Today, Richard Burton tells us 1001 stories. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The vizier was appalled when
his daughter, Shahrazad, said she would marry the
king. The king's first wife had betrayed him, and
he'd chopped her and her lover into four pieces
with a single sword stroke. Now the king took a new
bride each night and killed her the next day. That
way, he would not be betrayed again.
When Shahrazad's wedding to the king was
consummated, she sat down to tell him a story. By
dawn, the story wasn't quite over. So the king
spared her that night. Next night, another
unfinished story. So it went for a thousand and one
nights. Then she said to him, "I have borne you
three sons. I have earned your love. Remove the
threat of death." "I removed the threat of death
long ago," the king replied. "You are my queen."
Burton made the definitive translation of the
Arabian Nights stories in 1885. He was
a brilliant linguist, fluent in several dialects of
Arabic. He'd spent his life in extraordinary
scholarship and in extraordinary exploration as
well.
He and John Speke had discovered the source of the
Nile River. Before that, Burton had written
startling travel books. In one exploit, he'd
entered the sacred Mosque at Mecca disguised as a
Moslem. That would've cost him his life had he been
caught.
Other Victorians translated parts of the
Arabian Nights, but Burton brought an
Arabic mind to the full Arabic text. He had a
genius for looking at other cultures with clear,
unjudging eyes.
And he went to remote corners of the earth looking
for them. In 1860 he visited the new Mormon
community in Salt Lake City. He openly contrasted
Mormon polygamy with Arabic harems. Burton's
biographer, Fawn Brodie, tells how an odd bond of
friendship formed between Burton and Brigham Young during that
visit.
Burton delighted in Arabic frankness about sexual
matters, and he translated with deadly accuracy.
That drove his wife to distraction. She produced
her own expurgated version of his Arabian
Nights for use by ladies. It sold just 471
copies. Victorian ladies, it seems, opted to read
the original.
Burton died just as he completed his translation of
yet another racy Arabic book, The Scented
Garden. His wife promptly burned it along
with Burton's journals. Then she wrote her own
biography of the man, painting him as modest and
proper.
He was anything but! Burton brought a penetrating
childlike detachment to that terrible tale of a
young queen, bargaining for her life by telling
stories -- expecting to die when the stories
ceased. And, in a way, Richard Burton was also
bargaining for life. He, too, pushed death back
night after night by recounting -- for us -- all
the unexpected richness of being alive.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Burton, R.F., The Thousand Nights and a Night:
A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights
Made and Annotated by Richard F. Burton. New
York: Heritage Press, 1934.
Brodie, F.M., The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir
Richard Burton. New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1967 (first published as a Norton paperback in
1984).
I am grateful to Judy Myers, UH Libraries, for
pointing me to the Fawn Brodie source and to
Jeffery Scoggins, Detering Book Gallery, for
providing the Heritage Press version of the
Arabian Nights.
Soon after the Arabian Nights was
published in 1885, Henry Reeves, editor of the
Edinburgh Review, called Burton: "a
man who knows thirty-five languages and dialects,
especially that of pornography." He also said that
the Arabian Nights was "one of the
most indecent books in the English language -- an
extraordinary agglomeration of filth." That's the
sort of thing Burton was up against, doing honest
translations in a Victorian world.
For a rich web site on Burton, visit: http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/burton/
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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