The Life of Sir Richard Burton Part 29

Uneath to him to smell, who's To catarrh-troubled men flowers troubled with a rheum, Are lack their smell; flowers; the broker knows And brokers ken for how much what worth the garments be. clothes can sell;

So supplicate thy Lord right So haste and with thy Lord humbly for His grace And re-union sue, Providence, belike, shall And haply fate shall lend thee help thy constancy; aidance due.

And thou shalt win thy will and Rest from rejection and from estrangement's stress estrangement stress, And eke rejection's pains And joy thy wish and will shall shall be at rest and free. choicely bless.

The asylum of His grace is wide His court wide open for the enough for all That seek; The suer is dight:-- one true G.o.d, the One, very G.o.d, the Lord, th'

Conqueror, is He! Almighty might.

We may also compare the two renderings of that exquisite and tender little poem "Azizeh's Tomb" [462] which will be found in the "Tale of Aziz and Azizeh."

Payne Burton

I pa.s.sed by a ruined tomb in the I past by a broken tomb amid midst of a garden way, Upon a garth right sheen, Whereon whose letterless stone seven on seven blooms of Nu'aman blood-red anemones lay. glowed with cramoisie.

"Who sleeps in this unmarked Quoth I, "Who sleepeth in this grave?" I said, and the tomb?" Quoth answering earth, "Bend low; For a earth, "Before a lover lover lies here and waits for Hades-tombed bend reverently."

the Resurrection Day."

"G.o.d keep thee, O victim of Quoth I, "May Allah help thee, love!" I cried, "and bring O thou slain of love, And thee to dwell In the highest grant thee home in heaven of all the heavens of Paradise, and Paradise-height to see!

I pray!

"How wretched are lovers all, "Hapless are lovers all e'en even in the sepulchre, tombed in their tombs, For their very tombs are Where amid living folk the covered with ruin and decay! dust weighs heavily!

"Lo! if I might, I would plant "Fain would I plant a garden thee a garden round about, blooming round thy grave and with my streaming tears And water every flower with the thirst of its flowers tear-drops flowing allay!" free!" [463]

136. The Summing Up.

The reader will notice from these citations:

(1) That, as we have already said, and as Burton himself partly admitted, Burton's translation is largely a paraphrase of Payne's. This is particularly noticeable in the latter half of the Nights. He takes hundreds--nay thousands--of sentences and phrases from Payne, often without altering a single word. [464] If it be urged that Burton was quite capable of translating the Nights without drawing upon the work of another, we must say that we deeply regret that he allowed the opportunity to pa.s.s, for he had a certain rugged strength of style, as the best pa.s.sages in his Mecca and other books show. In order to ensure originality he ought to have translated every sentence before looking to see how Payne put it, but the temptation was too great for a very busy man--a man with a hundred irons in the fire--and he fell. [465]

(2) That, where there are differences, Payne's translation is invariably the clearer, finer and more stately of the two. Payne is concise, Burton diffuse. [466]

(3) That although Burton is occasionally happy and makes a pat couplet, like the one beginning "Kisras and Caesars," nevertheless Payne alone writes poetry, Burton's verse being quite unworthy of so honourable a name. Not being, like Payne, a poet and a lord of language; and, as he admits, in his notes, not being an initiate in the methods of Arabic Prosody, Burton shirked the isometrical rendering of the verse.

Consequently we find him constantly annexing Payne's poetry bodily, sometimes with acknowledgement, oftener without. Thus in Night 867 he takes half a page. Not only does he fail to reproduce agreeably the poetry of the Nights, but he shows himself incapable of properly appreciating it. Notice, for example, his remark on the lovely poem of the Fakir at the end of the story of "Abu Al-Hasan and Abu Ja'afer the Leper," the two versions of which we gave on a preceding page. Burton calls it "sad doggerel," and, as he translates it, so it is. But Payne's version, with its musical subtleties and choice phrases, such as "The thought of G.o.d to him his very housemate is," is a delight to the ear and an enchantment of the sense. Mr. Payne in his Terminal Essay singles out the original as one of the finest pieces of devotional verse in the Nights; and worthy of Vaughan or Christina Rossetti. The gigantic nature of Payne's achievement will be realised when we mention that The Arabian Nights contains the equivalent of some twenty thousand decasyllabic lines of poetry, that is to say more than there are in Milton's Paradise Lost, and that he has rendered faithfully the whole of this enormous ma.s.s in accordance with the intricate metrical scheme of the original, and in felicitous and beautiful language.

(4) That Burton, who was well read in the old English poets, also introduces beautiful words. This habit, however, is more noticeable in other pa.s.sages where we come upon cilice, [467] egromancy, [468]

verdurous, [469] vergier, [470] rondure, [471] purfled, [472] &c. Often he uses these words with excellent effect, as, for example, "egromancy,"

[473] in the sentence: "Nor will the egromancy be dispelled till he fall from the horse;" but unfortunately he is picturesque at all costs. Thus he constantly puts "purfled" where he means "embroidered" or "sown," and in the "Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni," he uses incorrectly the pretty word "cucurbit" [474] to express a bra.s.s pot; and many other instances might be quoted. His lapses, indeed, indicate that he had no real sense of the value of words. He uses them because they are pretty, forgetting that no word is attractive except in its proper place, just as colours in painting owe their value to their place in the general colour scheme. He took most of his beautiful words from our old writers, and a few like ensorcelled [475] from previous translators.

Unfortunately, too, he spoils his version by the introduction of antique words that are ugly, uncouth, indigestible and yet useless. What, for example, does the modern Englishman make of this, taken from the "Tale of the Wolf and the Fox," "Follow not frowardness, for the wise forbid it; and it were most manifest frowardness to leave me in this pit draining the agony of death and dight to look upon mine own doom, whereas it lieth in thy power to deliver me from my stowre?" [476] Or this: "O rare! an but swevens [477] prove true," from "Kamar-al-Zalam II." Or this "Sore pains to gar me dree," from "The Tale of King Omar,"

or scores of others that could easily be quoted. [478]

Burton, alas! was also unscrupulous enough to include one tale which, he admitted to Mr. Kirby, does not appear in any redaction of the Nights, namely that about the misfortune that happened to Abu Ha.s.san on his Wedding day. [479] "But," he added, "it is too good to be omitted." Of course the tale does not appear in Payne. To the treatment meted by each translator to the coa.r.s.enesses of the Nights we have already referred.

Payne, while omitting nothing, renders such pa.s.sages in literary language, whereas Burton speaks out with the bluntness and coa.r.s.eness of an Urquhart.

In his letter to Mr. Payne, 22nd October 1884, he says of Mr. Payne's translation, "The Nights are by no means literal but very readable which is the thing." He then refers to Mr. Payne's rendering of a certain pa.s.sage in the "Story of Sindbad and the Old Man of the Sea," by which it appears that the complaint of want of literality refers, as usual, solely to the presentable rendering of the offensive pa.s.sages. "I translate," he says **********. "People will look fierce, but ce n'est pas mon affaire." The great value of Burton's translation is that it is the work of a man who had travelled in all the countries in which the scenes are laid; who had spent years in India, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the Barbary States, and had visited Mecca; who was intimately acquainted with the manners and customs of the people of those countries, and who brought to bear upon his work the experience of a lifetime. He is so thoroughly at home all the while. Still, it is in his annotations and not in his text that he really excells. The enormous value of these no one would now attempt to minimize.

All over the world, as Sir Walter Besant says, "we have English merchants, garrisons, consuls, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, engineers, living among strange people, yet practically ignorant of their manners and thoughts..... it wants more than a knowledge of the tongue to become really acquainted with a people." These English merchants, garrisons, consults and others are strangers in a strange land. It is so very rare that a really unprejudiced man comes from a foreign country to tell us what its people are like, that when such a man does appear we give him our rapt attention. He may tell us much that will shock us, but that cannot be helped.

Chapter XXIX. Burton's Notes

137. Burton's Notes.

These Notes, indeed, are the great speciality of Burton's edition of the Nights. They are upon all manner of subjects--from the necklace of the Pleiades to circ.u.mcision; from necromancy to the characteristics of certain Abyssinian women; from devilish rites and ceremonies to precious stones as prophylactics. They deal not only with matters to which the word erotic is generally applied, but also with unnatural practices.

There are notes geographical, astrological, geomantic, bibliographical, ethnological, anthropomorphitical; but the p.o.r.nographic, one need hardly say, hugely predominate. Burton's knowledge was encyclopaedic. Like Kerimeddin [480] he had drunk the Second Phial of the Queen of the Serpents. He was more inquisitive than Vathek. To be sure, he would sometimes ask himself what was the good of it all or what indeed, was the good of anything; and then he would relate the rebuke he once received from an indolent Spaniard whom he had found lying on his back smoking a cigarette. "I was studying the thermometer," said Burton, and I remarked, "'The gla.s.s is unusually high.' 'When I'm hot, it's hot,'

commented the Spaniard, lazily, 'and when I'm cold it's cold. What more do I want to know?'" Burton, as we have seen, had for a long time devoted himself particularly to the study of vice and to everything that was bizarre and unnatural: eunuchs, pederasts, hermaphrodites, idiots, Augustus-the-Strongs, monstrosities. During his travels he never drank anything but green tea, and if Le Fanu's ideas [481] in In a Gla.s.s Darkly are to be respected, this habit is partly responsible for his extraordinary bias. He deals with subjects that are discussed in no other book. He had seen many lands, and, like Hafiz, could say:

"Plunder I bore from far and near, From every harvest gleaned an ear;"

and blighted ears some of them were. No other man could have written these notes; no other man, even if possessed of Burton's knowledge, would have dared to publish them. Practically they are a work in themselves. That they were really necessary for the elucidation of the text we would not for a moment contend. At times they fulfil this office, but more often than not the text is merely a peg upon which to hang a ma.s.s of curious learning such as few other men have ever dreamt of. The voluminous note on circ.u.mcision [482] is an instance in point.

There is no doubt that he obtained his idea of esoteric annotation from Gibbon, who, though he used the Latin medium, is in this respect the true father of Burton. We will give specimens of the annotations, taken haphazard--merely premising that the most characteristic of them--those at which the saints in heaven knit their brows--necessarily in a work of this kind exclude themselves from citations:

"Laughter. 'Sweetness of her smile'(Abu al Husn and Tawaddud). Arab writers often mention the smile of beauty, but rarely, after European fashion, the laugh, which they look upon as undignified. A Moslem will say 'Don't guffaw (kahkahah) in that way; leave giggling and grinning to monkeys and Christians.' The Spaniards, a grave people, remark that Christ never laughed." [483]

"Swan-maidens. 'And became three maidens' (Story of Janshah). [484] We go much too far for an explanation of the legend; a high bred girl is so much like a swan [485] in many points that the idea readily suggests itself. And it is also aided by the old Egyptian (and Platonic) belief in pre-existence, and by the Rabbinic and Buddhistic doctrine of Ante-Natal sin, to say nothing of metempsychosis. (Josephus' Antiq., xvii., 153)."

"The Firedrake. 'I am the Haunter of this place' (Ma'aruf the Cobbler).

[486] Arab, Amir=one who inhabiteth. Ruins and impure places are the favourite homes of the Jinn."

"Sticking Coins on the Face. 'Sticks the gold dinar' (Ali Nur al-Din).

[487] It is the custom for fast youths in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere to stick small gold pieces, mere spangles of metal, on the brows, cheeks and lips of the singing and dancing girls, and the perspiration and mask of cosmetics make them adhere for a time, till fresh movement shakes them off."

"Fillets hung on trees. 'Over the grave was a tall tree, on which hung fillets of red and green' (Otbah and Rayya). [488] Lane and many others are puzzled about the use of these articles. In many cases they are suspended to trees in order to transfer sickness from the body to the tree and to whoever shall touch it. The Sawahili people term such articles a Keti (seat or vehicle) for the mysterious haunter of the tree, who prefers occupying it to the patient's person. Briefly the custom, still popular throughout Arabia, is African and Fetish."

The value of the notes depends, of course, upon the fact that they are the result of personal observation. In his knowledge of Eastern peoples, languages and customs Burton stands alone. He is first and there is no second. His defence of his notes will be found in the last volume of his Supplemental Nights. We may quote a few sentences to show the drift of it. He says "The England of our day would fain bring up both s.e.xes and keep all ages in profound ignorance of s.e.xual and inters.e.xual relations; and the consequences of that imbecility are particularly cruel and afflicting. How often do we hear women in Society lamenting that they have absolutely no knowledge of their own physiology.... Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence. What an absurdum is a veteran officer who has spent a quarter of a century in the East without knowing that all Moslem women are circ.u.mcised, and without a notion of how female circ.u.mcision is effected," and then he goes on to ridicule what the "modern Englishwoman and her Anglo-American sister have become under the working of a mock modesty which too often acts cloak to real devergondage; and how Respectability unmakes what Nature made." [489]

Mr. Payne's edition contains notes, but they were intended simply to elucidate the text. Though succinct, they are sufficient for the general reader. Here and there, however, we come upon a more elaborate note, such as that upon the tuning of the lute (Vol. viii., 179), where Mr.

Payne's musical knowledge enables him to elucidate an obscure technical point. He also identified (giving proper chapter and verse references), collated, and where needful corrected all the Koranic citations with which the text swarms, a task which demanded great labour and an intimate knowledge of the Koran. The appropriate general information bearing on the work he gave in a succinct and artistic form in his elaborate Terminal Essay--a masterpiece of English--in which he condensed the result of erudition and research such as might have furnished forth several folio volumes.

138. The Terminal Essay.

Finally there is the Terminal Essay, in which Burton deals at great length not only with the origin and history of the Nights and matters erotic, but also with unnatural practices. This essay, with the exception of the p.o.r.nographic portions, will be found, by those who take the trouble to make comparisons, to be under large obligations to Mr.

Payne's Terminal Essay, the general lines and scheme of which it follows closely. Even Mr. Payne's special phrases such as "sectaries of the G.o.d Wunsch," [490] are freely used, and without acknowledgement. The portions on s.e.xual matters, however, are entirely original. Burton argues that the "naive indecencies of the text of The Arabian Nights are rather gaudisserie than prurience." "It is," he says, "a coa.r.s.eness of language, not of idea.... Such throughout the East is the language of every man, woman and child, from prince to peasant." "But," he continues, "there is another element in the Nights, and that is one of absolute obscenity, utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least prudish." Still, upon this subject he offers details, because it does not enter into his plan "to ignore any theme which is interesting to the Orientalist and the Anthropologist. To a.s.sert that such lore is unnecessary is to state, as every traveller knows, an absurdum."