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

shy or silent, and it must be remembered that the separation of the sexes adds considerably to this freedom of expression. Their language is material in quality, every root is objective; as an instance, for the word soul they have no more spiritual equivalent than breath. Even the conversation between parents and children is of incredible frankness, and the Wazir of Egypt talks to his daughter “the Lady of Beauty,” in a fashion astonishing to the West. But the Arabs are a great mixture. They are keenly alive to beauty, and every youth and every damsel is described in glowing, rapturous terms. We have heard in our own country, so far north as chilly Scotland, of a whole audience standing up in a theatre to applaud the entrance and acknowledge the charms of a beautiful woman. In the East they are far more readily subjugated, and the event is of everyday occurrence, and not a wonder.

“When the people of Damascus saw Ajib’s beauty and brilliancy and perfect grace and symmetry (for he was a marvel of comeliness and winning loveliness, softer than the cool breeze of the North, sweeter than limpid waters to man in drouth, and pleasanter than the health for which sick man sueth), a mighty many followed him, whilst others ran on before and sat down on the road until he should come up, that they might gaze on him.” The Arabs are highly imaginative, and their world is peopled with supernatural beings, whilst Ovid is surpassed in the number and ingenuity of their metamorphoses. Their nerves are highly strung, they are emotional to the hysteric degree, and they do everything in the superlative fashion. They love at first sight, and one glimpse of a face is enough to set them in flames; they cease to sleep or to eat until they are admitted to the adored presence, they weep till they faint, they rend their garments, pluck their beards, buffet their faces, and after paroxysms of passion they recover sufficiently to recite verses—“and he beat his face and head and recited these couplets”—“then she recited, weeping bitterly the while”—“When the young man heard these words he wept with sore weeping, till his bosom was drenched with tears and began reciting.” All this effervescence, so different to our rigid repression, all this exuberance of feeling is the gift of a hot climate. And, besides this easy stirring of their passions, they always live in supreme consciousness that every impulse, every act is decreed, that they drift without will of their own, and are the helpless creatures of destiny. Half their talk consists of invocations to Allah, the All-ruling, All-gracious Allah! This fatalistic element is a leading feature in the Nights. All that happens is accepted with submission, and with the conviction that nothing can be averted. The Wazir’s eye is knocked out, “as fate and fortune decreed,” the one pomegranate seed escapes destruction, and the Princess dies in consequence; the beautiful lad secreted in a cave under the earth to keep him from harm, because it is foretold by the astrologers that he will die on a certain day, meets with his death at the appointed hour despite all precautions. This is one of the myriad instances, says Captain Burton, showing “that the decrees of Anagk�, Fate, Destiny, Weird are inevitable.” And yet, in the face of overwhelming evidence that Moslems in all things bow to the stroke of destiny, it is singular to note that a Turkish scholar like Mr. Redhouse, translator of the “Mesnevi,” fails to realise this most characteristic trait of Mahometan belief, and confuses it with the Christian idea of Providence and Premonition. The folk in Arabian tales, as might be expected, meet calamity in the shape of death with fortitude. The end of life is not a terror acutely feared as with us. They die easily, and when the time comes they give up the ghost without repining, although the mourning by survivors is often loud and vehement, and sometimes desperately prolonged.

This facility in dying is partly due to their fatalistic philosophy, and partly it is the effect of climate. It is in rugged climes that death is appalling, and comes as the King of Terrors, but the hotter the country the easier it is to enter the Door of Darkness. All these things which make the difference between Orientals and ourselves must be taken into account by readers of Arabian story, and the coarseness, as Captain Burton shows, is but the shade of a picture which otherwise would be all light;” the general tone of the Nights “is exceptionally high and pure, and the devotional fervour often rises to boiling point.” We have shown how Captain Burton has rendered the prose of the Nights, how vigorous, yet simple, is the language, how pleasant is his use of antique phrase, serving as it often does to soften the crudity of Oriental expression. In translating the poetry, which finally will amount to nearly 10,000 lines, he has again started on a path of his own. He has closely preserved the Arab form, although, as he says, an absolutely exact copy of Arabic metres is an impossibility.

 

A striking novelty in Captain Burton’s translation is the frequent occurrence of passages in cadenced prose, called in Arabic “Saj’a,” or the cooing of a dove. These melodious fragments have a charming effect on the ear. They come as dulcet-surprises, and mostly occur in highly-wrought situations, or they are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in art or nature. We give one or two instances of these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose. Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really is due to profound study of the situation, as if the tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain. The prose ripples and rises to dancing measure when the King of the Age, wandering in a lonely palace, comes upon the half-petrified youth, “the Ensorcelled Prince.”

 

“Now when the Sultan heard the mournful voice he sprang to his feet, and following the sound found a curtain let down over the chamber door. He raised it and saw behind it a young man sitting upon a couch about a cubic above the ground: he fair to the sight, a well-shaped wight, with eloquence dight, his forehead was flower-white, his cheek rosy bright, and a mole on his cheek breadth like an ambergris mite.”

 

It is broken again to bring into fuller notice the perfections of one of the three merry ladies of Baghdad, sitting under a silken canopy, the curtains “looped up with pearls as big as filberts and bigger.” We are told to note how eastern are the metaphors, how confused the flattery.

 

“Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow-beaming brilliancy, and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery, and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see. Her stature was straight as the letter I (the letter Alif a straight perpendicular stroke), and her face shamed the noon sun’s radiancy; and she was even as a galaxy or a dome with golden marquetry, or a bride displayed on choicest finery, or a noble maid of Araby.”

 

And prose is not thought adequate to do justice to the natural beauty of a garden “like one of the pleasaunces of Paradise.”

 

“It was a garden with trees of freshest green and ripe fruits of yellow sheen; and its birds were singing clear and keen, and rills ran wimpling through the fair terrene.”

 

It is a marvel that these cadences have never been reproduced before. They have been faintly attempted by Eastwick, in his “Gulistan,” whilst Mr. Payne simply passed them over, rejected them as of no account. They fall in with Captain Burton’s plan of omitting nothing; of giving the Nights intact in the precise form in which they are enjoyed by the Oriental. Beside the verses so characteristic of exaggerated Arabic sentiment, and the rhymed cadences, let like precious stones into the gold of the prose, the proverbs embodying the proverbial wit and wisdom are all rhymed as in the original Arabic. What Arabists think of this translation we may learn from a professed Arabist writing to this effect:—“I am free to confess, after many years study of Arabic, a comparison of your translation with the text has taught me more than many months of dry study,” whilst Englishmen who for years have lived in the East are making the discovery that, after all, they have known little or nothing, and their education is only beginning with this version of the Arabian Nights. It is only knowledge that knows how to observe; and it is satisfactory to observe that Captain Burton’s amazing insight into Eastern peculiarities has been put to its best use in giving a true idea of the People of the Sun and a veritable version of their Book of Books. The labour expended on this edition has been enormous. The work could only have been completed by the most excessive and pertinatious application. All the same we are told it has been “a labour of love,” a task that has brought its own exceeding great reward.

 

Arabian Nights, Volume 16

Footnotes

 

[FN#1] Tome xii. is dated 1789, the other three, 1788, to include them in the “Cabinet.”

 

[FN#2] The titles of all the vols. are dated alike, 1793, the actual date of printing.

 

[FN#3] This name is not in the Arabic text, and I have vainly puzzled my brains about its derivation or meaning.

 

[FN#4] This P.N. is, I presume, a corruption of “Shawal�n”=one falling short. The wife “Oitba” is evidently “Otb�” or “Utb�.”

 

[FN#5] See my Supplemental volume i. pp. 37-116, “The Ten Wazirs; or, the History of King Az�dbakht and his Son.”

 

[FN#6] MS. pp. 140-182. Gauttier, vol. ii., pp. 313-353, Histoire du sage Heycar translated by M. Agoub: Weber, “History of Sinkarib and his two Viziers” (vol. ii. 53): the “Vizier” is therein called Hicar.

 

[FN#7] This form of the P.N. is preferred by Prof. R. Hoerning in his “Prisma des Sanherib,” etc. Leipsic, 1878. The etymology is “Sin akhi-irib”=Sini (Lunus, or the Moon-God) increaseth brethren. The canon of Ptolemy fixes his accession at B.C. 702, the first year of Elibus or Belibus. For his victories over Babylonia, Palestine, Judea, and Egypt see any “Dictionary of the Bible,” and Byron for the marvellous and puerile legend—

 

The Assyrian came down as a wolf on the fold, which made him lose in one night 185,000 men, smitten by the “Angel of the Lord” (2 Kings xix. 35). Seated upon his throne before Lachish he is represented by a bas-relief as a truly noble and kingly figure.

 

[FN#8] I presume that the author hereby means a “fool,” Pers.

n�d�n. But in Assyrian story Nadan was=Nathan, King of the people of Pukudu, the Pekod of Jeremiah (i. 21) and other prophets.

 

[FN#9] In text always “At�r,” the scriptural “Asshur”=Assyria, biblically derived from Asshur, son of Shem (Gen. x. 22), who was worshipped as the proto-deity. The capital was Niniveh. Weber has “Nineveh and Thor,” showing the spelling of his MS.

According to the Arabs, “Ashur” had four sons; Iran (father of the Furs=Persians, the Kurd, or Ghozzi, the Daylams, and the Khazar), Nab�t, Jarm�k, and Bas�l. Ibn Khaldun (iii. 413), in his “Universal History,” opposes this opinion of Ibn Sa’id.

 

[FN#10] i.e. “Fish-town” or “town of Nin” =Ninus, the founder. In mod. days “Naynawah” was the name of a port on the east bank of the Tigris; and moderns have unearthed the old city at Koyunjik, Nabi Yunas, and the Tall (mound of) Nimrud.

 

[FN#11] The surroundings suggest Jehovah, the tribal deity of the Jews. The old version says, “Hicar was a native of the country of Haram