Eastern Dreams

by Paul Nurse

  * Alf Laila wa Laila was not the only work sought; in his edition of the Nights, Sir Richard Burton notes that for years he has “vainly troubled friends and correspondents” to be “ever on the lookout” for the lost Persian storybook Hazar Afsanah.

  *Most researchers now maintain that according to textural evidence, the Galland Manuscript cannot be dated earlier than sometime in the mid-fifteenth century, or prior to the earliest Renaissance voyages of discovery.

  Chapter 7

  THE VICTORIAN RIVALS

  What did he say to you, dear aunt?

  That’s what I want to know.

  What did he say to you, dear aunt?

  That man at Waterloo!

  An Arabian old man, a Nights old man,

  As Burton, as Burton can be;

  Will you ask my papa to tell my mama

  The exact words, and tell them to me?

  —ANONYMOUS ENGLISH VERSE, CIRCA 1885

  Of the many westerners associated with the Arabian Nights, none led lives of such contrast, or possessed characters so diametrically opposed, than the Victorian Englishmen John Payne and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Their individual, daringly unexpurgated English versions of The Thousand and One Nights are milestones in the history of the work as well as significant products of Victorian literature, yet each edition could have brought its translator serious trouble.

  It is difficult today to understand the potential minefield Payne and Burton trod when issuing their unabridged versions of the Nights, for while both translations were printed for private subscribers only and therefore not “published” in the usual sense of the word, there remained an element of danger to even offer for private sale books that might conceivably contravene the age’s obscenity laws. Although during its pre-European history Alf Laila wa Laila was viewed by many in the Muslim world as a compendium of coarse tales, its obscene passages were accepted as part of the work’s nature; if one didn’t like such things, one ignored them and left it at that.

  Not so in Britain, where the second half of the Victorian Age saw a tightening of censorship laws regarding published works. The passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (commonly called Lord Campbell’s Act after its sponsor) gave magistrates the power to search premises suspected of offering for sale obscene articles in books or prints. If anything deemed objectionable was found, prosecution would usually follow; a conviction often meant prison with a jail term averaging eight months.

  Compounding matters was the existence of vigilance associations such as the Pure Literature Society, the National Vigilance Society and the Society for the Suppression of Vice—organizations of private citizens who took it upon themselves to ferret out works they considered in violation of Lord Campbell’s Act. In this way, they acted as watchdogs for the authorities, visiting booksellers in search of offensive materials, ever on the lookout for works thought unwholesome and never averse to alerting the law. Their zeal was often the result of panting religious fervour directed against any kind of sexual representation, ensuring that Victorian writers seldom if ever used such innocuous words as “calf” or “thigh” to describe a woman’s leg for fear of prosecution. So active was the Society for the Suppression of Vice alone, that in its first 159 prosecutions against publishers for issuing questionable material, it succeeded in gaining convictions in all but five cases.

  In such an atmosphere of social and legal repression, anyone looking to issue an unexpurgated English translation of the Arabian Nights ran a real risk no matter how they chose to disseminate it—something Payne and Burton knew from the beginning. Even if they did not face actual prosecution, there was always the danger that being associated with a work considered pornographic could ruin their reputations and even their livelihoods. Neither man had the security of a private income; Payne worked as a lawyer while Burton was an employee of the Foreign Office, subject to dismissal and loss of pension. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, translating The Thousand and One Nights had ceased being a pastime for pedants and oriental scholars. For anyone wishing to produce an unedited version true to the earthy Arabic original, it was now a task requiring will and, ironically, strong moral courage.

  Of the two men, John Payne led the more conventional life, although it was not without its difficulties. He was born to a solidly middle-class London family in 1842, but business reversals forced Payne’s family to move to Bristol when he was thirteen, a situation that saw John yanked prematurely from school. Thereafter, he worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country—including a humiliating stint as an usher at his old school—until at nineteen he was placed in a London solicitor’s office, where eventually he qualified as a solicitor himself, and set up a practice.

  That was only a livelihood, for literature remained Payne’s special passion. Despite his abortive education, he possessed an outstanding linguistic gift, learning on his own (besides the French, Latin and Greek from his schooldays) German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Persian and Arabic even as he made translations of Dante and Goethe while still in his teens. Some of this extreme work ethic may have been the result of a mildly depressive or bipolar personality. Payne’s biographer Thomas Wright describes him as having “an uncontrollable imagination and a fondness for fun [which] not infrequently went hand in hand with gloom and foreboding.” Payne’s need for constant stimulation could have been a way of coping with his depression—what Sir Winston Churchill, another depressive also known to battle his illness with a wide range of activities, called his “black dog.”

  Even for a High Victorian, Payne was eccentric. Notoriously near-sighted, he was nevertheless a fine amateur musician able to play from sight; he also adored cats, revered Shakespeare to the point of idolatry and was prickly enough to quarrel at one time or another with everyone from his relatives to his fellow poet Algernon Swinburne. In his professional life Payne was an effective if unspectacular lawyer, but he was also like Antoine Galland in that his greatest devotion was reserved for literary work. Also, like Galland he never married, looking to have only found real satisfaction in the arts of translation and composing poetry.

  He was no milksop, however. Even before translating the Nights, Payne flirted with the era’s obscenity laws by publishing an 1877 English anthology of work by the lusty fifteenth-century French poet-thief François Villon. Aware that he might be heading for trouble, Payne and several friends set up the Villon Society to privately print a work ordinary publishers wouldn’t touch for fear of Lord Campbell’s Act. The Villon Society appears to have been modelled on other literary vehicles of the period such as the Hakluyt and Early English Text Societies. By offering works such as The Poems of François Villon for private subscription—a commercial transaction between private citizens—matters were left in a legal grey area; should push come to shove, it could be argued in court that such arrangements did not actually violate the letter of the law by offering questionable materials for public sale.

  At around the same time as his Villon translation appeared, Payne became interested in creating a complete English version of Alf Laila wa Laila, which he later recalled he began in earnest on February 5, 1877. There had been no problems with printing Villon, so Payne trusted that selling an unexpurgated edition of the Nights privately would hinder, if not actually prevent, legal trouble, and went ahead with the translation.

  He did so in a characteristically eccentric manner, writing almost entirely atop the horse-drawn omnibuses that now trod around London. Liking to “segregate himself in a crowd,” Payne would simply climb aboard a “bus” without caring about its destination and remain on the top level with his materials as it wound its prescribed way through the city. It was only when conductors refused to take him any further that Payne would disembark and board another vehicle to start work anew. The John Payne translation of The Thousand and One Nights is thus not only the first unexpurgated version rendered into English but also the only edition known to have been composed almost entirely in transit.<
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  If John Payne can be described as the hermit of English Arabian Nights translators, then Richard Francis Burton is surely its paladin. A protean figure in his own age, it is a mark of Burton’s personal power that he is fast becoming renowned in our own day as a model of extraordinary ability, someone whose talents so far outstrip the average that it seems there was very little he could not do, do better than most and then proceed to write authoritatively about it.

  Few individuals have ever worked in so many fields, successfully or otherwise. At various times of his life Burton was a soldier, a traveller, a military surveyor, a stunning linguist with nearly thirty languages to his credit, an African explorer, an anthropologist, an ethnologist and a pioneering sexologist, as well as one of the founding members and first presidents of the organization that would become the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The author of over fifty books, he still found time to become a master swordsman and amateur geologist, botanist and inventor.

  Although Payne and Burton had much in common, their differences make them the Mutt and Jeff duo of English Arabian Nights scholars—almost a reflection of the extremes found within the Nights itself. Whereas John Payne lived most of his life in England, Burton travelled and worked on every continent except for Australia and Antarctica. Where Payne may have been wary of sex—some think he was a little too attached to his sisters—Burton’s reputation is intimately bound up with sexual subjects, whether through his anthropological writings, a series of alleged affairs with native women or allegations of homosexuality in India. Where Payne’s interest in Muslim matters seems to have been wholly academic, Burton was personally fascinated by Islam, claiming to be a Master Sufi and making a dangerous hajj to Medina and Mecca disguised as an Afghan pilgrim.

  Comparisons between Payne and Burton extend to their physical appearances. John Payne’s physique was that of a stereotypical bookworm: medium-sized, mild-looking, sporting a spade beard and a ubiquitous pair of pince-nez glasses. Richard Burton stood nearly six feet tall with broad, muscular shoulders, drooping moustachios and dark, gypsyish looks set off by a pair of famously mesmerizing eyes. The Earl of Dunraven recalled that in middle age Burton prided himself on looking like Satan, often forking his heavy chestnut beard in the middle to evoke a devilish air, while Algernon Swinburne, a close friend, noted that he had “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god.” Later portraits and photographs show evidence of two great scars, one on each cheek, the result of a nighttime raid near the East African coast during which Burton took a Somali spear through his face.

  For all his abilities and accomplishments, however, and for someone so frankly ambitious, there lurked in Burton a deep streak of social immaturity that often worked against his best interests; a perverse tendency to tweak authority that he never outgrew. He gleefully admitted to every rumour and scandal, true or not, regardless of any consequences to his reputation. Such attitudes tend to backfire badly, and Burton paid a heavy price for his love of a sinister persona even as his exploits turned him into a national hero and a recognized authority on the eastern world.

  Burton can also be accused of taking on too much and never fully integrating any of it. To some eyes, he spent much of his life careening from one interest to another, mastering most before moving on as if dissatisfied, then often returning to an endeavour he had abandoned years before. The ephemera of his life reflect this frankly bizarre path. Burton is at once the same individual who introduced the Swahili word safari into western usage, might have coined the term ESP (although calling it Extra-Sensuous Perception) and may have brought the confection known as “Turkish Delight” to Europe following the Crimean War. Besides gaining a maître d’armes in fencing (think of a high martial arts black belt), from youth to old age he was famous for being able to play four simultaneous games of chess while blindfolded—and win them all.

  The roots of Burton’s mercurial character may lie in his unusually nomadic childhood. Excepting a single, unsuccessful year at an English school at age nine, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence roving around Europe with his family, giving him an early cosmopolitanism unusual for English youths of his day, but also ensuring that he would never fit comfortably within the rigid social structure of nineteenth-century Britain. After a short stint at Oxford ended with his more-or-less permanent suspension, Burton received a commission in the army of the Honourable East India Company and spent seven years in western India, passing six interpreter’s examinations while delving deeply into local customs.

  But illness and unsavoury rumours saw him invalided home in 1849. He wrote several books based on his Indian experiences before starting a decade-long career as one of the foremost explorers of his generation, first undertaking his famous pilgrimage to Mecca (a city forbidden to non-Muslims) before twice visiting Africa in unsuccessful searches for the fabled source of the Nile. With his exploration days effectively over by 1860, Burton then married the pious upper-class Catholic Isabel Arundell and entered the British consular corps. He served in a number of posts before landing in diplomatic exile at the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste in 1872, travelling, publishing and studying as before, but with the unhappy sense that his best days lay behind him.

  But even the man who coined ESP could not foresee what his future held, or know how much his posthumous fame would depend on a pipe dream he shared with a friend in 1852. While recovering from his journey to Mecca at the Red Sea port of Aden, Burton and his fellow orientalist Dr. John Steinhaeuser first conceived the idea of creating an unexpurgated English translation of the Nights. Burton later recalled that, while talking about Arabia one day, he and Steinhaeuser reached the same conclusion: that the Arabian Nights, “this wondrous treasury of Moslem folk lore … [is] familiar to almost every English child, [but] no general reader is aware of the valuables it contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists.”

  Before parting, they agreed to collaborate on a “full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original,” with Steinhaeuser translating the work’s prose portions and Burton the poetry. This was not the unequal division of labour it might appear; with nearly ten thousand lines of poetry in Calcutta II, and the notorious difficulty of translating the Arabic metre, Burton’s task would have been at least as difficult as Steinhaeuser’s, requiring months, if not years, to complete.

  There can be no doubt that Burton grew up familiar with the Arabian Nights in the same way as other British children in the early nineteenth century. Yet it was only with Indian service and his immersion in native cultures that he came to understand the extent of the work’s true nature—the earthy and often ribald core which, while considered coffee-house entertainment in the eastern world, was sure to be deemed pornographic in Europe, especially in Victorian England. Even as he recited stories from the Nights to safari companions in Africa—referring to the book as “that wonderful work, so often translated, so much turned over, and so little understood at home”—Burton acknowledged the perceived “moral putrefaction” of the original tales, writing that while the Nights is “the most familiar of books in England, it is one of the least known, the reason being that about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation … not even the most sanguine Orientalist would dare render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder.”

  It was this book that Burton and Steinhaeuser decided to translate complete into English, exchanging notes and conferring whenever they met for some years afterwards (they appear to have worked in a desultory fashion on their respective tasks). With Steinhaeuser’s premature death in 1866, however, Burton fell heir to “very little of his [Steinhaeuser’s] labours,” and thereafter was forced to work on the entire project by himself.

  How much work Burton accomplished in the years following Steinhaeuser’s death is unclear. He could only work whenever he found the time amidst his other activities and projects, and he usually had at least one book either in progress or ready for the press. Even so, he makes refe
rence to the pleasure translating these stories brought him over many a weary year, “an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction … a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency” during his official duties in the consulates of West Africa and Brazil.

  It is known that while serving as British consul in Damascus in 1871 he showed Lord Redesdale “the first two or three chapters” of the work, saying that Redesdale was the only person to be shown the book-in-progress. Later, however, Burton admitted that he worked only “fitfully” on the manuscript “amid a host of obstructions,” claiming it was only in the spring of 1879 that “the tedious process of copying began and the book commenced to take finished form.” At the time, he believed an absolute minimum of a year’s hard work—perhaps two or three—were required before he could complete the translation.

  Burton turned to storytelling in his later years to stave off an objectionable existence, comforting himself with fictional realities more appealing than his own. Given unimportant consular posts as the years advanced—particularly after the 1872 diplomatic recall that landed him in Trieste—his frustration found increasing solace in literary pursuits, churning out a fantastic number of works ranging from a scholarly history of the sword to a biography of his hero, the Portuguese poet Luís de Camõens. Between 1872 and his death in 1890, Burton published more than twenty books, most of them multi-volume works laced with lengthy footnotes designed to illuminate the text and serve as a forum for his endless opinions, prejudices, beliefs and theories.

  One of these works proved a dry run for the Nights. In 1870, Burton published a small collection of translated Hindu folk tales that form part of the Vetala Panchavinshati, or Twenty-five Tales of a Demon, itself part of the famous eleventh-century Sanskrit folk collection known as Katha Sarit Sagara—“The Ocean of Story.” Burton translated eleven of these tales and, like Galland, added individual flourishes and asides before bringing them out as Vikram and the Vampire, following magazine serialization.