R F. B ICHARD URTON Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer, linguist, and writer best remembered today for his translation of The Arabian Nights, was born in Torquay, Devon, on March 19, 1821. Descended from prosperous provincial gentry, he experienced an exotic and nomadic childhood. In 1822 Burton’s father, a onetime lieutenant colonel in the British army, moved the family to Beauséjour, a small château in the Loire valley. During the 1830s they wandered throughout France and Italy, returning to England for short visits. As a child Burton displayed his talent for languages, and was fluent in Greek and Latin as well as Italian and French before entering Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840 to prepare for a career in the Anglican church. He was expelled in 1842 for misbehavior and sailed to India with a commission in the Bombay Army, a military branch of the East India Company. Burton spent the next seven years in the northern province of Sind as a field surveyor and intelligence officer, often disguising himself as a Muslim merchant. He mastered a dozen Oriental languages, including Arabic, Hindustani, and numerous other Indian languages, and absorbed everything he could about Indian culture. In 1850 he left India for Boulogne, France, where he wrote three books about his experiences in India that endure as compelling contributions to ethnology: Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Scinde, or, The Unhappy Valley; and Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus. In 1853, disguised as an Afghani physician, he traveled to Medina and Mecca where he visited and sketched at great risk the sacred shrines of Islam forbidden to non-Muslims. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El- Medinah and Mecca (1855–1856), an encyclopedic look at the Islamic world, is widely considered his most important travelogue. Though this book brought him acclaim in England, Burton then set off on an expedition through Ethiopia and Somaliland to the forbidden city of Harer, the citadel of Muslim learning; he was the first European to enter and leave the city without being executed. First Footsteps in East Africa (1856) records this adventure. Following a brief tour of duty in the Crimean War, Burton and John Speke set out from Zanzibar in 1857 in an attempt to locate the source of the Nile. The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) chronicles the two-year expedition that resulted in the discovery of Lake Tanganyika. In 1860 he traveled across the United States to Salt Lake City. The City of the Saints (1861) describes the Mormon Church and offers a portrait of its leader, Brigham Young. In 1861 Burton married Isabel Arundell, a devout Roman Catholic, and joined the British Foreign Office. Assigned to a minor consular post in Fernando Póo, a desolate island off the coast of present-day Cameroon, he studied the ethnology of native tribes and accumulated notes for four books: Wanderings in West Africa (1863), Abeokuta and the Cameroons Mountains (1863), A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (1864), and Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (1876). While on subsequent diplomatic assignments in São Paulo, Brazil (1864–1869), and Damascus, Syria (1869–1871), he wrote The Highlands of Brazil (1869), Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870), and Unexplored Syria (1871). Burton spent his final years in the quiet consulship at Trieste, Italy. Bored by official duties, he indulged in two final adventures: gold-mining expeditions to Egypt (1876–1880) and West Africa (1881–1882) that resulted in The Gold Mines of Midian (1878) and To the Gold Coast for Gold (1883). During this time he also wrote The Kasîdah (1880), an elegiac poem fashioned after The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. In addition he translated Latin poems by Catullus; several works of Italian literature; and two classics of Indian erotica, the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) and the Ananga Ranga (1885); as well as an Arabian treatise on sexuality, The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui (1886). In 1884 Burton began to rework and organize his translation of The Arabian Nights, a project undertaken in India some three decades earlier. Published in sixteen volumes over the next three years, it was both a critical and financial success. “The Arabian Nights is more generally loved than Shakespeare,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “No human face or voice greets us among [this] crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough.” In 1886 Burton received a knighthood, an honor many considered long overdue, and two years later he brought out Supplemental Nights, a continuation of his masterpiece. Captain Sir Richard Burton died in Trieste on October 20, 1890. Alarmed by the sexually explicit content of her husband’s papers, Isabel Burton burned almost all of his notes, diaries, and manuscripts— an immeasurable loss to history. Only a handful of Burton’s works appeared posthumously, notably The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam (1898) and Wanderings in Three Continents (1901). C ONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE INTRODUCTION BY A. S. BYATT PREFACE BY SIR RICHARD F. BURTON STORY OF KING SHAHRYAR AND HIS BROTHER A. The Tale of the Bull and the Ass (Burton, vol. 1, p. 2) THE TALES OF SHAHRAZAD 1. THE FISHERMAN AND THE JINNI A. The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince (Burton, vol. 1, p. 38) 2. THE PORTER AND THE THREE LADIES OF BAGHDAD A. The First Kalandar’s Tale B. The Second Kalandar’s Tale C. The Third Kalandar’s Tale D. The Eldest Lady’s Tale E. Tale of the Portress (Burton, vol. 1, p. 82) 3. THE TALE OF THE THREE APPLES (Burton, vol. 1, p. 186) 4. TALE OF NUR AL-DIN ALI AND HIS SON BADR AL-DIN HASAN (Burton, vol. 1, p. 195) 5. TALE OF GHANIM BIN AYYUB, THE DISTRAUGHT, THE THRALL O’ LOVE A. Tale of the First Eunuch, Bukhayt B. Tale of the Second Eunuch, Kafur (Burton, vol. 2, p. 45) 6. THE TALE OF THE BIRDS AND BEASTS AND THE CARPENTER (Burton, vol. 3, p. 114) 7. THE HERMITS (Burton, vol. 3, p. 125) 8. THE TALE OF KAMAR AL-ZAMAN (Burton, vol. 3, p. 212) 9. HATIM OF THE TRIBE OF TAYY (Burton, vol. 4, p. 94) 10. THE TALE OF MA’AN SON OF ZAIDAH AND THE BADAWI (Burton, vol. 4, p. 97) 11. THE CITY OF MANY-COLUMNED IRAM AND ABDULLAH SON OF ABI KALIBAH (Burton, vol. 4, p. 113) 12. THE SWEEP AND THE NOBLE LADY (Burton, vol. 4, p. 125) 13. ALI THE PERSIAN (Burton, vol. 4, p. 149) 14. THE MAN WHO STOLE THE DISH OF GOLD WHEREIN THE DOG ATE (Burton, vol. 4, p. 265) 15. THE RUINED MAN WHO BECAME RICH AGAIN THROUGH A DREAM (Burton, vol. 4, p. 289) 16. THE EBONY HORSE (Burton, vol. 5, p. 1) 17. HOW ABU HASAN BRAKE WIND (Burton, vol. 5, p. 135) 18. THE ANGEL OF DEATH WITH THE PROUD KING AND THE DEVOUT MAN (Burton, vol. 5, p. 246) 19. SINDBAD THE SEAMAN AND SINDBAD THE LANDSMAN A. The First Voyage of Sindbad Hight the Seaman B. The Second Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman C. The Third Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman D. The Fourth Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman E. The Fifth Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman F. The Sixth Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman G. The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman (Burton, vol. 6, p. 1) 20. THE CITY OF BRASS (Burton, vol. 6, p. 83) 21. THE LADY AND HER FIVE SUITORS (Burton, vol. 6, p. 172) 22. JUDAR AND HIS BRETHREN (Burton, vol. 6, p. 213) 23. JULNAR THE SEA-BORN AND HER SON KING BADR BASIM OF PERSIA (Burton, vol. 7, p. 264) 24. KHALIFAH THE FISHERMAN OF BAGHDAD (Burton, vol. 8, p. 145) 25. ABU KIR THE DYER AND ABU SIR THE BARBER (Burton, vol. 9, p. 134) 26. THE SLEEPER AND THE WAKER A. Story of the Larrikin and the Cook (Burton, supplemental vol. 1, p. 1) 27. ALAEDDIN; OR, THE WONDERFUL LAMP (Burton, supplemental vol. 3, p. 52) 28. ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES (Burton, supplemental vol. 3, p. 369) 29. MA’ARUF THE COBBLER AND HIS WIFE FATIMAH (Burton, vol. 10, p. 1) CONCLUSION (Burton, vol. 10, p. 54) NOTES BY SIR RICHARD F. BURTON COMMENTARY READING GROUP GUIDE I NTRODUCTION A. S. Byatt The collection of stories known as the Thousand and One Nights is in itself a symbol for infinity. The title comes from the Arabic, Alf Layla wa Layla, “a thousand nights and one night” and the addition of the extra “one” to the round thousand both suggests a way to mathematical infinity—you can always add one more to any number—and produces a circular, mirrorlike figure, 1001. The original collection has no one author and no one source. The stories are Indian, Persian, and Arabic, and were told in many forms many centuries before they were written down. In the tenth century a Persian collection, Hazar Afsana (a thousand legends), was known by Arab writers, and tales can be traced back to the Panchatantra (Five Books) in Sanskrit—sixth century or earlier—and the Katha Sarit Sagara, translated and published by C. H. Tawney (1880–1884) and republished in 1928 as The Ocean of Story. As Robert Irwin remarks in his indispensable The Arabian Nights: A Companion, quoting a mediaeval Dutch proverb, “Big fish eat little fish”—story collections tend to swallow, digest, and transmute each other. This image of container and contained in the Nights is also an infinity symbol. A character in a story invokes a character who tells a story about a character who has a story to tell…. Everything proliferates. The Nights is a maze, a web, a network, a river with infinite tributaries, a series of boxes within boxes, a bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, a story about storytelling. And yet we feel it has to do with our essential nature, and not just a need for idle entertainment. The “frame story,” the tale of the angry king Shahriyar who avenged his first wife’s adultery by marrying virgins and beheading them the morning after their defloration, is a deeply satisfying image of the relations between