the mental faculties, it should be assisted by the ear and the tongue as well as the eyes. I would invariably make pupils talk, during lessons, Latin and Greek, no matter how badly at first; but unfortunately I should have to begin with teaching the pedants who, as a class, are far more unwilling and unready to learn than are those they teach.

 

[FN#200] The late Dean Stanley was notably trapped by the wily Greek who had only political purposes in view. In religions as a rule the minimum of difference breeds the maximum of disputation, dislike and disgust.

 

[FN#201] See in Tr�butien (Avertissement iii.) how Baron von Hammer escaped drowning by the blessing of The Nights.

 

[FN#202] He signs his name to the Discours pour servir de Pr�face.

 

[FN#203] I need not trouble the reader with their titles, which fill up nearly a column and a half in M. Hoeffer. His collection of maxims from Arabic, Persian and Turkish authors appeared in English in 1695.

 

[FN#204] Galland’s version was published in 1704-1717 in 12 vols.

12mo., (Hoeffer’s Biographie; Grasse’s Tr�sor de Livres rares and Encyclop. Britannica, ixth Edit.)

 

[FN#205] See also Leigh Hunt “The Book of the Thousand Nights and one Night,” etc., etc. London and Westminster Review Art. iii., No. 1xiv. mentioned in Lane, iii., 746.

 

[FN#206] Edition of 1856 vol. xv.

 

[FN#207] To France England also owes her first translation of the Koran, a poor and mean version by Andrew Ross of that made from the Arabic (No. iv.) by Andr� du Reyer, Consul de France for Egypt. It kept the field till ousted in 1734 by the learned lawyer George Sale whose conscientious work, including Preliminary Discourse and Notes (4to London), brought him the ill-fame of having “turned Turk.”

 

[FN#208] Catalogue of Printed Books, 1884, p. 159, col. i. I am ashamed to state this default in the British Museum, concerning which Englishmen are apt to boast and which so carefully mulcts modern authors in unpaid copies. But it is only a slight specimen of the sad state of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Soci�t�

Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our “Institute” au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its skulls in the cellar!

 

[FN#209] Art. vii. pp. 139-168, “On the Arabian Nights and translators, Weil, Torrens and Lane (vol. i.) with the Essai of A. Loisseleur Deslongchamps.” The Foreign Quarterly Review, vol.

xxiv., Oct. 1839-Jan. 1840. London, Black and Armstrong, 1840.

 

[FN#210] Introduction to his Collection “Tales of the East,” 3

vols. Edinburgh, 1812. He was the first to point out the resemblance between the introductory adventures of Shahryar and Shah Zaman and those of Astolfo and Giacondo in the Orlando Furioso (Canto xxviii.). M. E. L�v�que in Les Mythes et les L�gendes de l’Inde et la Perse (Paris, 1880) gives French versions of the Arabian and Italian narratives, side by side in p. 543 ff. (Clouston).

 

[FN#211] Notiti� Codicis MI. Noctium. Dr. Pusey studied Arabic to familiarise himself with Hebrew, and was very different from his predecessor at Oxford in my day, who, when applied to for instruction in Arabic, refused to lecture except to a class.

 

[FN#212] This nephew was the author of “Recueil des Rits et C�r�monies des Pilgrimages de La Mecque,” etc. etc. Paris and Amsterdam, 1754, in 12mo.

 

[FN#213] The concluding part did not appear, I have said, till 1717: his “Comes et Fables Indiennes de Bidpa� et de Lokman,”

were first printed in 1724, 2 vols. in 12mo. Hence, I presume, Lowndes’ mistake.

 

[FN#214] M. Caussin (de Perceval), Professeur of Arabic at the Imperial Library, who edited Galland in 1806, tells us that he found there only two MSS., both imperfect. The first (Galland’s) is in three small vols. 4to. each of about pp. 140. The stories are more detailed and the style, more correct than that of other MS., is hardly intelligible to many Arabs, whence he presumes that it contains the original (an early?) text which has been altered and vitiated. The date is supposed to be circa A.D.

1600. The second Parisian copy is a single folio of some 800

pages, and is divided into 29 sections and cmv. Nights, the last two sections being reversed. The MS. is very imperfect, the 12th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 20th, 21st-23rd, 25th and 27th parts are wanting; the sections which follow the 17th contain sundry stories repeated, there are anecdotes from Bidpai, the Ten Wazirs and other popular works, and lacun� everywhere abound.

 

[FN#215] Mr. Payne (ix. 264) makes eleven, including the Histoire du Dormeur �veill� = The Sleeper and the Waker, which he afterwards translated from the Bresl. Edit. in his “Tales from the Arabic” (vol. i. 5, etc.)

 

[FN#216] Mr. E. J. W. Gibb informs me that he has come upon this tale in a Turkish storybook, the same from which he drew his “Jew�d.”

 

[FN#217] A litt�rateur lately assured me that Nos. ix. and x.

have been found in the Biblioth�que Nationale (du Roi) Paris; but two friends were kind enough to enquire and ascertained that it was a mistake. Such Persianisms as Codadad (Khudadad), Baba Cogia (Khw�jah) and Peri (fairy) suggest a Persic MS.

 

[FN#218] Vol. vi. 212. “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London: Longmans, 1811) by Jonathan Scott, with the Collection of New Tales from the Wortley Montagu MS. in the Bodleian.” I regret to see that Messieurs Nimmo in reprinting Scott have omitted his sixth Volume.

 

[FN#219] Dr. Scott who uses Fitnah (iv. 42) makes it worse by adding “Alcolom (Al-Kul�b?) signifying Ravisher of Hearts” and his names for the six slavegirls (vol. iv. 37) such as “Zohorob Bostan” (Zahr al-B�st�n), which Galland rightly renders by “Fleur du Jardin,” serve only to heap blunder upon blunder. Indeed the Anglo-French translations are below criticism: it would be waste of time to notice them. The characteristic is a servile suit paid to the original e.g. rendering hair “accomod� en boucles” by “hair festooned in buckles” (Night ccxiv.), and �le d’�b�ne (Jaz�rat al-Abn�s, Night xliii.) by “the Isle of Ebene.” A certain surly old litt�rateur tells me that he prefers these wretched versions to Mr. Payne’s. Padrone! as the Italians say: I cannot envy his taste or his temper.

 

[FN#220] De Sacy (M�moire p. 52) notes that in some MSS., the Sultan, ennuy� by the last tales of Shahr�zad, proposes to put her to death, when she produces her three children and all ends merrily without marriage-bells. Von Hammer prefers this version as the more dramatic, the Frenchman rejects it on account of the difficulties of the accouchements. Here he strains at the gnat—

a common process.

 

[FN#221] See Journ. Asiatique, iii. s�rie, vol. viii., Paris, 1839.

 

[FN#222] “Tausend und Eine Nacht: Arabische Erz�hlungen. Zum ersten mal aus einer Tunisischen Handschrift erg�nzt und vollstandig �bersetzt,” Von Max Habicht, F. H. von der Hagen und Karl Schatte (the offenders?).

 

[FN#223] Dr. Habicht informs us (Vorwort iii., vol. ix. 7) that he obtained his MS. with other valuable works from Tunis, through a personal acquaintance, a learned Arab, Herr M. Annagar (Mohammed Al-Najj�r?) and was aided by Baron de Sacy, Langl�s and other savants in filling up the lacun� by means of sundry MSS.

The editing was a prodigy of negligence: the corrigenda (of which brief lists are given) would fill a volume; and, as before noticed, the indices of the first four tomes were printed in the fifth, as if the necessity of a list of tales had just struck the dense editor. After Habicht’s death in 1839 his work was completed in four vols. (ix.-xii.) by the wellknown Prof. H. J.

Fleischer who had shown some tartness in his “Dissertatio Critica de Glossis Habichtianis.” He carefully imitated all the shortcomings of his predecessor and even omitted the Verzeichniss etc., the Varianten and the Glossary of Arabic words not found in Golius, which formed the only useful part of the first eight volumes.

 

[FN#224] Die in Tausend und Eine Nacht noch nicht �bersetzten N�chte, Erz�hlungen und Anekdoten, zum erstenmal aus dem Arabischen in das Franz�sische �bersetzt von J. von Hammer, und aus dem Franz�sischen in das Deutsche von A. E. Zinserling, Professor, Stuttgart und Tubingen, 1823. Drei Bde. 80 .

Tr�butien’s, therefore, is the translation of a translation of a translation.

 

[FN#225] Tausend und Eine Nacht Arabische Erz�hlungen. Zum erstenmale aus dem Urtexte vollst�ndig und treu uebersetze von Dr. Gustav Weil. He began his work on return from Egypt in 1836

and completed his first version of the Arabische Meisterwerk in 1838-42 (3 vols. roy. oct.). I have the Zweiter Abdruck der dritten (2d reprint of 3d) in 4 vols. 8vo., Stuttgart, 1872. It has more than a hundred woodcuts.

 

[FN#226] My learned friend Dr. Wilhelm Storck, to whose admirable translations of Camoens I have often borne witness, notes that this Vorhalle, or Porch to the first edition, a rhetorical introduction addressed to the general public, is held in Germany to be valueless and that it was noticed only for the Bemerkung concerning the offensive passages which Professor Weil had toned down in his translation. In the Vorwort of the succeeding editions (Stuttgart) it is wholly omitted.

 

[FN#227] The most popular are now “Mille ed una notte. Novelle Arabe.” Napoli, 1867, 8vo illustrated, 4 francs; and “Mille ed une notte. Novelle Arabe, versione italiana nuovamente emendata e corredata di note”; 4 vols. in 32 (dateless) Milano, 8vo, 4

francs.

 

[FN#228] These are; (l) by M. Caussin (de Perceval), Paris, 1806, 9 vols. 8vo. (2) Edouard Gauttier, Paris, 1822-24: 7 vols. 12mo; (3) M. Destain, Paris, 1823-25, 6 vols. 8vo, and (4) Baron de Sacy, Paris. 1838 (?) 3 vols. large 8vo, illustrated (and vilely illustrated).

 

[FN#229] The number of fables and anecdotes varies in the different texts, but may be assumed to be upwards of four hundred, about half of which were translated by Lane.

 

[FN#230] I have noticed these points more fully in the beginning of chapt. iii. “The Book of the Sword.”

 

[FN#231] A notable instance of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance. Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal used as a Kiblah or prayer-direction (Jerusalem or Meccah), the visible means of fixing and concentrating the thoughts of the vulgar, like the crystal of the hypnotist or the disk of the electro-biologist. And goddess Diana was in no way better than goddess Pasht. For the true view of idolatry see Koran xxxix. 4. I am deeply grateful to Mr. P. le Page Renouf (Soc. of Biblic. Arch�ology, April 6, 1886) for identifying the Manibogh, Michabo or Great Hare of the American indigenes with