Eastern Dreams (25 page)

Arguments and even quarrels are part and parcel of intellectual life. Once interested orientalists began creating independent versions of the
Nights
, it was inevitable that some would take issue with Galland's altered paraphrase of
Alf Laila wa Laila
. Less forgivably, as a devoted partisan of Egypt, Lane missed the historical boat entirely by insisting that the
Nights
is most likely the product of one or two author-compilers who created the work in either Syria or Egypt between 1475 and 1525 CE, and that the Bulaq Text
printed in his beloved Cairo contains the final or “actual” text of
Alf Laila wa Laila
. Lane provides little evidence for either contention, outside his strong personal preference for Arabic Egypt.

Edward Lane might have blasted Galland, but his own version received a drubbing from a formidable Arabist. Lane's translation and especially his theories about the
Nights
' history were hotly contested by the English polymath Richard Francis Burton. While acknowledging Lane as an “
amiable and devoted Arabist,” Burton nevertheless skewered him for producing an expurgated edition that was “garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsouled.” By making his “drawing-room” translation, Lane cut many of the tales in the Bulaq Text and rewrote parts of others, causing Burton to snort that Edward Lane had done nothing but convert “
the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters.”

Lane's contention that the
Nights
is entirely an Arab work earned Burton's particular scorn. “
When he [Lane] pronounces The Nights … purely ‘Arab' … his opinion is entitled to no more deference than his deriving the sub-African … from Arabia….” From consultation with Hermann Zotenberg and careful examination of many of the surviving
Nights
manuscripts in Europe, Burton knew that the theories of von Hammer-Purgstall and others in his camp were right. The Arabic version of
The Thousand and One Nights
is only a secondary stage in the work's evolution; the book's origins extend back far further than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the oldest stories predate the ninth century CE.

By Burton's day, a thousand years after the appearance of the first
Alf Laila wa Laila
collections, enough historical work had been done on the
Nights
that few researchers believed an original Arabic edition containing 1001 Nights existed anywhere, or that the figure accurately described the book's contents. The
Arabian Nights
is no more the product of a single place or person than is
jazz; it developed over centuries from the seeds of the storytelling tradition to become literature's great shape-shifter.

By the Victorian Age, it no longer mattered much. The creation of printed Arabic texts revealed that
Alf Laila wa Laila
bore a different tone to western versions of the
Nights
. It was now acknowledged among those familiar with Arabic that there existed a wide gap between the European and original
Nights
; the West had so far seen something less than the whole—only a kind of shadow
Arabian Nights
.

The creation of the Arabic recensions, while each contains problems, nevertheless served a dual purpose by providing the Arabic world with comprehensive editions of
Alf Laila wa Laila
and the West with the resources to fashion translations including previously expurgated material. Henry Torrens had begun in a tentative way to approach this issue by creating an unexpurgated
Nights
translated directly from the Arabic before passing the baton to Lane who, despite his criticism of Galland, nevertheless trod the same path as the Frenchman by reserving the “
right to omit such tales, anecdotes, etc., as are comparatively uninteresting or on any account objectionable.”

With a mass of printed and handwritten material now available to work with, the stage was set for bolder attempts to render the full flavour of
The Thousand and One Nights
into western languages. By the late Victorian Age, two scholars of vastly different temperaments and experiences resolved separately to do exactly that, although both ran the risk of disgrace or even imprisonment for their efforts.

*
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.