Chapter VII. 29th October 1854—9th February, 1855 To Harar
Bibliography: 13. Pilgrimage to Al-Madimah and Meccah. 3 vols. 1855-1856.
29. At Aden. The Arabian Nights. Oct. 1854.
It was while staying at Bombay as Mr. Lumsden's guest that Burton, already cloyed with civilization, conceived the idea of journeying, via Zeila in Somaliland, to the forbidden and therefore almost unknown city of Harar, and thence to Zanzibar. His application to the Bombay Government for permission and assistance having been received favourably, he at once set out for Aden, where he stayed with his "old and dear friend," Dr. John Steinhauser, who had been appointed civil surgeon there. Steinhauser, a stolid man, whose face might have been carved out of wood, was, like Burton, an enthusiastic student of The Arabian Nights, and their conversation naturally drifted into this subject. Both came to the conclusion that while the name of this wondrous repertory of Moslem folk-lore was familiar to almost every English child, no general reader could form any idea of its treasures. Moreover, that the door would not open to any but Arabists. But even at the present day, and notwithstanding the editions of Payne and Burton, there are still persons who imagine that The Arabian Nights is simply a book for the nursery. Familiar only with some inferior rendering, they are absolutely ignorant of the wealth of wisdom, humour, pathos and poetry to be found in its pages. [141] Writing in 1856, Burton says: "The most familiar book in England, next to the Bible, it is one of the least known, the reason being that about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation, and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to render more than three-quarters of the remainder, [142] consequently the reader loses the contrast—the very essence of the book—between its brilliancy and dulness, its moral putrefaction and such pearls as:
'Cast the seed of good works on the least fit soil;
Good is never wasted, however it may be laid out.'
And in a page or two after such divine sentiment, the ladies of Baghdad sit in the porter's lay, and indulge in a facetiousness which would have killed Pietro Aretino before his time." [143] When the work entitled A Thousand Nights and a Night was commenced, no man knows. There were Eastern collections with that title four centuries ago, laboured by the bronzed fingers of Arab scribes; but the framework and some of the tales must have existed prior even to the Moslem conquest. It has been noticed that there are resemblances between the story of Shahryar and that of Ahasuerus as recorded in Esther. In both narratives the King is offended with his Queen and chooses a new wife daily. Shahryar has recourse to the scimitar, Ahasuerus consigns wife after wife to the seclusion of his harem. Shahryar finds a model consort in Shahrazad, Ahasuerus in Esther. Each queen saves a multitude from death, each king lies awake half the night listening to stories. [144] While many of the stories in The Arabian Nights are ancient, some, as internal evidence proves, are comparatively recent. Thus those of Kamar-al-Zaman II. and Ma'aruf the Cobbler belong to the 16th century; and no manuscript appears to be older than 1548. The most important editions are the Calcutta, the Boulac [145] and the Breslau, all of which differ both in text and the order of the stories. The Nights were first introduced into Europe by Antoine Galland, whose French translation appeared between 1704 and 1717. Of the Nights proper, Galland presented the public with about a quarter, and he added ten tales [146] from other Eastern manuscripts. An anonymous English edition appeared within a few years. The edition published in 1811 by Jonathan Scott is Galland with omissions and additions, the new tales being from the Wortley Montague MS. now in the Bodleian. In 1838, Henry Torrens began a translation direct from the Arabic, of which, however, he completed only one volume, and in 1838-40 appeared the translation direct from the Arabic, of which, however, he completed only one volume, and in 1838-40 appeared the translation of Edward William Lane, [147] made direct from the Boulac edition. This work, which contains about one third of the entire Arabian Nights, was a great step forward, but unfortunately, Lane, who afterwards became an excellent Arabic scholar, was but a poor writer, and having no gift of verse, he rendered the poetical portions, that is to say, some ten thousand lines "in the baldest and most prosaic of English." [148]
So Burton and Steinhauser said to themselves, As the public have never had more than one-third of the Nights, and that translated indifferently, we will see what we can do. "We agreed," says Burton, "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." [149] They told each other that, having completed their task, they would look out for a retreat as a preparation for senility, some country cottage, perhaps, in the South of France, where, remote from books, papers, pens, ink and telegrams, they could spend their nights in bed and their days in hammocks. Beyond planning the translation, however, nothing was done. Steinhauser died fourteen years later (1866), and whatever notes he made were dispersed, while Burton, even as late as 1883, had done nothing beyond making a syllabus of the Boulac edition. [150] Still, the scheme was never for very long absent from his thoughts, and during his wanderings in Somaliland, the Tanganyika country and elsewhere, he often delighted the natives by reciting or reading some of the tales. The history of Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights is, as we shall subsequently show, curiously analogous to that of The Kasidah.