Many years ago, I met a gentleman from the National Geographic Society whose job title was “explorer-in-residence,” which, despite the blatant contradiction in terms, I found terribly impressive. He had lived among the shamanic peoples of the Himalayas and was now enjoying retirement somewhere in Middle America, occasionally visiting the NatGeo headquarters in Washington, D.C.—a more comfortable locale than the remote mountaintops of Nepal, if equally barbaric.
Who as a child has not wanted to be an explorer? I am afraid I did not grow up very fast. As it came time to enter college, I still had a vague idea of learning some combination of languages and civil engineering that would allow me to go build roads somewhere godforsaken; the dream ran aground for good on a near-failing grade in linear algebra. I became involved with the student newspaper, and my fate was sealed.
Still, the detritus of childhood dreams has a way of sticking around. On top of my office bookshelves, surrounded by a pith helmet, a sombrero, and officers’ caps from various armies, sits a set of sixteen books with blown-out covers and barely legible spines. Opening the first of these, the reader is greeted with a curious and apparently meaningless square design; the obverse of the page has a line in Arabic script and its ostensible translation, “TO THE PURE ALL THINGS ARE PURE,” followed by a number of verses from various European languages. Another turn of the page, and at last the announcement:
A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entitulated
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
You want explorers? Here is the godfather of them all.
Richard Francis Burton was born in 1821 to an Anglo-Irish officer in the British Army. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Burton was something of an eccentric, moving his family around England and continental Europe, where the young Burton picked up bad habits and a number of foreign languages. After a varied secondary education, he came to Oxford with ambitions of becoming a linguist.
“My reception at College was not pleasant,” wrote Burton in a passage quoted by Thomas Wright, his biographer. “I had grown a splendid moustache, which was the envy of all the boys abroad, and which all the advice of Drs. Ogle and Greenhill failed to make me remove. I declined to be shaved until formal orders were issued by the authorities of the college. For I had already formed strong ideas upon the Shaven Age of England, when her history, with some brilliant exceptions, such as Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson, was at its meanest.”
Unlike the mustache, Oxford did not grow on Burton. The feeling was mutual. His behavior was generally bad, and in 1842 he was sent down for attending a forbidden horse race.
Naturally, Burton’s next step was to get a commission in the Bombay Army and try to serve in the First Anglo-Afghan War. The war was over by the time he stepped off the ship, but British India was still there in all the chaotic glory of the last years of Company Raj. In his seven years in the Bombay Army, he became proficient in a variety of Indian languages, as well as Persian and the Arabic he had started at Oxford.
It was in 1853 that Burton undertook his first really great feat. Having obtained leave from the army and after taking on a series of elaborate and frankly outrageous disguises, he performed the hajj. While the journey was made under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society to improve knowledge of the Arabian peninsula, the same naughty schoolboy attitude that earned expulsion at Oxford permeates his account of the journey: “What remained for me but to prove, by trial, that what might be perilous to other travellers was safe to me? . . . Being liberally supplied with the means of travel by the Royal Geographical Society; thoroughly tired of ‘progress’ and of ‘civilisation;’ curious to see with my eyes what others are content to ‘hear with ears,’ namely, Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed, I resolved to resume my old character of a Persian wanderer, a ‘Darwaysh,’ and to make the attempt.”
Attempt became success; Burton published his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah in 1855 and won his first dose of literary and personal celebrity. The European kafirs who had made the pilgrimage could be counted on one hand. This deed alone would have earned Burton a long memory among students of the East.
Not long after, he obtained permission to explore East Africa, of interest to the British because of their relatively recent acquisition of Yemen and the ever-expanding security concerns about India. (The tragic mechanism of empire is that it expands less out of avarice and more from the desire to keep secure what is already taken.) In a clash with armed Somali tribesmen, he was stabbed through the face, cheek to cheek. The scars gave his already severe face a yet more shocking aspect. It is difficult to imagine he didn’t enjoy the effect.
There is a whiff of the patriotic in all this, which becomes thematic in the novel Burton is said to have inspired, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Burton’s own writing is significantly less beef-and-tea about it. While he does gesture toward matters of national interest—noting, for example, in the introduction to the Nights that Britain found itself with the largest Muslim population of any empire on earth, a point of interest and anxiety when it would find itself at war with the caliph of Islam a few decades after his writing—it is his aggressive curiosity and more than healthy self-regard that characterize the story.
Burton was trouble. He assiduously cultivated his scandalous reputation for sex and fighting, and he played poorly with others. His fellow explorer from East Africa days, John Hanning Speke, refused to be in the same room with him in later years; his progress in the military and diplomatic establishment stopped something short of what it perhaps could have been had he been an ounce less outrageous and a pound less grandiose. Wild (albeit plausible, and never fully dispelled) rumors that he practiced unnatural vices and had murdered a boy in cold blood to avoid discovery on the hajj dogged him throughout his public life. The Nights, in which he drew liberally and openly from an earlier translation that he had advised, earned him the rather meaner accusation of plagiarism. But mild professional frustration is perhaps a small price for becoming an immortal, one of Elysian heroes of the high noon of the British Empire, and enduring literary fame. Besides, he married, and that has a settling effect. Isabel Burton was a daughter of the recusant Arundell family, and by every evidence a remarkably tolerant woman.
Amid his travels, he found the time to write on not only geography, history, linguistics, and anthropology but also falconry and fencing technique. Yet it is the Nights for which he will always be best remembered. This is not stuff for children. In the introduction, he promises not to stint in reporting and explaining the sexual peculiarities portrayed in the tales; as if to make it clear that this is not an idle promise, within the opening pages he pens a footnote that is frankly unprintable in a family magazine about, among other things, the relative endowments of different races’ menfolk based on his own fieldwork.
Despite the occasional innocence of dated references (for example, the belief evinced in the introduction to the Nights that the Semitic and Indo-European languages share a discernible common ancestor), Burton never seems to be anything less than the master of the material: “Dr. Badger uses the acute symbol to denote accent or stress of voice; but such appoggio is unknown to those who speak with purest articulation; for instance whilst the European pronounces Mus-cat´, and the Arab villager Mas´-kat; the Children of the Waste, ‘on whose tongues Allah descended,’ articulate Mas-kat.” (What a phrase! The Children of the Waste, on whose tongues Allah descended. That is writing.)
I have no Arabic, so I cannot say whether Burton is successful in rendering the feeling of the Nights’ language; but the English is unmistakably itself, a bizarre pastiche that almost defies evaluation. (Unsurprisingly, Borges rated it very highly.) The mix of high and low register, archaism, technical language, and (for the time) common street slang is fresh in every sense of the word: “Hereupon the King cast aside all cark and care and robed the wizards and dismissed them with splendid honoraria; and he resigned himself to the will of Heaven and acknowledged that the decrees of Destiny may not be countervailed.” What on earth is cark? It doesn’t matter. “So when the nest-owner [Mouse] would have gone out after his wont, he drew near the Cat; whereupon she seized him and taking him in her claws, began to bite him and shake him and take him in her mouth and lift him up and cast him down and run after him and cranch him and torture him.” What could it possibly mean to cranch someone or something? Well, we know it when we feel it.
Burton felt that his really valuable contribution was in the translation of the Nights’ verse sections. The uncertain reader must judge that for himself. A sample:
When thou art seized of Evil Fate, assume*he noble soul’s long-suffering: ’tis thy best:
Complain not to the creature; this be ’plaint*rom one most Ruthful to the ruthlessest.
Is this very good English verse? I’m not sure. Would you ever mistake it for anything but Burton’s Nights? Not on your life. In M.F.A. programs (I know by cruel experience), people talk a lot about “being awake” and “language that is awake.” By this, they simply mean being alert both to the world and to the possibilities of the English language. Burton is, if nothing else, awake.
It would be an omission in the eyes of this magazine’s readership not to address what is perhaps the strangest question in Burton’s puzzling life: Was he a Catholic? He claimed atheism as his creed and the Church of England as his affiliation—one of history’s great combinations—and Isabel had to secure a dispensation to marry him, something that was not easy to come into in those days, even for the high-flying subset of English Catholics. He was a hajji and a Hindu initiate; his Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî is considered evidence of Sufist inclination. He was possibly a murderer and a specialist in frank if high-register pornography, introducing the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden to Western audiences. Yet Wright the biographer reports of his time at Oxford, “The only preacher Burton would listen to was Newman, then Vicar of St. Mary’s; of Pusey’s interminable and prosy harangues he could not bear even to think.” And, when Burton suffered a heart attack in Trieste in 1890, Isabel had a priest in to perform last rites. This act was controversial, and perhaps not effective; some have alleged that Burton was already dead before the clergyman came in. We will never know, although we may be forgiven for hoping with the widow Burton that her husband made a final transit, incognito if necessary, into a city forbidden to all but the faithful.
The couple’s mausoleum, in the churchyard of the Catholic parish of St Mary Magdalen in Outer London, is a bizarre affair: a great stone effigy of a Bedouin-style tent, fringed with a design of gilded crescents and stars. Mounted over the entrance is a great, agonized crucifix that would have done the most bathetic Victorian tomb proud. Here we will let them lie.
My own copy of The Thousand Nights and a Night is one of the underground American “Burton Club” productions, sixteen volumes printed privately to get around censorship laws. I found it listed for a pittance in one of the great souks of our own time, Craigslist. The seller lived in one of those immaculate bungalows in the part of Northwest D.C. perched high over the Potomac; he proved to be a very kind, elderly gentleman with a tremor. He and his wife—a well-preserved woman, aged but conspicuously younger than her husband—had honeymooned in Morocco, where their guide had spun tales about Burton and enchanted them. “Are you an orientalist?” he asked, humorously putting the stress on the a. I’m the managing editor of an occasionally controversial right-wing magazine, which doesn’t always play well in Washington’s parlors; so I said I was in fact an orientalist, in a small way.
A very small way indeed. Who isn’t small before a giant like Burton, or before his literary possession for all time? “This is all that hath come down to us of the origin of this book, and Allah is All-knowing. So Glory be to Him whom the shifts of Time waste not away, nor doth aught of chance or change affect His sway: whom one case diverteth not from other case and Who is sole in the attributes of perfect grace.”
