The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1

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THE BOOK OF THE
THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT
A Plain and Literal Translation
of the Arabian Nights Entertainments

Translated and Annotated by
Richard F. Burton

VOLUME ONE

Inscribed to the Memory
of
My Lamented Friend
John Frederick Steinhaeuser,
(Civil Surgeon, Aden)
who
A Quarter of a Century Ago
Assisted Me in this Translation.

"To the pure all things are pure" (Puris omnia pura)
- Arab Proverb.

"Niuna corrotta mente intese mai sanamente parole."
- "Decameron" - conclusion.

"Erubuit, posuitque meum Lucretia librum Sed coram Bruto. Brute!
reced, leget.
- Martial.

"Miculx est de ris que de larmes escripre, Pour ce que rire est
le propre des hommes."
- Rabelais.

"The pleasure we derive from perusing the Thousand and One
Stories makes us regret that we possess only a comparatively
small part of these truly enchanting fictions."
- Crichton's "History of Arabia."

Contents of the First Volume

Introduction
Story Of King Shahryar and His Brother
a. Tale of the Bull and the Ass
1. Tale of the Trader and the Jinni
a. The First Shaykh's Story
b. The Second Shaykh's Story
c. The Third Shaykh's Story
2. The Fisherman and the Jinni
a. Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban
ab. Story of King Sindibad and His Falcon
ac. Tale of the Husband and the Parrot
ad. Tale of the Prince and the Ogress
b. Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince
3. The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad
a. The First Kalandar's Tale
b. The Second Kalandar's Tale
ba. Tale of the Envier and the Envied
c. The Third Kalandar's Tale
d. The Eldest Lady's Tale
e. Tale of the Portress
Conclusion of the Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies
4. Tale of the Three Apples
5. Tale of Nur Al-din Ali and his Son
6. The Hunchback's Tale
a. The Nazarene Broker's Story
b. The Reeve's Tale
c. Tale of the Jewish Doctor
d. Tale of the Tailor
e. The Barber's Tale of Himself
ea. The Barber's Tale of his First Brother
eb. The Barber's Tale of his Second Brother
ec. The Barber's Tale of his Third Brother
ed. The Barber's Tale of his Fourth Brother
ee. The Barber's Tale of his Fifth Brother
ef. The Barber's Tale of his Sixth Brother
The End of the Tailor's Tale

The Translator's Foreword.

This work, labourious as it may appear, has been to me a labour
of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During
my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly
deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half
clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman
against ennui and despondency. Impossible even to open the pages
without a vision starting into view; with out drawing a picture
from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of
memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of
travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull
and commonplace and "respectable" surroundings, the Jinn bore me
at once to the land of my pre-direction, Arabia, a region so
familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a
reminiscence of some by gone metem-psychic life in the distant
Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious
as aether, whose every breath raises men's spirits like sparkling
wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire
from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after glow
transfiguring and transforming, as by magic, the homely and
rugged features of the scene into a fairy land lit with a light
which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the
woollen tents, low and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in
the boundless waste of lion tawny clays and gazelle brown
gravels, and the camp fire dotting like a glow worm the village
centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild
weird song of lads and lasses, driving or rather pelting, through
the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the
spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels;
mingled with bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the
humpy herds; while the reremouse flitted overhead with his tiny
shriek, and the rave of the jackal resounded through deepening
glooms, and--most musical of music--the palm trees answered the
whispers of the night breeze with the softest tones of falling
water.

And then a shift of scene. The Shaykhs and "white beards" of the
tribe gravely take their places, sitting with outspread skirts
like hillocks on the plain, as the Arabs say, around the camp
fire, whilst I reward their hospitality and secure its
continuance by reading or reciting a few pages of their favourite
tales. The women and children stand motionless as silhouettes
outside the ring; and all are breathless with attention; they
seem to drink in the words with eyes and mouths as well as with
ears. The most fantastic flights of fancy, the wildest
improbabilities, the most impossible of impossibilities, appear
to them utterly natural, mere matters of every day occurrence.
They enter thoroughly into each phase of feeling touched upon by
the author: they take a personal pride in the chivalrous nature
and knightly prowess of Taj al-Muluk; they are touched with
tenderness by the self sacrificing love of Azizah; their mouths
water as they hear of heaps of untold gold given away in largesse
like clay; they chuckle with delight every time a Kazi or a
Fakir--a judge or a reverend--is scurvily entreated by some
Pantagruelist of the Wilderness; and, despite their normal
solemnity and impassibility, all roar with laughter, sometimes
rolling upon the ground till the reader's gravity is sorely
tried, at the tales of the garrulous Barber and of Ali and the
Kurdish Sharper. To this magnetising mood the sole exception is
when a Badawi of superior accomplishments, who sometimes says his
prayers, ejaculates a startling "Astagh-faru'llah"--I pray
Allah's pardon!--for listening, not to Carlyle's "downright
lies," but to light mention of the sex whose name is never heard
amongst the nobility of the Desert.

Nor was it only in Arabia that the immortal Nights did me such
notable service: I found the wildlings of Somali land equally
amenable to its discipline; no one was deaf to the charm and the
two women cooks of my caravan, on its way to Harar, were in
continently dubbed by my men "Shahrazad" and "Dinazad."

It may be permitted me also to note that this translation is a
natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah.
Arriving at Aden in the (so called) winter of 1852, I put up with
my old and dear friend, Steinhaeuser, to whose memory this volume
is inscribed; and, when talking over Arabia and the Arabs, we at
once came to the same conclusion that, while the name of this
wondrous treasury of Moslem folk lore is familiar to almost every
English child, no general reader is aware of the valuables it
contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists.
Before parting we agreed to "collaborate" and produce a full,
complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original, my
friend taking the prose and I the metrical part; and we
corresponded upon the subject for years. But whilst I was in the
Brazil, Steinhaeuser died suddenly of apoplexy at Berne in
Switzerland and, after the fashion of Anglo India, his valuable
MSS. left at Aden were dispersed, and very little of his labours
came into my hands.

Thus I was left alone to my work, which progressed fitfully amid
a host of obstructions. At length, in the spring of 1879, the
tedious process of copying began and the book commenced to take
finished form. But, during the winter of 1881-82, I saw in the
literary journals a notice of a new version by Mr. John Payne,
well known to scholars for his prowess in English verse,
especially for his translation of "The Poems of Master Francis
Villon, of Paris." Being then engaged on an expedition to the
Gold Coast (for gold), which seemed likely to cover some months,
I wrote to the "Athenaeum" (Nov. 13, 1881) and to Mr. Payne, who
was wholly unconscious that we were engaged on the same work, and
freely offered him precedence and possession of the field till no
longer wanted. He accepted my offer as frankly, and his priority
entailed another delay lasting till the spring of 1885. These
details will partly account for the lateness of my appearing, but
there is yet another cause. Professional ambition suggested that
literary labours, unpopular with the vulgar and the half
educated, are not likely to help a man up the ladder of
promotion. But common sense presently suggested to me that,
professionally speaking, I was not a success, and, at the same
time, that I had no cause to be ashamed of my failure. In our
day, when we live under a despotism of the lower "middle class"
Philister who can pardon anything but superiority, the prizes of
competitive services are monopolized by certain "pets" of the
Mediocratie, and prime favourites of that jealous and potent
majority--the Mediocnties who know "no nonsense about merit." It
is hard for an outsider to realise how perfect is the monopoly of
common place, and to comprehend how fatal a stumbling stone that
man sets in the way of his own advancement who dares to think for
himself, or who knows more or who does more than the mob of
gentlemen employee who know very little and who do even less.

Yet, however behindhand I may be, there is still ample room and
verge for an English version of the "Arabian Nights'
Entertainments."

Our century of translations, popular and vernacular, from
(Professor Antoine) Galland's delightful abbreviation and
adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern
original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is
diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re-
correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and
all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and
ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a
nice present for little boys.

After nearly a century had elapsed, Dr. Jonathan Scott (LL.D.
H.E.I.C.'s S., Persian Secretary to the G. G. Bengal; Oriental
Professor, etc., etc.), printed his "Tales, Anecdotes, and
Letters, translated from the Arabic and Persian," (Cadell and
Davies, London, A.D. 1800); and followed in 1811 with an edition
of "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments" from the MS. of Edward
Wortley Montague (in 6 vols., small 8vo, London: Longmans, etc.).
This work he (and he only) describes as "Carefully revised and
occasionally corrected from the Arabic." The reading public did
not wholly reject it, sundry texts were founded upon the Scott
version and it has been imperfectly reprinted (4 vole., 8vo,
Nimmo and Bain, London, 1883). But most men, little recking what
a small portion of the original they were reading, satisfied
themselves with the Anglo French epitome and metaphrase. At
length in 1838, Mr. Henry Torrens, B.A., Irishman, lawyer ("of
the Inner Temple") and Bengal Civilian, took a step in the right
direction; and began to translate, "The Book of the Thousand
Nights and One Night," (1 vol., 8vo, Calcutta: W. Thacker and
Co.) from the Arabic of the AEgyptian (!) MS. edited by Mr.
(afterwards Sir)William H. Macnaghten. The attempt, or rather the
intention, was highly creditable; the copy was carefully moulded
upon the model and offered the best example of the verbatim et
literatim style. But the plucky author knew little of Arabic, and
least of what is most wanted, the dialect of Egypt and Syria. His
prose is so conscientious as to offer up spirit at the shrine of
letter; and his verse, always whimsical, has at times a manner of
Hibernian whoop which is comical when it should be pathetic.
Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed
would have contained nine or ten.

That amiable and devoted Arabist, the late Edward William Lane
does not score a success in his "New Translation of the Tales of
a Thousand and One Nights" (London: Charles Knight and Co.,
MDCCCXXXIX.) of which there have been four English editions,
besides American, two edited by E. S. Poole. He chose the
abbreviating Bulak Edition; and, of its two hundred tales, he has
omitted about half and by far the more characteristic half: the
work was intended for "the drawing room table;" and,
consequently, 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 had
small 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, I883), they are an ethnological text book.

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
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
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
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 Indians
or to their legislators; a singularity (?) pervading their
writings and conversation, but no proof of moral depravity."
Another justly observes, Les peuples primitifs n'y entendent pas
malice: ils appellent les choses par leurs noms et ne trouvent
pas condamnable ce qui est naturel. And they are prying as
children. For instance the European novelist marries off his hero
and heroine and leaves them to consummate marriage in privacy;
even Tom Jones has the decency to bolt the door. But the Eastern
story teller, especially this unknown "prose Shakespeare," must
usher you, with a flourish, into the bridal chamber and narrate
to you, with infinite gusto, everything he sees and hears. Again
we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les
turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in
England is not so in Egypt; what scandalises us now would have
been a tame joke tempore Elisoe. Withal The Nights will not be
found in this matter coarser than many passages of Shakespeare,
Sterne, and Swift, and their uncleanness rarely attains the
perfection of Alcofribas Naiser, "divin maitre et atroce cochon."
The other element is absolute obscenity, sometimes, but not
always, tempered by wit, humour and drollery; here we have an
exaggeration of Petronius Arbiter, the handiwork of writers whose
ancestry, the most religious and the most debauched of mankind,
practised every abomination before the shrine of the Canopic
Gods.

In accordance with my purpose of reproducing the Nights, not
virginibus puerisque, but in as perfect a picture as my powers
permit, I have carefully sought out the English equivalent of
every Arabic word, however low it may be or "shocking" to ears
polite; preserving, on the other hand, all possible delicacy
where the indecency is not intentional; and, as a friend advises
me to state, not exaggerating the vulgarities and the indecencies
which, indeed, can hardly be exaggerated. For the coarseness and
crassness are but the shades of a picture which would otherwise
be all lights. The general tone of The Nights is exceptionally
high and pure. The devotional fervour often rises to the boiling
point of fanaticism. The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine;
tender, simple and true, utterly unlike much of our modern
tinsel. Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is
everywhere flavoured with that unaffected pessimism and
constitutional melancholy which strike deepest root under the
brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven: --

Vita quid est hominis? Viridis floriscula mortis;
Sole Oriente oriens, sole cadente cadens.

Poetical justice is administered by the literary Kazi with
exemplary impartiality and severity; "denouncing evil doers and
eulogising deeds admirably achieved." The morale is sound and
healthy; and at times we descry, through the voluptuous and
libertine picture, vistas of a transcendental morality, the
morality of Socrates in Plato. Subtle corruption and covert
licentiousness are utterly absent; we find more real"vice" in
many a short French roman, say La Dame aux Camelias, and in not a
few English novels of our day than in the thousands of pages of
the Arab. Here we have nothing of that most immodest modern
modesty which sees covert implication where nothing is implied,
and "improper" allusion when propriety is not outraged; nor do we
meet with the Nineteenth Century refinement; innocence of the
word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart,
and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect
hypocrisy. It is, indeed, this unique contrast of a quaint
element, childish crudities and nursery indecencies and "vain and
amatorious" phrase jostling the finest and highest views of life
and character, shown in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the
marvellous picture with many a "rich truth in a tale's presence",
pointed by a rough dry humour which compares well with "wut; "the
alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of
the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the baldest prose
(the Egyptian of today); the contact of religion and morality
with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter--at
times taking away the reader's breath--and, finally, the whole
dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein
the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material
and the natural; it is this contrast, I say, which forms the
chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking
originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of the
medieval Moslem mind.

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