A Fantastic Find

Oh, I've been waiting for this moment for twenty years...

I haven't made an eBay purchase in quite a few years now, but I took the plunge when I found something I've been wanting to get for two decades now. It's a complete set of Sir Richard Burton's English translation of the Arabian Nights, a sixteen-volume set. I bought it a couple of weeks ago, anticipating an arrival in early February, or later because PEI takes longer for everything.

Well, they arrived today, and they are beautiful. Check it out:

I know, I know...they look really old and worn, don't they? Well, that's because they ARE old. 135 years old, in fact. Yes, this is the ORIGINAL, limited edition printing of the Thousand Nights and a Night, from 1885. Don't believe me? Feast your eyes!

That's right, and it's fantastic! I've already started reading it, beginning with the Translator's Foreword, and I've started the introduction to the stories. And wow, I'm ten pages in, and I'll never be able to watch Disney's Aladdin the same way again. I'm definitely not going to be reading these to my kids. Not until they're much older, anyway.

See, my initial exposure to the Arabian Nights stories was in the children's versions, such as Andrew Lang or the aforementioned Disney movie. Little did I know that those were very much the bowdlerized versions of the stories. The 'naughty bits' were glossed over or just edited out altogether. Not so with Sir Richard Burton; he is, after all, the man who brought the Kama Sutra to England a couple of years before publishing this. That was available in a limited edition, too. In fact, you couldn't buy these books in a bookstore; it was, as you can see below, only available to 'subscribers.'

'Private subscribers only' was because the British censors deemed the books pornography. And while Burton's translation is nothing compared to what we can find with a Google search these days, it certainly isn't going to make the children's section of the library, either. As I said, I'm ten pages in so far, and I've already run into adultery, voyeurism, two orgies, and murderous revenge. And Scheherazade hasn't even shown up in the book yet.

Still, it's a beautiful set, and while it's not kid-friendly, it's definitely chock-full of adventure, magic, genies, romance, and heroics. I'm there. And the cool part is, I know how long it will take me to read the first ten volumes: 1,001 days! The last six are supplemental stories, and that's where I'll find the Ali Baba and Aladdin stories; they weren't part of the original Arabian Nights, but everyone assumes they are.

Here's what the inside looks like. It's got a lot of art like this, with the translucent leaf overtop of it (which I've moved out of the way so you can see the text on the other side as well).

That art is tame compared to some of the pictures; at least those girls are clothed.

Now, for a certain class of people, this book ranks right up there with Mein Kampf as a tome of pure horror. Why? Because it was published in 1885 by a man who would have outright laughed at the notion of political correctness while picking his teeth with an elephant tusk and talking about the backward cultures he had visited around the world. If you are offended by old terms used to describe people of a certain color, then this is not the book series for you. Burton considered this to be a work of anthropology, not literature, and he has the typical Victorian-era British attitudes toward non-European (or just non-British) people around the world: They are backward, half-savage at best, and almost impossible to properly civilize. He doesn't hide it, he doesn't sugar-coat it, and he doesn't give a damn.

Burton himself is quite the character; he was, without a doubt, a man's man of Victorian England. An explorer, adventurer, and spy, he spoke a bunch of languages (as many as 29 according to some counts), and among his exploits are a trip to Mecca in disguise (when Europeans were forbidden on pain of death to go), and being among the first Europeans to find the Great Lakes of Africa while searching for the source of the Nile. He served in the Crimean War and in India, explored the East Coast of Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. He got around, and he truly lived. Controversial even in his own time, he nonetheless is a man to be admired for what he accomplished.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to keep reading. And no, I'm not doing a review or a Let's Read of this series. That would just be weird, and take forever.