The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 16, Sir Richard Francis Burton [novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

represent the rhythmical tongue of the Arab” (Memoir, p. xxvii.). “The translation itself is distinguished by its singular accuracy and by the marvellous way in which the Oriental tone and colour are retained ” (ibid.). The writer has taken scant trouble to read me when he asserts that the Bulak edit was my text, and I may refer him, for his own advantage, to my Foreword (vol. i. p. xvii.), which he has wilfully ignored by stating unfact. I hasten to plead guilty before the charge of “really misunderstanding the design of Lane’s style” (p. 173). Much must be pardoned to the panegyrist, the encomiast; but the idea of mentioning in the same sentence with Biblical English, the noblest and most perfect specimen of our prose, the stiff and bald, the vapid and turgid manner of the Orientalist who “commences” and “concludes”—never begins and ends, who never uses a short word if he can find a long word, who systematically rejects terse and idiomatic Anglo-Saxon when a Latinism is to be employed and whose pompous stilted periods are the very triumph of the “Deadly-lively”! By arts precisely similar the learned George Sale made the Koran, that pure and unstudied inspiration of Arabian eloquence, dull as a law document, and left the field clear for the Rev. Mr. Rodwell. I attempted to excuse the style-laches of Lane by noticing the lack of study in English linguistic which distinguished the latter part of the xviiith and the first half of the xixth centuries, when men disdaining the grammar of their own tongue, learned it from Latin and Greek; when not a few styled Shakespeare “silly-billy,” and when Lamb the essayist, wrote, “I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.” But the reviewer will have none of my palliative process, he is surprised at my “posing as a judge of prose style,” being “acquainted with my quaint perversions of the English language” (p. 173) and, when combating my sweeping assertion that “our prose” (especially the prose of schoolmasters and professors, of savans and Orientalists) “was perhaps the worst in Europe,” he triumphantly quotes half a dozen great exceptions whose eminence goes far to prove the rule.

 

As regards Lane’s unjustifiable excisions the candid writer tells us everything but the truth. As I have before noted (vol. ix. 304), the main reason was simply that the publisher, who was by no means a business man, found the work outgrowing his limits and insisted upon its coming to an untimely and, alas! a tailless end. This is perhaps the principal cause for ignoring the longer histories, like King Omar bin al-Nu’um�n (occupying 371

pages in my vols. ii. and iii.); Ab� Hasan and his slave-girl Tawaddud (pp.

56, vol. v. 189-245), the Queen of the Serpents with the episodes of Bulukiy�

and of J�nshah (pp.98, vol. v. 298-396); The Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and the Adventures of Mercury Ali (pp. 55, vol. vii. 144-209). The Tale of Harun al-Rashid and Abu Hasan of Oman (pp. 19, vol. ix. 188-207) is certainly not omitted by dictations of delicacy, nor is it true of the parts omitted in general that “none could be purified without being destroyed.” As my French friend remarks, “Few parts are so plain-spoken as the introduction, le cadre de l’ouvrage, yet M. Lane was not deterred by such situation.” And lastly we have, amongst the uncalledfor excisions, King Jali’ad of Hind, etc. (pp. 102, vol. ix. 32-134). The sum represents a grand total of 701 pages, while not a few of the notes are filled with unimportant fabliaux and apologues.

 

But the critic has been grandly deceptive, either designedly or of ignorance prepense in his arithmetic. “There are over four hundred of these (anecdotes, fables, and stories) in the complete text, and Lane has not translated more than two hundred” (p. 172). * “Adding the omitted anecdotes to the omitted tales, it appears that Lane left out about a third of the whore ‘Nights,’ and of that third at least three-fourths was incompatible with a popular edition.

When Mr. Payne and Captain Burton boast of presenting the public ‘with three times as much matter as any other version,’ they perhaps mean a third as much again” (p. 173). * “Captain Burton records his opinion that Lane has ‘omitted half and by far the more characteristic half of the Arabian Nights,’

but Captain Burton has a talent for exaggeration, and for ‘characteristic’ we should reed ‘unclear.’ It is natural that he should make the most of such omissions, since they form the raison d’�tre of his own translation; but he has widely overshot the mark, and the public may rest assured that the tales omitted from the standard version (proh pudor!) are of very slight importance in comparison with the tales included in it” (p. 173).

 

What a mass of false statement!

 

Let us now exchange fiction for fact. Lane’s three volumes contain a total, deducting 15 for index, of pp. 1995 (viz. 618 + 643 + 734); while each (full) page of text averages 38 lines and of notes (in smaller type) 48. The text with a number of illustrations represents a total of pp. 1485 (viz. 441 + 449

+ 595). Mr. Payne’s nine volumes contain a sum of pp. 3057, mostly without breaks, to the 1485 of the “Standard edition.” In my version the sum of pages, each numbering 41 lines, is 3156, or 1163 more than Lane’s total and 2671 more than his text.

 

Again, in Lane’s text the tales number 62 (viz. 35 + 14 + 13), and as has been stated, all the longest have been omitted, save only Sindbad the Seaman. The anecdotes in the notes amount to 44 1/2 (viz. 3 1/2 + 35 + 6): these are for the most pert the merest outlines and include the 3 1/2 of volume i. viz. the Tale of Ibrahim al-Mausil� (pp. 223-24), the Tale of Caliph Mu’�wiyah (i. pp.

521-22), the Tale of Mukh�rik the Musician (i. pp. 224-26), and the half tale of Umm ‘Amr (i. p. 522). They are quoted bodily from the “Halbat al-Kumayt”

and from the “Kit�b al-Unw�n f� Mak�id al-Nisw�n,” showing that at the early stage of his labours the translator, who published in parts, had not read the book on which he was working; or, at least, had not learned that all the three and a half had been borrowed from The Nights. Thus the grand total is represented by 106 1/2 tales, and the reader will note the difference between 106 1/2 and the diligent and accurate reviewer’s “not much more than two hundred.” In my version the primary tales amount to 171; the secondaries, &c., to 96 and the total to 267, while Mr. Payne has 266.[FN#449] And these the critic swells to “over four hundred!” Thus I have more than double the number of pages in Lane’s text (allowing the difference between his 38 lines to an oft-broken page and my 41) and nearly two and a half tales to his one, and therefore I do not mean “a third as much again.”

 

Thus, too, we can deal with the dishonest assertions concerning Lane’s translation “not being absolutely complete” (p. 171) and that “nobody desired to see the objectionable passages which constituted the bulk of Lane’s omissions restored to their place in the text” (p. 175).

 

The critic now passes to The Uncle’s competence for the task, which he grossly exaggerates. Mr. Lane had no “intimate acquaintance with Mahommedan life” (p.

174). His “Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians” should have been entitled “Modern Cairenes;” he had seen nothing of Nile-land save what was shown to him by a trip to Phil� in his first visit (1825-28) and another to Thebes during his second, he was profoundly ignorant of Egypt as a whole, and even in Cairo he knew nothing of woman-life and child-life—two thirds of humanity. I doubt if he could have understood the simplest expression in baby language; not to mention the many idioms peculiar to the Harem nursery. The characteristic of his work is geniality combined with a true affection for his subject, but no scholar can ignore its painful superficiality. His studies of legal theology gave him much weight with the Olema, although, at the time when he translated The Nights, his knowledge of Arabic was small. Hence the number of lapses which disfigures his pages. These would have been excusable in an Orientalist working out of Egypt, but Lane had a Shaykh ever at his elbow and he was always able to command the assistance of the University Mosque, Al-Azhar. I need not enter upon the invidious task of cataloguing these errors, especially as the most glaring have been cursorily noticed in my volumes. Mr. Lane after leaving Egypt became one of the best Arabic scholars of his day, but his fortune did not equal his deserts. The Lexicon is a fine work although sadly deficient in the critical sense, but after the labour of thirty-four years (it began printing in 1863) it reached only the 19th letter Ghayn (p. 2386). Then invidious Fate threw it into the hands of Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole. With characteristic audacity he disdained to seek the services of some German Professor, an order of men which, rarely dining out and caring little for “Society,” can devote itself entirely to letters, perhaps he hearkened to the silly charge against the Teuton of minuteness and futility of research as opposed to “good old English breadth and suggestiveness of treatment.” And the consequence has been a “continuation” which serves as a standard whereby to measure the excellence of the original work and the woful falling-off and deficiencies of the sequel— the latter retaining of the former naught save the covers. [FN#450]

 

Of Mr. Lane’s Notes I have ever spoken highly: they are excellent and marvellously misplaced—non erat his locus. The text of a story-book is too frail to bear so ponderous a burden of classical Arabian lore, and the annotations injure the symmetry of the book as a work of art. They begin with excessive prolixity: in the Introduction these studies fill 27 closely printed pages to 14 of a text broken by cuts and vignettes. In chaps. i. the proportion is pp. 20, notes: 15 text, and in chaps. ii. it is pp. 20: 35. Then they become under the publisher’s protest, beautifully less; and in vol. iii.

chaps. 30 (the last) they are pp. 5: 57. Long disquisitions, “On the initial Moslem formula,” “On the Wickedness of Women,” “On Fate and Destiny,” “On Arabian Cosmogony,” “On Slaves,” “On Magic,” “On the Two Grand Festivals,” all these being appended to the Introduction and the first chapter, are mere hors d’oeuvres: such “copy” should have been reserved for another edition of “The Modern Egyptians.” The substitution of chapters for Nights was perverse and ill-judged as it could be, but it appears venial compared with condensing the tales in a commentary, thus converting the Arabian Nights into Arabian Notes.

However, “Arabian Society in the Middle Ages,” a legacy left by the “Uncle and Master”, and like the tame and inadequate “Selections from the Koran,”

utilised by the grand-nephew, has been of service to the Edinburgh. Also, as it appears three several and distinct times in one article (pp. 166, 174, and 183), we cannot but surmise that a main object of the critique was to advertise the volume. Men are crafty in these days when practicing the “puff indirect.”

 

But the just complaint against Lane’s work is its sin of omission. The partial Reviewer declares (pp. 174 75) that the Arabist “retranslated The Nights in a practical spirit, omitting what was objectionable, together with a few tales(!) that were, on the whole, uninteresting or tautological,