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                   "TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE."
                           (Puris omnia para)

                                                        —_Arab Proverb._

          "Niuna corrotta mente intese mai sanamente parole."

                                            —"_Decameron_"—_conclusion_.

              "Erubuit, posuitque meum Lucretia librum
                  Sed coram Bruto. Brute! recede, leget."

                                                             —_Martial._

            "Mieulx 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_."

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_A PLAIN AND LITERAL TRANSLATION OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS.
NOW ENTITULED_




                           _THE BOOK OF THE_
                     =Thousand Nights and a Night=

              _WITH INTRODUCTION EXPLANATORY NOTES ON THE
                MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF MOSLEM MEN AND A
                 TERMINAL ESSAY UPON THE HISTORY OF THE
                                NIGHTS_

                               VOLUME I.


                                   BY
                           RICHARD F. BURTON

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                 PRINTED BY THE BURTON CLUB FOR PRIVATE
                            SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

                            Shammar Edition

Limited to one thousand numbered sets, of which this is

                              Number _547_




                          PRINTED IN U. S. A.

                       =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.




                       THE TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD.


This work, laborious 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;
without 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 predilection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my
mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone
metempsychic life in the distant Past. Again I stood under the
diaphanous skies, in air glorious as æther, 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 the bleating of the flocks and
the bellowing of the humpy herds; while the rere-mouse 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-Mulúk; they are touched with tenderness by the self-sacrificing
love of Azízah; their mouths water as they hear of heaps of untold gold
given away in largesse like clay; they chuckle with delight every time a
Kázi or a Fakír—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 "Astaghfaru'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 incontinently 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 "Athenæum" (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
monopolised by certain "pets" of the _Médiocratie_, and prime favourites
of that jealous and potent majority—the Mediocrities who know "no
nonsense about merit." It is hard for an outsider to realise how perfect
is the monopoly of commonplace, 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-employés 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'œuvre 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 vols., 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 Ægyptian (!) 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, 1883), 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'être_ 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 medie 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 _mécanique_, 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 Ráwí or reciter,
to whose wits the task of supplying details is left, well knows their
value: the openings carefully repeat the names of the _dramatis personæ_
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